The Mystery of Evil and Love

On Tuesday we meditated on the great thing that God has done in our lives, and how often the greatest things he does for us are not the overt miracles such as the plagues that we will here God bring against Egypt in tomorrows first reading.

After Mass on Tuesday someone reminded me of a quote by the Physicist Albert Einstein, a man who often strikes me as much of a mystic as a scientist, neither past-time suffering because of the other.

Einstein once noted: There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

Of course you might think that this is the easy way out…

To label everything a miracle so as to explain away the absence of miracles of biblical proportions in our modern day and age.

Why is it then that in Bible story after Bible story we here of burning bushes that aren’t burned, Angels, Demons, visions, plagues, seas and rivers parting, people being heal…

And yet none of these things are part of our every day experience of God. I believe, as I said the other day, that these types of miracles can happen, but why don’t they happen more often. Why is it possible for man to even dream that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about his creation?

This question was central to the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zuberi, who at the beginning of the twentieth century found himself in a quandary. Deeply Catholic, he found him self in crisis, having experienced the first world ward, Spanish Civil war, and then world war two he asked if God is good and all powerful why does he allow evil to exist in the world, why is he silent to us.

Why didn’t God do this or avert this, why didn’t he save 6 million Jews and 3 million poles and others from the Germans, why did he allow the countless deaths, why does he allow war, poverty, hunger, etc.

Why does he even allow people to blaspheme his Holy Name and deny his existence?

Without getting into the intricacies of Zuberi’s Philosophy and that of his students, he basically answered this question by exploring the wonderful gift of human freedom.

Zuberi reasons that if the almighty God is silent and unseen to man there must be a reason. That reason Zuberi reasoned was that he wanted man to freely cooperate with him.

Consider it for a moment, to be free is to, without constraint, choose the good, however if God were not normally silent, if he was as present to us as the sun or the sky, imposing his will like the sun causes sunburns, then how could we say that we were free to choose God, to cooperate with God.

Man’s ability to choose not God, to choose war, and greed, and slavery over peace, solidarity, and freedom is exactly what makes man free.

It is man’s existence as a mystery before himself, before others, and before God that makes him truly free to choose to be sons of God by God’s grace.

God works, most often in quite, subtle ways, and even when he performs the occasional overt miracle he allow men to doubt, to be skeptical, because he wants man to be free to reject him.

Or rather since true freedom is in choosing the good, God wants man to freely choose to make an act of faith, to give of and risk his own being for God and others, despite the mystery, despite his uncertainty.

He wants us to do this because this is true love.

Think about the love between a human parent and child, most parents try to give their children good things, to love their children, with no assurances that the child will love them back, or honor them as a teenager, or call them as a young adult, or care for them when they get old.

God reveals himself as a good and loving, all-powerful and all-knowing God, however he leaves rooms for mystery, to uncertainty, because in this uncertainty man finds freedom and with it the ability to love.

I want you to consider this for a few moments. Consider all the evil in this world, and then consider the act and ability of love. God believes that the freedom to love is worth all of this suffering. If this is true, shouldn’t we make a greater effort each day to love God and one another, as Jesus commanded?? And shouldn’t we make a greater effort to help people to see this great gift God has given them and to choose love, to choose, life.

As Christian we are called to choose love always in spite of, and actually because of the mystery of our existence.

Love is the yoke of Jesus, spoken of in the Gospel today, which make all the sufferings and evils of this life easy.

In contrast, when you take the mystery out of our existence, especially the mystery of love, our life becomes a heavy yoke, which to quote the English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is short, nasty, and brutish.

I will end as I began quoting that Jewish mystic Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.


Open your eyes Christian and see the mystery of love that is the Cross.