Learning good from evil
The paradox of the Christian Faith is that we learn love through sin. Yet that concentrates and complements what belongs to a great range of other spiritual and ethical traditions and teachings about what is learned through suffering and evil. Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindu tradition faces an ethical dilemma about war and violence, learning from his confusion and distress by way of Sri Krishna to follow his dharma, the law of his being, but without attachment to results. It is a way of transcending the binaries of war, of conflict, but without denying or negating their reality. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, confronts our suffering humanity in the form of a dead man, an old man, and a sick man as well as beholding the calm of a so-called holy man, a guru. It leads to an intense reflection about suffering in the Buddhist tradition. How we face suffering and evil is the question that simply doesn’t go away.
In the Islamic tradition, the Qur’anic story of Joseph, for instance, shows how good comes out of suffering and evil. Likewise in the similar story of Joseph in the Hebrew Scriptures. The point is that we confront ourselves in all of the contradictions of our fallen humanity. We are meant to find ourselves in the madness of crowds. Counter to the prevailing ideology of victim culture, Holy Week reveals that we are not the victims but the victimizers. Christ is the victim, the sacrificial scapegoat upon whom is visited all of the betrayals, confusions, contradictions and uncertainties of our humanity. We behold ourselves in all our disarray but even more we behold the greater love of Christ, the one who bears our sins.
The intensity of the Passion is equally the power of the Scriptures. We are meant to hang upon the words of the one who hangs upon the Cross for our redemption. In contemplating our evil, we learn something about the greater love of God for us and for our world and day. “God commendeth his love towards us,” Paul says, “in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were yet sinners. Thus the Pageant of the Passion opens us out to the wisdom of love. As Lancelot Andrewes notes Christ crucified in liber caritatis, the book of love opened out for us to read. For “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are made whole,” as Isaiah prophetically puts it. Somehow we can learn love through sin, good from evil. That is itself a testament to the wisdom of God, a wisdom that is there for us to ponder.
I wish you all a blessed Holy Week and a joyous Easter.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy