Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
“Overcome evil with good”
It is a strong statement about the power and nature of the good and a strong indictment of a form of false or incomplete justice that belongs to revenge. Revenge is about our wanting to get back at someone who has wronged or hurt us as we think or imagine. But if we are honest with ourselves it means recognizing that we do not simply want to get back, to do just as it has been done to us. No. What we really want is to annihilate or humiliate the other; to “nuke them till they glow,” as I recall some dyed in the wool theological liberals at Harvard saying at the time of the Iranians taking American hostages. Justice as getting ahead not getting even.
Paul suggests that is not the way to go. It is our way but not God’s way, quoting first, Deuteronomy on vengeance, and, then, Proverbs, about feeding and giving drink to your enemy. But what exactly is meant in saying that in so doing “thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” How is that good and just. It sounds more than a wee bit vindictive. But is it? Might it not rather suggest the conviction of conscience in countering evil with good and thus awakening that sense of the greater power of the good in the other, the enemy? It transcends the false and limited forms of human justice. The injunction at the beginning of the Epistle reading from Romans to “be not wise in [our] own conceits,” our own thinking, is complemented by the concluding injunction to “be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Such injunctions are far more than the chorus of empty platitudes that dominate our contemporary culture. Be kind, be nice, be good, be happy – all true but what do they mean? What does it mean to say to your children that you just want them to be happy without giving them any idea of what happiness is? That is to leave them alone and empty in themselves as if happiness is merely subjective. Aristotle, who uses the word eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics, means by it something far removed from our modern assumptions. It is a life of virtue lived in accord with reason; something substantial and more than simply something emotional and personal. As such the great traditions of ethical philosophy or theology provide us with something more and greater that shape and inform our lives in what is ultimately good even in the face of “our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities,” as the Collect wisely says. The good is the mercy of God who speaks to the truth of our desires and gathers us to himself, seeking our good and our wholeness; ultimately the healing of soul and body.
