Sermon preached at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill by William Morris on 29 August 2006

A few weeks ago, just as the conflict in Lebanon was starting up, Radio 4 ran a piece on the support of American Christian evangelicals for the State of Israel – and, especially, support for a strong, military response by Israel to any threats it faced from neighbouring countries. The BBC reporter visited a church in one of the Southern states, where, in addition to the usual American flag placed on one side of the altar, there was an Israeli flag, the Star of David, on the other. In explaining this, the minister of the church told the interviewer that he supported Israel because the Book of Revelation makes clear that the Jews must reclaim the Holy Land and build the third temple as a prelude to the final battle, Armageddon. And at Armageddon, good will triumph over evil, at last and definitively, leading to the Second Coming.

In today’s world we tend to shy away from words like “evil” even at the best of times, so this sort of apocalyptic stuff just makes most of us shake our heads in despair. I think our most generous response is likely to be: “Well, that’s just the Book of Revelation, and those people are mad.” But, more seriously, what this does is to completely poison our view of Revelation. Instead of seeing it as allegorical, or mystical, or firmly within the tradition of apocalyptic literature, we see it only as something which has to be interpreted literally, and judged as true or false on that basis. And then, on that basis, we reject it – in its entirety.

But there’s a problem with that for us as Christians because, in that rejection, we also dismiss its main theme: the struggle between good and evil in this world. And this is important, because, even though our Lord came to preach a gospel of love, the battle between good and evil is a central theme throughout the New Testament – it’s not just locked away in Revelation. I think we tend to mentally delete all those times when Jesus casts out demons, rejects the temptations of the Devil, and foretells judgement being made on the basis of good and evil – not to mention His own teaching on the apocalypse and the second coming. And then there are all the other examples outside of the Gospels, including the passage from Paul in today’s epistle, which use language strikingly close to that of Revelation – just in today’s reading we hear about the “cosmic powers of this present darkness”, “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”, and so on.

But, even apart from what the Bible says, there’s also a very practical problem with rejecting the idea that there is a struggle between good and evil. And that problem, simply put, is that evil does seem clearly to exist in the world – however strongly our moral relativism makes us struggle against that. I want to put off to another time some of those difficult questions about evil – such as why does it exist, and how can a good God allow it? – because I do think that we need first to focus on the fact that evil does exist. And then we need to ask ourselves the practical question of what we can do to prevent it.

So, what is “evil”? It’s a strong word – what does it mean? Well, to personalize it, as you know I spend a lot of my time on planes – probably too much – and I never really worry about it, never think about all the things that might go wrong. But, two weeks ago, on the day the day the airline bomb plot was announced, Michelle and the girls and I flew to the US. Heathrow was barely controlled chaos, and during our four hours on the runway, we all had plenty of time to think about what could have happened. And I have no hesitation in saying that a plot to blow planes out of the sky and kill hundreds or thousands of innocent men, women and children is evil; it was motivated by evil, and the people who would have done that – assuming they did indeed plan to do those things – would have performed acts of evil. And, just to stay close to home, I would say exactly the same about the about the bombers on the Tube last July. This was evil. Now, I should quickly make clear that to say this is not to judge the individuals involved – God, and the state, will do that in their own way. We should not seek to wield the sword of vengeance or of righteousness – as Christians we are commanded to forgive. However, what I am saying is that evil can be recognized – that it does exist.

But is “evil” just these dramatic, headline catching acts? I don’t think so. There’s a whole spectrum of evil stretching from murder right down to petty things like purposely spreading ugly rumours about someone we don’t like. What these do all have in common is that they all cause hurt, or pain, or suffering, or sorrow for those upon whom the evil is visited, and diminution and distancing from God for those performing the act.

Now, sometimes evil can seem overwhelming – just think of Darfur in Africa – but before we seek to solve the problems of the world, we must first look inside ourselves. Because evil grows, can only grow, from the acts of individuals – only we can actually perform acts of evil. So what can we do about that? Well, to answer that question we need to understand what we might call the mechanism of evil, how it comes about. Put simply, I think we can say there is an external stimulus, an external cause – call it temptation, or, perhaps, the seeds of evil, if you like. And there is also an internal response from us – to continue the analogy, only we can provide the ground in which the seed of evil can germinate and grow. So evil requires both the external stimulus and the internal response.

The external stimulus – temptation, the work of the devil, call it what you will – will always be there. I take that as a given. So what can we do to protect ourselves against it – against helping the seed germinate and becoming fully-fledged evil in ourselves? Well, part of the answer is clearly self-awareness. The idea that there actually is such as thing as evil, along with such a thing with good. Once we have realized that, we are better placed to prevent the internal response that lets evil grow. But, nevertheless, with what can we protect ourselves? Well, what St Paul suggests in today’s reading is that while we have many spiritual gifts at our disposal, no single one will do the trick. In Paul’s analogy we need the entire armour of God, the whole toolkit, all the pieces of the puzzle. God, he says, gives us truth, and righteousness, and the gospel of peace, and faith, and salvation, and the Holy Spirit. We need to work on these through prayer – they are free gifts, but still require work from us. But, if we do that work, these gifts will interlock and provide us with more strength than any one on its own would do. Faith, for example, allows the Holy Spirit to act in us; the Holy Spirit gives us the strength to keep preaching the gospel of peace even in the face of adversity; the gospel of peace supports our concept of righteousness, and so on. Together, all of these provide us with protection that one would not give us. All of these, in combination, allow us to reject the external stimulus, to prevent the internal response which would lead to evil.

Let me finish by saying that I recognize that we all feel uncomfortable with the idea of evil. It just doesn’t fit with our modern world, with the way people speak today, or indeed with our concept of ourselves. But I don’t think we have to believe in Armageddon or the Apocalypse to see that “evil” – or “bad” or “malice”, or whatever you want to call it – really does exist, and that we humans are the cause, the agents of it. We may still hesitate to attach the term to anything but the most serious crimes, but the process by which those acts come about is the same as that by which the most petty acts come about. We respond to an external stimulus in a way that we know is wrong, or should know is wrong. Where that temptation – that external stimulus – comes from is not really the issue, because it’s there, it does exist. What the issue is, is how we can prevent ourselves from responding, how can we prevent the evil from growing? And the answer – the only answer – seems to be: with every gift that God has given us. With the whole armour of God we can help good triumph over evil.