Not again! We shudder once more when we turn on the
news only to hear that somewhere else innocent people have been senselessly
murdered by persons known or unknown. How do we explain it to ourselves, let
alone to anyone else, why this keeps happening?
Commentators try, not too successfully, the wisdom of
hindsight and to second-guess what could be happening. Demagogues vainly look
for a single reason or a blanket target for blame and retribution as if it
could be that simple. We want easy answers and straight forward solutions. We
look for the disgruntled disadvantaged or those mesmerised by false promises of
reward in an afterlife for their destructive self-sacrifices.
I am drawn to read from Ephesians 6, “For we fight not against flesh and blood
but against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness”. We
are forced to recognise that these forces are more than human. It is evil
itself using human beings to sabotage God’s will for his kingdom of heaven on
earth by taking it all out on soft targets somewhere.
Evil does this but goes further. It seeks to further
divide people into mutually hostile camps, creating long-term chaos and
destruction as we see only too well. Well might we pray, “Deliver us from evil”, for we feel powerless to quench it. The
more we struggle against it the worse it seems to become.
I am encouraged by a seemingly obscure verse from
that mysterious book of Revelation where a picture is painted of the archangel
St Michael and all his angels overcoming the dragon and all its angels in a
giant heavenly showdown. It tells me that while all human attempts to overcome
evil appear futile, it is in the end a spiritual battle, for evil itself is
spiritual.
So, what are we doing when we pray, “Deliver us from evil”? Yes, we do pray
that though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we may fear no
evil to come upon us or upon our loved ones in such a vulnerable world. But we
pray for more than that. We are praying that the evil that can attack us does
not itself take us over so that we become embittered enough to transfer the
same evil on down the track to others as we have so often seen. To be able to
remain strong in the face of evil and not give into it becomes our part in this
unrelenting battle against it.
We take Jesus as our model. He was cruelly attacked
by evil yet was not captured by it. His love casts out our fear and gives us
that hope that in his strength we can do the same.
