“DELIVER US FROM EVIL”

      

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.