Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Office Reading from Romans (12:9-21) is so full of wisdom that I’m just going to copy the whole thing to make sure you get a chance to read it (I'll make a couple comments after):

"Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

One of the things I love about this passage is how positive it is. Not positive as in some oppressive secular notion of “positivity” as if being incessantly cheerful is what’s most important about life and it’s living. I mean positive in the sense of an active presence in and to the world that inevitably looks like love. What Paul is telling us here in Romans are various ways we can be actively present in and to the world.

And all of this wisdom naturally reaches its conclusion in, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” I fear sometimes that us modern folks don’t always understand what evil is…in part because we assume at the start that evil is! But the ancients understood evil in much more challenging and interesting way. They didn’t believe there was a force for evil (though they certainly believed that beings both spiritual and corporeal could do evil and could be bent on evil); but more importantly, they didn’t believe that evil had any positive existence. There was no thing that evil was, no substance in which evil participated. There was no there there. Evil was understood to be privative…which is to say, it wasn’t a presence, but an absence. Evil could be recognized not because any particular thing was evil, but because a good that otherwise ought to be present was missing or obscured. The very real effects of evil actions in the world, effects like oppression and injustice, were caused by actions that did not participate in the good as fully as they ought, and so their results were the obscuring of the good in the world.

One very famous example of how this thinking worked had to do with how light and darkness work—I may have mentioned this example to you at some point in the past, dear Friend, but it’s a pretty good example of what we're getting at here. When you encounter a dark room, how do you illuminate it? Of course, you turn on a light or switch on a flashlight or light a candle! You don’t grab a shovel and start scooping out darkness…that wouldn’t get you anywhere! No: you turn on a light.

When Jesus fought against death and sin in his cross and Passion, he didn’t use violence—he who was Life itself made himself fully present to death…and death exhausted itself in his infinite Life. He didn’t vanquish hell through force of arms: rather, Jesus received the violence we directed at him on the cross and turned that cross into a ladder by which he descended to hell to bring light to the lightless, hope to the hopeless, love to the unloved, life to the dead, salvation to the damned.

If we’re called to be the lights of the world in our generation (and, Beloved, we are), we won’t contend well with evil if we fight against it using evil means or acts or intentions…all of those things are emptiness added to emptiness, absence added to absence. To hate evil, as Paul suggests, isn't to have negative thoughts about bad things or circumstances. It's to use our whole beings, whatever presence we have as an instrument of whatever presence God has in us, to be present when absence seems easier, to speak truth when deception seems to be have become a duty, to love when the capacity for love seems to fail, to hope in the midst of despair. If we wish to fruitfully contend with evil, we’ll do so through presence, by showing up in our own lives and in our world, by nurturing, illuminating, and doing good by the grace of God.

I hope today that we will pray for the grace to show up, to shine (!) and to do all the good works that God has prepared for us to walk in this day and every day of our lives!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+