How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? A colleague once challenged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit Catholic Priest, with this question. You believe that good will ultimately triumph over evil; well, what if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb? What happens to goodness then? Teilhard answered this way. If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that would be a two-million-year setback, but goodness will triumph over evil, not because I wish it, but because God promised it and, in the resurrection, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise. He is right. Except for the resurrection, we have no guarantees about anything. That is our hope. Jesus was a great moral teacher, and his teachings, if followed, would transform the world. Simply put, if we all lived the Sermon on the Mount, our world would be loving, peaceful, and just; but self-interest is often resistant to moral teaching. From the Gospels, we see that it was not Jesus’ teaching that swayed the powers of evil and ultimately revealed the power of God. Not that. The triumph of goodness and the final power of God were revealed instead through his death, by a grain of wheat falling in the ground and dying and so bearing lots of fruit. Jesus won victory over the powers of the world in a way that seems antithetical to all power. He did not overpower anyone with some intellectually superior muscle or by some worldly persuasion. No, he revealed God’s superior power simply by holding fast to truth and love even as lies, hatred, and self-serving power were crucifying him. The powers of the world put him to death, but he trusted that somehow God would vindicate him, that God would have the last word. God did. God raised him from the dead as a testimony that he was right and the powers of the world were wrong, and that truth and love will always have the last word. That is why St. Paul says that if Jesus was not resurrected, then we are the most deluded of all people.[1]
[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Triumph of Good Over Evil”, January 2021.