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How Would God Deal With Evil?

when the true God comes back to deal with evil, he will look like a young Jewish prophet journeying to Jerusalem at Passover time, celebrating the kingdom, confronting corrupt authorities, feasting with his friends, succumbing in prayer and agony to a cruel and unjust fate, taking upon himself the weight of Israel’s sin, the world’s sin, Evil with a capital E.

The church is never more at risk than when it sees itself merely as the solution bearer and forgets that every day it must say, ‘Lord have mercy on me, a sinner’, and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility even as it stands boldly before the world and its crazy empires. In particular, it is a problem when a Christian empire seeks to impose its will, dualistically, on the world, by labelling other parts of the world evil while seeing itself as the avenging army of God. That is more or less exactly what Jesus found in the Israel of his day, what he saw in James and John. The cross was and is a call to a different vocation, a new way of dealing with evil, ultimately a new vision of God.

What, after all, would it look like if the true God came to deal with evil? Would he come in a blaze of glory, in a pillar of cloud and fire, surrounded by legions of angels? Jesus of Nazareth took the total risk of speaking and acting as if the answer to the question were this: when the true God comes back to deal with evil, he will look like a young Jewish prophet journeying to Jerusalem at Passover time, celebrating the kingdom, confronting corrupt authorities, feasting with his friends, succumbing in prayer and agony to a cruel and unjust fate, taking upon himself the weight of Israel’s sin, the world’s sin, Evil with a capital E. When we look at Jesus in this way, we discover that the cross has become for us the new temple, the place where we go to meet the true God and know him as saviour and redeemer. The cross becomes the place of pilgrimage where we stand and gaze at what was done for each of us. The cross becomes the only sign by which we go to address the wickedness of the world. The cross signifies that the pagan empire, symbolized in the might and power of brute force, has been decisively challenged by the power of love – and that this decisive challenge will win the day. That is the Christian answer to the problems summed up for us in 9/11.

From Surprised by Scripture: Engaging with contemporary issues by Tom Wright (p. 126).

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