Matthew 6:9-13; Romans 12:1-2, 9-21

In May of 1996, I stood in a place of evil.  I stood in a place whose name is synonymous with evil, death and destruction.  A place where the worst of human nature was revealed.  I stood in Auschwitz.

I was in Poland with a group of eleven other students and one faculty member from Wesley Theological Seminary.  I was in the middle of working on a graduate degree in the area of spirituality and the suffering of God.  Part of the requirement for the degree was to go to Poland to tour several Holocaust sites. 

I thought I was prepared for what I would experience at Auschwitz.  I was wrong.  As I walked through the death camp, viewing evidence of the atrocities committed there, I was overwhelmed with grief and sadness.  The piles of luggage, shoes, prayer shawls, hairbrushes and combs, baby bottles and clothes and toys, all cried out their accusations of murder on a scale so large that I simply could not comprehend it.

One of the buildings I walked through was known as the prison within the prison.  It was where prisoners were taken when they had been accused of some crime, such as stealing food or passing messages to people outside the camp.  The cells that held them were atrocious.  Some were tall and narrow, so narrow that the prisoner inside would not be able to sit down.  Others were very short, so that the prisoner would have to lie down at all times.

When I came to one cell, I noticed a spotlight pointing toward something on the stone wall.  I had to look very closely to see what it was.  Gradually I became aware of an image that had been scratched into the rock.  I looked harder.  It was a cross.  Someone had carved a cross into the wall of that prison cell in the middle of Auschwitz.  I had almost forgotten that Christians had been killed there, as well as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political prisoners.  Obviously, a Christian had been held in that cell and had carved the cross into the wall.

What better image to carve there?  Of all the evil in the world, surely the evil that put Jesus on the cross was even more offensive than the evil that had resulted in Auschwitz.  To think that the very Son of God was put to death in the most gruesome manner known at that time is horrifying.  In fact, death on the cross was so painful that a new word was invented to describe it:  excruciating pain.  And on Good Friday, when Jesus hung on a Roman cross dying, evil thought that it had won the ultimate victory.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I believe that there is an evil force at work in our world, attempting to counteract what God is trying to do.  And that evil force has a name:  Satan.  In a poll by the Barna Group a few years ago, it was reported that two-thirds of Americans do not believe in Satan.  About 62% said that they believe Satan is a symbol of evil, but is not a living being.  That troubles me.  Because the Bible is quite clear that Satan exists, sometimes referring to Satan as the devil.  William Barclay wrote that the Bible is never in any doubt that there is a power of evil in the world … The Bible does not think of evil as an abstract principle or force, but as an active, personal power in opposition to God.

I realize that some people have a hard time believing in Satan or the devil, a personal being that is actively working against the purposes of God in the world.  But let me encourage you to rethink your position.  Pierre Baudelaire writes, The devil’s most beautiful ruse is to convince us that he does not exist.  And Peter J. Gomes, in his book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, writes that it is unwise to underestimate the power and sophistication of Satan.  It is not for nothing that in ancient Christian culture another name for Satan was the Old Deluder, and it is said that his most successful delusion to date is that he persuades very smart people that he doesn’t exist.

But many strong and wise Christians remind us that the devil does exist.  Pope John Paul II, in 1986, issued a statement on the devil, in which he said, [The devil exists and] is a cosmic liar and murderer … [who] has the skill in the world to induce people to deny his existence in the name of rationalism and of every other system of thought which seeks all possible means to avoid recognizing his activity.  And Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, It seems to me quite extraordinary that anyone should have failed to notice, especially during the last half century, a diabolic presence in the world, pulling downwards as gravity does instead of pressing upwards as trees and plants do when they … reach so resolutely after the light.

One reason that Jesus ended up on the cross was that he spent so much of his time exposing the evil of the systems in his world.  He confronted corporate evil in government, in politics, in religious parties, and in the religious structures of Judaism.  Brian D. McLaren wrote of this in his book, The Secret Message of Jesus, saying that Jesus drew systemic evil out of the shadows and into the light to be named and ex-posed and expelled.  He was a threat, in other words, to the powerful people – to the Roman governor, to the Jewish priests, and to the Jewish leaders.

Jesus confronted the Roman Empire and showed its weakness, in part by dying on the cross at the hands of the Roman rulers, and set an example for others to stand up to the evil of their day.  McLaren writes, In the face of the simple moral authority of Jesus, the power and authority of Rome seem brutally grotesque and ethically pathetic.  One thinks of the Chinese students standing down tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or Nelson Mandela ascending from prison to the presidency in South Africa in 1994 or Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in prison in Birmingham in 1963 – exercising greater moral leadership while under arrest than the prison guards, police forces, and governors who thought they were in control.  One thinks of the Catholic prayer protests that exposed the weakness of Communism in Poland or the weaponless crowds toppling Communism in Romania or Gandhi … as he led nonviolent resistance against imperialism and religious hatred.  Jesus also confronted the religious elite, showing the evil of the seemingly righteous people.  The message of Jesus was a tremendous threat to their authority and power, and so they had him killed, with the cooperation of the Roman governor.

It is necessary to face the power of evil in our world, to stand up to it in some way.  We know that we can be delivered from evil by the power and presence of the One who can save us.  God will give us the ability to battle evil, so we must be brave and bold in confronting Satan.  W. Philip Keller reminds us in his book, A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer, that we have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power.  We should not be afraid of facing evil, but we can be courageous in standing against it because we stand in the strength of Jesus Christ.

But sometimes that strength is shown in weakness.  Sometimes that strength gives us the courage to be defeated.  Jesus was put to death, after all.  It appeared that he had failed.  And that, according to McLaren, is the scandal of the message of Jesus.  He writes, The kingdom of God does fail.  It is weak.  It is crushed.  When its message of love, peace, justice, and truth meets the principalities and powers of government and religion armed with spears and swords and crosses, they unleash their hate, force, manipulation, and propaganda … But what is the alternative?  … Could the kingdom of God come with bigger weapons, sharper swords, more clever political organizing?  …  What if the only way for the kingdom of God to come in its true form … is through weak-ness and vulnerability, sacrifice, and love?  What if it can conquer only by first being conquered?  What if our only hope lies in this impossible paradox: the only way the kingdom of God can be strong in a truly liberating way is through a scandalous, noncoercive kind of weakness; the only way it can be powerful is through astonishing vulnerability; the only way it can live is by dying; the only way it can succeed is by failing?

The life to which we have been called is not a life based on power, but on love.  We are to be different from this world, or as Paul wrote, we are not to be conformed to this world.  Instead, we are to live with genuine love; we are to hate what is evil, and hold fast to what is good; we are to love one another with mutual affection; we are to rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer; we are to contribute to the needs of others and extend hospitality to strangers; we are to bless those who persecute us; we are to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep; we are to live in harmony with one another; we should not be haughty or claim to be smarter than we really are; we are not to repay anyone evil for evil, but as far as it depends on us, live in peace with all people; we are never to seek revenge; in fact, if our enemies are hungry, we must feed them, and if they are thirsty, we must give them something to drink.  And we are not to be overcome by evil, but we are to overcome evil with good.

That is the secret.  The way to overcome evil is not to be fighting it on its own terms, becoming tainted with evil ourselves in the process.  The way to overcome evil is to choose, every day, to live good lives.  The way to overcome evil is not to arm ourselves with the most powerful weapons, but to fill our hearts with the most powerful love.  Yes, Jesus died on the cross, and he was put there by evil forces; but God did something good with it.  As Frederick Buechner writes, Christianity points to the cross and says that … there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even this – but that God can turn it to good.  Brian McLaren says, Somehow … the defeat of Christ on that Roman cross – the moment when God appears weak and foolish, outsmarted as it were by human evil – provided the means by which God exposed and judged the evil of empire and religion, and, in them, the evil of every individual human being, so that humanity could be forgiven and reconciled to God.

By the cross of Jesus, God made salvation possible for all people.  The cross is not a symbol of evil for Christians, but a symbol of a different kind of power, the power of love; and it is a symbol of hope.  And that, I think, is why the unknown prisoner of Auschwitz carved a cross into that wall of his cell: to proclaim that evil would not have the last word, but that evil had, in fact, already been defeated for all time on that cross.  We know that beyond the cross is the empty tomb, God’s ultimate declaration of victory over death and evil and destruction.

And so, we have hope.  Because we know that we have been delivered from evil.  And we know that we can be delivered from any evil that we might face in life, by the power of the One who has overcome evil once and for all.  We face evil, and we learn, by his example, to overcome evil with good.