More Than Stone

From N. T. Wright’s book “Evil and the Justice of God”

We are not told-or not in any way that satisfies our puzzled questioning-how and why there is radical evil within God’s wonderful, beautiful and essentially good creation. One day I think we shall find out, but I believe we are incapable of understanding it at the moment, in the same way that a baby in the womb would lack the categories to think about the outside world. What we are promised, however, is that God will make a world in which all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, a world in which forgiveness is on e of the foundation stones and reconciliation is the cement which holds everything together. And we are given this promise not as a matter of whistling in the dark, not as something to believe even though there is no evidence, but in and through Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, and in and through the Spirit through whom the achievement of Jesus becomes a reality in our world and in our lives. When we understand forgiveness, flowing from the work of Jesus and the Spirit, as the strange, powerful thing it really is, we begin to realize that God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of others, is the knife that cuts the rope by which sin, anger, fear, recrimination and death are still attached to us. Evil will have nothing to say at the last, because the victory of the cross will be fully implemented.

We return to the point at which we began. In the new heavens and the new earth there will be nor more sea, no more chaos, no more monsters coming up from the abyss. And, as with all Christian eschatology, the best news of all is that we don’t have to wait for the future to start experiencing our deliverance from evil. We are invited, summoned, bidden to start living this way in the present. I suspect that the problems this poses for us—the immediate problems of forgiving ourselves and our neighbors, and the practical and political problems of working for a world in which people no longer wish to become terrorists, in which people no longer enslave one another with crippling debt, and in which those who live at great risk of the natural elements receive special protection form civil authorities—are the real problems. The philosophical problems often function simply as a smoke screen behind which we try to hide. And I suspect, therefore, that the more we learn the meaning of forgiveness in our own lives, the more we shall glimpse the deep theological truth that all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, and the more we shall be enabled to anticipate that reality even in the midst of our suffering world.

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