A reading from the Holy Gospel. According to Saint John, Jesus said to his disciples, I am the true vine, and my father is the vine grower. He prunes away every barren branch, but the fruitful branches, he trims clean to increase their yield. You are clean already, thanks to the word that I have spoken to you. Live on in me as I do in you.
No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself apart from the vine. Can you bear fruit apart from me? I am the vine. You are its branches. He who lives in me and I in him will produce abundantly.
For apart from me, you can do nothing. A man who does not live in me is like a withered, rejected branch, picked up to be thrown into the fire and burned. If you live in me and my words stay part of you, you may ask what you will. It will be done for you. My father has been glorified in your bearing much fruit and becoming my disciples.
And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Last evening on the news, once again, we had a dramatic illustration of this problem of evil. You all read about this tragic disaster in Coalinga, California, this earthquake. It was a massive one, a catastrophe, enormous damage.
The contrast that I that struck me was between a little child, you probably saw it was on the news, asking its mother, Why did this happen? And another picture in the report had a man or a woman, I forget which it was, expressing their gratitude to God for being spared that no one had died. In spite of the widespread and heavy damage to homes and all kinds of physical plants, no one apparently died, which is extraordinary. As of last night anyway, they may still find somebody in some ruins. But as the police as the sheriff said, we have had no reports of missing persons.
So apparently, no one died, and this man or woman expressed their gratitude to god for being spared, that god was on their side. Well, of course. You see, this I am not standing up here to give you a simplistic answer to the problem of evil, but there's some things we cannot say about it. One of them is you can't escape the problem by saying god had nothing to do with it. Now a book came out not so long ago and was on the bestsellers list in which the author solves this problem of physical evil.
That's what we're talking about, remember. There's no we're not talking about moral evil, sin. We're talking about physical evil, such things as death, destruction, in which he pointed out that nature runs its own course. So you don't have to blame god for that. When you have a malformed baby coming into the world, don't you have no problem with God.
God had nothing to do with it, so he says. That at least that's how I understand it. Well, I wish that were true. But I don't have to be even a Christian, all I have to be is an Aristotelian to know it ain't true. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, both of them face up to this problem, especially Tolstoy in his War and Peace.
This is the big problem. How can how can you bring God into the world and and harmonize God's running the show with man's free will and what seems to be these awful disasters such as war and and all these tremendous catastrophes. I live through the Guatemala earthquake, so I know what it is to be scared. Earthquakes are scary, believe me. Now, I want to lay this matter before you clearly, not to escape the problem but to let the let you see the problem.
If god has nothing to do with it, we have no problem. But then the question is who or what has something to do with it? Now the basic the basic truth here is that God is the creator of the universe, of the universe, everything in the universe. Second, that everything in the universe depends for its existence upon god. We call that contingent.
Everything for its existence, and I mean everything. Everything which is real. Because we talk about evil if if were a thing, which is a horrible mistake. So every reality in this world depends for its continuance in existence upon god. We are not deists.
See, the deists had the idea that god created the world and put it on the mantelpiece as you would as you would wind up a clock and put it aside and then had nothing more to do with it. That's called deism as opposed to theism Because the theist, that is the person who believes in God as the creator of the universe and the sustainer of the universe, has to admit that there is nothing in this universe that happens except in some way dependent upon god. So let's face it. Let's not run away from it. So God's very much in the picture.
These tremendous catastrophes on sea, on land, in the air, where innocent people get clobbered, clobbered, clobbered, Where little babies take for you if you've read the brothers tear Mazov, there's probably nothing in literature so vividly that so vividly portrays how innocent little children suffer in this world. If any of you have read it, you will recall what I'm talking about. It's in Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky. So let's not run away from this. This is a problem.
But we're talking about physical evil. A malformed child is a physical evil. It's not immoral. And while we're talking about immoral immorality, let's come back to a very serious consideration, which people are forgetting today. There is no moral evil in dying.
Physical death is not a moral evil, whether it's of the tree, of a whale, or of a human being. It's not a it's not a moral evil. The crime of murder isn't in a corpse. It's not in the death of the corpse. The crime of murder is in the murderer.
The crime of if war is a crime, I say if because I certainly feel that I know I I mean, I am confident that there are certainly just wars. But it the the crime of war is not in the in the physical destruction. You see, today we have come anytime I you read anything or if you've been reading about this nuclear business, all they talk about is what will the tremendous catastrophe that will happen. Life will be wiped out. So what?
That's not moral evil. Cardinal Newman said, and I can give you a page and number, that it were better if the whole universe were destroyed rather than one venial sin be committed. So we've lost that point of view completely. See, the so called Christian in the Western world, we're living as out and out secularists. Don't don't ever forget it.
We're living in a secular world, a materialistic secular world. And we are and our and our so called catholic thinking is become is reflecting that. Death is no moral evil. There's nothing immoral about dying. Everybody's going to die.
So what? Just just a matter of now or later or still later? So so you we've got to keep this in mind so that when you're asking, why how do you account for evil? The first thing you must do is to separate moral evil from physical evil. That's the first thing you have to do because god is certainly not responsible for moral evil.
That is man's contribution. But when you come to physical uni evil, that's a horse of another color. And when you say, why did these things happen? Why this earthquake in California? Why this disaster on the 14th Street Bridge?
Why this horrible suffering of the innocent children in the universe has been going on for centuries? I can't give you with the I can't give you a good answer to that, but there are plenty of things I can't give any answers to. That doesn't faze me at all. I come back to a very basic, very basic truth that god created the world, this physical world, and death is a physical evil. Keep it in mind.
And I don't pretend to be able to explore in its totality the mind of God. What arrogance that we should even think we can. And God's under no obligation to to to sit down some afternoon and give me a Xerox copy of how he intends to run the show. He's not under any obligation to do that, and he doesn't. But I make an act of faith.
Here's where we come to it. If you admit that god's running the if you admit that god is creator and sustainer of the universe, then you then you have a rational explanation for evil, so called. Because what it amounts to is that what the so called physical evil is not a real evil. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.