In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Some horrifying news came over the TV last night. You're not even safe in a McDonald's anymore. Just imagine a quiet evening or a quiet hour with people coming into this fast food restaurant of all ages, from the age of babyhood all the way up to the aged.
And they're coming in there quietly and decently and properly, and everything is absolutely uniform and tranquil, you know nothing extraordinary. And when all of a sudden all hell breaks loose, and in a matter of a few moments, 21 people are dead, murdered. And I don't know how many injured and how many more will die. And all because one man ran berserk, who had no who had no knowledge at all of these people. Of course, he's dead too, so we can't ask him.
Now you talk about the problem of evil, the problem of man's being afflicted with all kinds of horrors, illnesses, sicknesses, death, tragedies of all sorts, failures, bankruptcies, you know, you name them. This is something which you can't get out of. It's all around us. It's the primary it is the primary argument and the most persuasive argument against the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent God. Because it's so simple.
To say, if you believe in a benevolent, that means all loving, omnipotent means all powerful God, then what kind of a God is it to allow such tragedies to happen to absolutely innocent people? How many lives, 21 people murdered? How many lives, how many families will be ruined or tremendously changed by that tragedy yesterday? How many? Who knows?
I don't know. Now today you will hear people who certainly ought to know better telling you, this is no problem. Because this isn't an act of God, this was the act of a madman. Well, I wish you could get out of this problem that easily because that, of course, is nonsense. That is absolute nonsense.
If you believe that God is running the world. And certainly to begin with Catholics, we believe that. All Jews believe that. All Mohammedans believe that, that God is running the world. I'm not running it.
You cannot exclude God from such a tragedy by saying, well, God didn't do it. That was the was the the action of a maniac. You can't get out of that. This is the argument of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Now how you as I've said many times, I am most aware, I am profoundly aware, I am bloodedly aware of this tremendous problem of reconciling God's providence of the world with man's free will.
That is to me, no one has an answer to this problem. And I've spent years on it. It's the great inevitable problem. And yet you've got to you've got to accept both of them, that God's running the show and that man has a certain measure of responsibility in determining his own actions, and that he is free to do it. This was the great problem of Martin Luther.
Not Martin Luther King, but Martin Luther. I don't know what problems Martin Luther King had. So you're not going to get out of this by saying, Oh, well now, just a minute. A book, I forgot I can never recall the title of it, it's a recent it was a bestseller week after week after week. It was written by a Jewish father who had a son born.
I think this is the way it was. And and the boy was very malformed. And he had great problems about this, as anybody has. Why me, God? What have I done to deserve this?
You see, just think of the think of the background logic of what have I done to deserve this. In other words in other words, God is is treating me in this world, rewarding me for the good, and damning me for evil or making me suffer for it. That's what's behind us, and that, of course, is nonsense too. Although that was a very firm conviction of the Old Testament, read the book of Job. That's the whole essence of the book of Job.
So how do you answer this problem? I don't know the answer. But the only thing I mean, any more than you ask me, how do I how does that electric light up there absolutely give me light? How do I see you out there? What's going on in the back of my head that I have an awareness, a sensual awareness of you people sitting in the pews?
Who can give me a good concrete answer to this? I know some of the answers, but they don't agree. There's no unanimity about it. So I find no difficulty at all in saying, I don't know. There are so many things I don't know that I get tired of thinking about it.
It's much easier to think about the few little things that I may know. So the fact that I don't have an explanation for a fact doesn't mean that I reject the fact or that I reject other explanations of the fact. The fact that I can't put all these business together doesn't mean that I reject the whole business. You see that that's pure, that's infertile, that's immature. And none of us run our lives on complete knowledge.
There is nobody has complete knowledge about anything. And so when you come to a tragedy like this, how do you face up to it? Have you can you face up to it and say, yes, this I have no problem with it. I have no problem. I may lament it and regret it, feel utter sympathy for everybody involved, including the poor guy who did it, who's better off.
I may have all of that, but that doesn't have to say I have to produce some kind of an absurd, explanation of it, which is no explanation at all. That is if you admit that there's a god and that this world is contingent. That's all I'm talking about. I'm talking about contingency. That little tiny word contingency.
That's all I'm talking about. Contingency means dependency. Dependency in being, actuality of being. And we say we depend upon God. That without me, you can do nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. Well, then when I do do something, how can I exclude god from it? How can I exclude God from the world and a purposeful activity in this world without objection rejecting teleology? That is the idea that things have an ultimate cause and an ultimate purpose and reason.
And I can't reject that without without rejecting my intelligence and my reason. God doesn't correct has not created the world just on a whim. He doesn't dangle us like a lot of puppets that take joy in our suffering. That's ridiculous. It's repulsive.
So where do we come? We come back to Jesus Christ. The old testament doesn't have an answer to this problem. The best you're gonna get tired of me saying some things, but there are some things so fundamental into our life that you can't emphasize them too much, and one of them is the book of Job of the Old Testament. The problem of evil has never been better presented than through the book of Job.
More dramatically, more poetically, and that's we don't know where it came from actually. It goes it goes so far back into the Eastern world. So the the Old Testament has no problem with the answer to this problem of evil. Christ does have the answer, and the answer is the cross. And he said that as clearly as possible, that this world is simply an introduction to the next, and that we we have here not a lasting city, and that here we have to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, not in comfort and tranquility as the world would have it, but in fear and trembling.
And that's the message of our lord. And his message is, this is a burden. This is a yoke you're going to be carrying. But if it if if my name is on that yoke, if you're carrying that in the name of in my name, then first of all, I am with you. I am with you in carrying that burden and in carrying that heavy galling yoke.
And with me carrying it with you, then I tell you, will find that yoke useful and even light. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.