Editorial - Power to do evil

03.03.2010

I have never been to Egypt. I  did read about a Muslim security guard and Coptic Christians  being  gunned down after attending Christmas Eve Mass in the Egyptian town of Nag Hamadi on January 7th, 2010. I would not have taken any notice of the tragedy because it was remote from my experience but for the fact that a Coptic Orthodox Christian works in our office.

I was asking myself why people do these terrible things? It isn’t just Muslim fundamentalists who commit atrocities as we know from recent events in Rwanda and Yugoslavia where Christians also were involved in unspeakable savagery.

People commit atrocities because they can. Certainly, connivance of a government helps when  it is unwilling to use the power of the State to protect people. Torturers have said that they do not need to torture people to get information, they torture their victims because they can. It is as simple as that. This is power to do evil, to ‘lord’ it over the other, to know their life is in your hands. The desire to act in this manner is a perversion of God’s power. We really do want to be like ‘ a god’.

Yet  the Son of God, Jesus, was never like this, quite the opposite. Defenceless human beings will always be treated shamefully –abused, humiliated and killed by perpetrators who hold absolute power over them. The crucified Christ is a fundamental human  reminder of goodness battling evil and  of  evil overwhelming good,  winning a battle but, because of the Resurrection, not the war.

This dynamic is at work everywhere as millions of people move looking for a better place to live. We have to keep in mind the Last Judgement in St Matthew's gospel (25:31-46): "Then the king will say to those on his right, 'You have my Father's blessing; come take possession of the kingdom …when I was a stranger you took me into your home…'"


Fr Gary Walker
TFE@columban.org.au