On July 13, 2013, my father experienced perhaps the worst call of his professional law enforcement career. He was the first to respond to an accident at the home of a young couple with three kids. While mowing his daughter's lawn, the grandfather accidentally backed up and ran over his grandson with a riding lawn mower. The details are too disturbing to recount here, but it was fatal and tragic. This family's life is forever changed.
I seem to have an allergic reaction of sorts to tragedy, which is not a virtue or a discipline that I've mastered over time but a kind of default set of emotions that simply come out. My first response is usually anger. The worst words I have ever said flow out of the frustration and pain that I feel because I cannot make sense of the tragedy. Next come the tears and those haunting thoughts: How can that family ever function normally again? Will the son-in-law have to learn how to love his wife's father again? What about the daughter? How can that poor grandfather ever keep going? What would I do if I were any of these people? The inability to process this and make any sense of it is debilitating, but I think this inability actually speaks to a deep theological truth that gives me a degree of comfort. This truth is that evil, in whatever shape it takes (intentional, accidental, systemic, etc.), is incomprehensible, disordered, and chaotic. It is not able to be sensible in itself. This chaos, however, is God's enemy, and God is a God of order.
Built in to our awareness of evil in the world is a desire for justice. When there is a crime and the criminal is caught and punished, we feel satisfied that justice was served. When the crime is such that there is severe loss of life or well-being, even though the criminal is punished, there is often an emotional remainder. On the one hand, we feel satisfied that justice was served, but, on the other hand, justice cannot fully replace the loss. Settlement money in a lawsuit involving a fatality can never fully equal the value of the life lost. What then do we do with complete accidents? This accident was evil, but not due to the grandfather's malicious intent. In light of my inability to make sense of these tragedies, I'm convinced of another way forward. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." As I read this passage while reflecting on this tragedy, I came to the realization that in the face of accidental evil, mourning is the proper response. Mourning is, perhaps, the only proper response because evil is chaos, and chaos is by nature disorderly and nonsensical. In fact, we must leave it unexplained and simply mourn with those who mourn; to not do so, by which I mean to insist that it "happened for some reason," results in an anomaly (literally, a wrongly named thing): we end up calling disorder order. The Old Testament rightly considers anomalies like these immoral because they violate a fundamental biblical truth: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" (Isa 5.20). God does not delight in the death of his creatures, and when people attempt to comfort others who are in pain by telling them that all things happen for a reason or that God's plans are bigger than our scenarios they are speaking half truths as best. What is usually happening unbeknownst to the "comforter" is that they are trying to comfort by falsely reassuring people God did this for a reason, which is to say that God's plan included, and by extension needed, this tragedy to happen. This is very poor theology.
There is a substantial difference between the belief that God ordains or causes evil for his good and the belief that God creates good out of evil. Judas remains the betrayer, despite the fact that his betrayal led to Christ's death, which accomplished our redemption. Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension don't make Judas's actions good. The inexhaustible mystery of the Triune God is that he is able to create goodness out of evil, bring order out of chaos. St. Athanasius said that redemption is the continuation of creation. The very ordering of the (non-evil) chaos in Gen 1 is continued by God's (re-)ordering of the (evil) chaos of the world. The introduction of sin allows us to unpack this ordering, and the Bible and Christian theology teach us that God often orders by conquering. That is, some things are fundamentally against God and they cannot be redeemed. The effects that these anti-God experiences have on us require conquering and healing, not redeeming. We are in the process of being redeemed, but the evils themselves are not. God doesn't cause evil for his good, he conquers evil for our good, which is also his good. I consider this distinction between ordaining evil for good and ordering evil toward good a necessary one in order to affirm the essentials of Scripture and Christian theology: God is completely good; evil is a reality we have brought into the world and it is anti-God; and Christ has conquered, is conquering, and will continue to conquer sin, death, and the Devil. Christus Victor! "Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered!"
