Reading something of Simone Weil’s ideas on suffering. I was struck by one remark which reminded me of a problem I had when teaching and which I have never really solved. How did Christ by his death on the cross save us? The remark was, ‘The cross is a divine response to evil and a model for ours.’ I wondered what are the other divine responses to evil and in what sense are we saved by the cross and resurrection of Christ. The answer that immediately springs to mind is solidarity. As a human person Christ overcame evil and death. We, as human persons, through our links with him, can also overcome evil and death. How? I don’t know, but I do know, though I cannot explain, that we are all linked in some fashion and that the actions of each have an affect on all – good for good, evil for evil. Hence the importance of prayer and self-sacrifice.
The received answer is that the Father raised him up and that we, through our baptism, are incorporated into Christ’s death and resurrection. This is a Christian articulation of what I said about solidarity. But what exactly does that mean? And why is this procedure necessary in the first place? Why submit to evil? Why not negotiate with it, dialogue, overcome, destroy it, etc. So many options are possible but passive non-resistance is chosen, leading to the destruction of Christ. Evil seems to be built into the scheme of things and a world without it does not seem to have been an option for the Creator. The good, and Christ was the archetypal good man, are always going to be destroyed by the forces of evil. Some struggle and fight against it and this struggle against the forces of entropy, destruction and death, this desire to overcome not only the evil we face but the limitations of our existence, has led to the extraordinary advances of the last five thousand years after tens of thousands of years of (as far as we know) almost imperceptible development. I was going to say that Christ chose passive non-resistance to the evil forces which opposed him and that this inevitably led to his destruction. Hence the myth, propagated by Nietzsche, of the ineffectiveness and weakness of Christianity. But it is more subtle than this. Christ did not respond to force and violence with force and violence. This does not mean that he was weak. On the contrary. His response was his moral authority, his openness, his transparent goodness, his exposure of lies and misrepresentations. Force and violence do not lead to an increase in the knowledge and understanding of the nature of reality. Christ was a revelation. He made explicit what many already knew implicitly about the power of God to transform people’s lives, about love and goodness, about the futility of violence and the desire for power and wealth. He also made explicit what probably very few knew, or suspected – the presence of God in the here and now, within and among us. Evil could not tolerate such an exposure. It destroyed Christ as it continues to destroy people like him today. It did its worst but its worst was not good enough. There occurred a resurrection in which Christ transcended evil, and also good, in fact this whole dimension of existence. Evil remains with all its destructive power within this domain. The only difference now is that we know its power is not absolute, that the only thing it leads to is death and that removes some of its mystique. Resurrection is now a possibility for us all, especially for those who live by love. The power of God’s love transcends death.