I am
not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them
from the evil one (John 17:15).
The Gospel next Sunday is the
middle part of Jesus’s great prayer of love and unity – John reports it in chapter
17. And this is one sentence of it: I
am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them
from the evil one. That phrase, the
evil one, does sound a bit medieval. As
we well know, the Lord’s Prayer says deliver us from evil. But Matthew’s Greek actually says, rescue
us from the evil one[1]. And in Luke’s Gospel, that phrase of the
Lord’s Prayer is left out altogether[2].
The ancient writers certainly
personified evil. Jesus was tempted in
the desert by Satan. Martin Luther threw
his inkpot at the Devil. Christians
today include many who believe in possession by evil spirits, and practise
exorcism. In the First Letter of Peter we
have[3]:
Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for
someone to devour. Resist him…! I am
not about to talk like that, but we are surely blind if we do not see the
multi-faceted reality of evil in our world, and if we fail to take it with
seriousness… and if we assume that we ourselves are somehow untainted or immune. It can indeed take possession of people and
events.
Jesus prays that we may be
protected from the evil one – certainly from being harmed, but equally if not
more from becoming ourselves part of the subtleties of evil. It is as though sensible efforts to be safe
are not going to be enough. Any experienced
addict knows that’s true. St Paul writes[4]:
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it… the evil I do not want is what
I do… I delight in the law of God in my
inmost self, but I see another law at war with the law of my mind, making me
captive… And if we don’t quite see
ourselves as captive – not everyone is an addict -- we are affected all the
same when we compromise what we know to be right, or collude even passively
with community violence, crudity, deceit, racism, cruelty and abuse. Our lifetime has seen dramatic, prolonged
manifestations of gross evil, and even today there are apocalyptic clouds on
the horizon.
Jesus prays that we will be
protected. Does he mean that nothing bad
will happen to us? If so, it’s a fairly
forlorn prayer. Living in the light is
what he said, reflected in our opinions and attitudes and statements… in the
words of the Prophet Micah[5],
Doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly… not only on the grand scale
of world events, but also, and possibly first, on the level of family and
tribe, friends and colleagues. Our
disciplines of silence and stillness are where we are equipped to live in peace
and in truth, increasingly able to recognise when it is not so, sensitive to
what is not right and is dishonouring the gift of life. However we are praying, essentially we are
joining that one eternal prayer of the risen Christ, in which he asks, not that
we will be taken out of the world, but that we will be resistant to evil.
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