Lent 1 Year C 2025: Luke 4:1-13

In November of 1856, the chief cashier of Dublin’s Broadstone railway terminal was murdered. Through a bungled police investigation, including an open crime scene where the public came by to check it out and to take souvenirs - far more common of a practice than you would think - the culprit was never brought to justice. But there was one person who was convinced that he could prove the identity of the killer, using a revolutionary new scientific method that would leave no room for doubt. His name was Frederick Bridges, and he was a phrenologist. Phrenology was a discipline which became enormously popular for a period in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists believed that the shape of a person's brain gave an indication of their personality and talents. They claimed that simply by examining a client's head, by feeling the pattern of bumps and ridges unique to each skull, they could provide a detailed account of an individual's mental abilities and character. Bridges wanted to apply this to policing. He was sure that there must be something distinctive about a murderer's brain, something that differentiated them from the law-abiding majority.  If so, the consequences for criminal justice would be momentous. So when the man accused of the Dublin Railway Murder was acquitted, Frederick Bridges saw an opportunity. A cursory examination of the man’s skull was enough to convince Bridges that the man in front of him was a murderer. Bridges was so sure of his conclusions that he immediately wrote to the home secretary, warning him that the configuration of (the man’s) head is of a most dangerous type, and it is therefore not prudent to allow such a man to be at large in this country. Bridges never received a reply to this peculiar letter: it seems that the home secretary was skeptical of the notion that it was possible to identify a murderer from the shape of their head. But others at the very top of government were more receptive to his ideas. (thanks to https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10207155/Murder-shook-1850s-Dublin-examined-using-evidence-seen-time-160-YEARS.html) And it isn’t hard to understand why they would be. Think of the huge number of answers we would have immediately. We would know why people kill and would be able to measure their likelihood to do so in a concrete way. We wouldn’t have to worry about all of the interpersonal and psychological considerations that go into people making such a choice. We could know the identities of all potential murderers and they could be taken out of society before they even got the chance to commit their crimes.

As long as there have been people, we have been making sinful choices. And as long as those choices have been affecting innocent people, we have been trying to figure out why we make choices that distort and destroy us and God’s intention for us as His children. Theologian Karl Barth’s answer to that question is nothingness - not nothing, but nothingness, which Barth defined as a break between God and the world. It is not simply an absence, but instead a wholly negative force, a rebellion, or an opposition. In Barth’s theology, nothingness is directed toward God. It has nothing to do with us personally. We don’t have a dog in the fight between God and nothingness - God is the one who will master and defeat Evil. But we participate in the battle when we consent to nothingness, which is where we get sin; nothingness un-makes us in sin.

We struggle with the problem of evil because it’s such a huge, pervasive struggle for everyone. Evil isn’t a term that we use very comfortably. Rather than face and acknowledge it, evil, and its main spokesman the devil, has been turned into a cartoon. Science doesn’t have a term to deal with Evil, so we make fun of it. Those of you who experienced the 1960’s and 70’s might remember Flip Wilson’s “the devil made me do it!” Or Dana Carvey’s Church Lady asking, “could this be the work of SATAN?”

We personify Evil, which makes it easier to conceptualize, but then we’re playing whack-a-mole with symptoms of Evil instead of combating Evil itself. We know what an Evil act looks like, and while it is of course important to do what we can to prevent those acts, to treat some of the symptoms, if we never go deeper than the acts to the motivating force behind the acts, we aren’t actually dealing with the problem of Evil.

What does it look like to deal with the problem of Evil? We can start with the way in which Luke personifies Evil in the Gospel text today. He doesn’t equate the devil - the Greek diablos is roughly equivalent with the Hebrew satan - with the acts with which the devil is tempting Jesus. The devil is not the acts offered. The devil is the being who is offering these choices to Jesus.

Country singer Kenny Chesney’s song "That’s Why I’m Here" does a good job of depicting this view of the work of the devil. In the song, he’s talking about his first time at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The lyrics of the chorus are: “It’s the simple things in life / like the kids at home and a loving wife / that you miss the most / when you lose control / and everything you love starts to disappear / the devil takes your hand and says no fear / have another shot / just one more beer / I’ve been there / that’s why I’m here.” What I like about the theology of this song is that it identifies the devil in its proper place. The devil is not the liquor. Nor is it the alcoholic. What it is is the force that leads us to those decisions that hurt ourselves, others, and our relationships with God.

We in the church have a rite through which we prepare to take on the problem of Evil: baptism. Oftentimes, when I talk about the baptismal promises, I focus on the last two: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” and “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” But before we get to declaring “I will, with God’s help” about those two, we have already declared the same about this: “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” Our task is not to defeat evil. Evil was conquered by Christ alone. The whole cosmos was affected by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But we are no longer in the midst of this battle; it isn’t ours. Our job is to live in the joy of the resurrection and to resist the Evil that still exists in our world, and whenever we do fall into sin to change our ways, to take up our sin and leave it at the cross where we can then walk away in the knowledge that we are forgiven and renewed. We are united together in our own human brokenness, but in that brokenness we are remade into the people more like who God calls us to be. Amen.