The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Articulating Jesus’ Diagnosis of Humanity:  Mt.15:18 – 19

^15:18 But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.

         Jesus calls us to put forward the biblical conviction that evil has come to reside in humanity, and needs to be cleansed out by him.  But sometimes it’s hard to just bring up ‘humanity’s evil’ in everyday conversation.  How do we do that?  Isn’t it rather awkward?

The therapeutic culture of victimization in America makes it difficult to hold anyone accountable for an act; instead, the victimizer must be understood as a victim of someone or something else.  On the news, the TV reporter declares that a mass murderer or child molester has been caught, then often brings up a psychologist to explain why this person’s childhood was messed up, and how that explains why this person did those horrible crimes.  Certainly those factors are often significant.  But we tend to make ‘evil’ something external to us, something foreign to us, something that only affects relatively few of us.  For many in Western culture, raising this concern about humanity is troubling and even offensive. 

Yet let’s take a brief glance at recent books and magazines wrestling with the topic of evil.  They tell us that this is a public concern, not something Christians talk about off to the side by ourselves, isolated from other important public discussions.

One of these books is by Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow.  It’s called Evil: An Investigation.  This exploration by a seasoned journalist of modern and historic cruelties was very engaging for me at first.  Not everyone goes to interview dictators like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic.  Morrow, however, found that even those men were not the madmen he supposed they were; they instead presented themselves to him rationally, calmly.  They had a different understanding of events and priorities for action, but they were not raging demon-possessed people.  Morrow’s conclusion was that evil was like a fungus, something common and banal that creeps up and grows in historical circumstances.  Ask a friend if that’s the most realistic view of evil we can have.

I found Morrow’s assessment disappointing and a bit shallow, because I don’t think that evil is something external to humanity, and a circumstance of the times.  Rather, I think evil is something that has lodged itself in human being and is always with us.  Modern psychologist Carl Jung said in a 1959 BBC interview, ‘We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself... We know nothing of man, far too little.  His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.’  Jung was more heroic than many in identifying humanity as the leading problem.  In literature, many sources identify humanity as a source of evil:  the Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, John Knowles in his book A Separate Peace, and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.  And of course, the biblical literature uniformly makes that case. 

          Donald Miller, in his book Blue Like Jazz, writes about a conversation he had with a friend, Tony, after watching the news about the violence happening in the Congo.

          “It’s terrible,” I told him.  “Two and a half million people, dead.  In one village they interviewed about fifty of so women.  All of them had been raped, most of them numerous times.”

          Tony shook his head.  “That is amazing.  It is so difficult to process how things like that can happen.”

          “I know.  I can’t get my mind around it.  I keep wondering how people could do things like that.”

          “Do you think you could do something like that, Don?” Tony looked at me pretty seriously.  I honestly couldn’t believe he was asking the question.

          “What are you talking about?” I asked.

          “Are you capable of murder or rape or any of the stuff that is taking place over there?”

          “No.”

          “So you are not capable of any of those things?” he asked again.  He packed his pipe and looked at me to confirm my answer.

          “No, I couldn’t,” I told him.  “What are you getting at?”

          “I just want to know what makes those guys over there any different from you and me.  They are human.  We are human.  Why are we any better than them, you know?”

          Tony had me on this one.  If I answered his question by saying yes, I could commit those atrocities, that would make me evil, but if I answered no, it would suggest I believed I am better evolved than some of the men in the Congo.  And then I would have some explaining to do.  (Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville, 2003, p.16 – 17)

We often need help articulating the depth of the human problem without sounding archaic.  The character Hannibal Lecter, in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, put it forcefully.  In response to the question, ‘What happened to you?’ Hannibal Lecter says, ‘Nothing has happened to me, officer Starling.  I happened.  You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.  You’ve given up good and evil for behavioralism, officer Starling.  You’ve got everybody in dignity pants.  Nothing is ever anybody’s fault.  Look at me, officer Starling.  Can you stand to say I’m evil?’

Ask a friend which view is the most realistic.  For example:  ‘Sometimes I read things that say human beings aren’t to blame for doing evil.  But the biblical tradition points to humanity being tainted by evil and being responsible for it.  What do you think?’