Scripture text: Luke 12:45-56
“Good will triumph in the end.” This is a given for many of us. We see it in our pop culture, read about it in stories or see it on the movie screen. It is a core component of our faith as Christians. Whatever other secrets may be hidden within the book of Revelation, one thing is clear. God wins in the end. And if God wins, then so too does good win for God is good.
The human mind however has this nasty little habit of taking a simple truth like “Good wins in the end” and then twisting it into something insidious or even monstrous. It’s amazing in some ways how quickly our thinking goes from “good wins in the end” to “good wins always.” That’s a dangerous lie, but it’s one we want to believe so badly that we almost never question it.
I have to give the world some credit here. Sad to say, but secular society seems to know this to be the lie it is. Think about it for a second. Is there ever a story that you’ve read where the hero never struggled once to overcome his enemies, where it was just one victory after another until the very end? Boring. TV, movies, books are all populated with stories of good people who have to fight tooth and nail to achieve their ends, some fiction, others based on true events of history.
Increasingly, we’re even seeing the rise of the villain story or the anti-hero story, tales of not-so-good people who still manage to triumph despite their evil. No one looks at stories like these and says, “no, that would never happen.” Walter White or Tony Soprano would never get away with any of that stuff in real life, because good always wins. Come on, we know better. Evil does triumph from time to time, but only temporarily.
Yet despite that, I can guarantee that even right now, as I speak, preachers are getting into pulpits all over this country and they’re telling the people in the pews before them that if only they believe enough and are sincere enough and if they’re good enough, then they will never have any trouble in life because good wins and God will make sure of that. And they’ll eat it up and they’ll believe it and then when something happens: an accident, a layoff, cancer, or some other painful “evil” event, they question and they wonder why on earth something so horrible would happen to someone as good as they are.
Evil sometimes wins. It’s as simple as that.
Bad things do happen. They happen in spite of the good we do. But interestingly enough, sometimes bad things happen because of the good we do.
And that brings us to Jesus. Our Gospel lesson today is a bit of a wake-up call to any of his disciples who are naive enough to presume that because they are followers of the Son of God then the whole world will be their oyster. Life will be perfect and pleasant and everybody will love them and it all be flowers and cupcakes and nothing bad will ever ever happen to them.
Jesus turns to his disciples and tells them, “Look, I’ve told you to love your enemies, to care for the downtrodden, to see people as God does, and the moment you start doing that, people are going to get angry at you. How dare you not hate the Muslims and the gays like everybody else! How dare you take care of those lazy freeloaders who don’t work! How dare you stand against us as we seek to destroy these worthless evil people! Your brother will turn against you. Your friends will become enemies. You will be divided from those you love for my sake and for the sake of the truths that I speak.”
In many ways, Jesus is telling us the mark of a righteous life is not smooth sailing in which evil never touches us. The mark of a righteous life is a constant battle against evil, one in which there will be pain, and there will be heartbreak, and there may even be death. This world of sin will not simply accept what we as Christians seek to do for it. It will resist. It will fight back, and it has numerous times in the past.
Gandhi stood up and said once that “my people need to be free and we will find our freedom not by violence or force of arms, but by resistance. We will harm no one. We will simply refuse to do what you tell us.” He was murdered for his trouble. Martin Luther King said the black man is equal to the white. People stood up with him and for daring to believe what we in this generation are increasing taken as a given, they were beaten, set upon by attack dogs, had fire hoses sprayed at them, and many of them were killed, including, of course, Dr. King himself. Susan B Anthony was jailed for daring to claim that a woman could vote. And all across history, truth-tellers and advocates and truly good people have suffered and died for the truths they espoused and for the good they sought to do.
Jesus himself even. I often find it funny how hard it is for the disciples to accept Jesus’ passion predictions. Oh, when we get to Jerusalem, I’m going to be arrested and executed. But after three days I’ll rise again. The part about that which is nigh on impossible to believe is the resurrection bit, but the disciples keep getting hung up on the whole arrest and execution part. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and wholly oblivious to reality not to see that coming. But then again, the disciples, like so many of us, believe that good always wins and that evil will never triumph ever.
If you do what your faith calls you to do...If I stand up for the people Jesus would have me stand up for, then there will be consequences. When we feed the poor, when we love the unloveable, when we welcome the outcast and the unwanted, the world will retaliate. How dare we show grace to the undeserving! They will hate us for it, because we do dare. We dare to follow God’s rules and not theirs. They may act on their hate. We may find ourselves in pain, in prison, or even in the grave for our audacity.
But what can they really do? Let them rage impotently, because while “good triumphs always” may be a delusion, “good wins in the end” is not. MLK died, as he once predicted, having never seen “the promised land.” Gandhi got only a brief glimpse of an independent India. The great saints and figures of Hebrew history that our second lesson speaks of also died before the fulfillment of their hopes. But because of them and because of the truths behind their actions, the world is changing. You can see it. Love is overcoming hate, slowly but inevitably. Peace is overcoming violence, slowly but inevitably. Justice is overcoming injustice, slowly but inevitably. The kingdom that God seeks for us is breaking through, bit by bit.
Evil may win in the short run, but God has the last word. The central story of our faith reveals that truth to us. Jesus dies a horrific death on the cross. He was put there by an abuse of justice, killed for the truths that he spoke and the good that he did. Evil seems to win in that moment, but it was only temporary. No, God had the last word then too and on that third day, as predicted, Jesus rose again.
So we may weep at the misfortune that befalls us. We may feel the anger boil within us at injustices done to us. Family may turn away from us. Friends abandon us. Our bodies may fail us. All this is part of life. We may feel that we are with Jesus on that cross, placed there for actions or beliefs that only a twisted world could see as crimes. We may feel like we’re stuck on Friday, but Sunday’s coming. God has the last word, and he has given us a promise. Where there is death, I will bring life again. That promise is our hope and our proof that good indeed will triumph in the end. Amen.
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