Delivered on Sunday 26 August 2007 in St George's Chapel

Habakkuk 1.2-4

It is a poor state of affairs when the crime rate is soaring, when physical violence is a commonplace, when strife is growing like wild fire and when the law is distorted. That observation is not taken from one of our newspapers or from a blog on the internet but straight from the words of the prophet Habakkuk, from whom we heard this morning. His words refer to a society over two and half thousand years ago. You might imagine then that his words are dusty or dry, that his concerns are peculiar. But, no. He could very well be speaking today. Just this week newspapers have reported stories that could fall under any one of Habakkuk's concerns. How is the law applied to sex offenders? Why do protests tend towards strife? And most poignantly, why is it that an eleven year boy, returning home from football practice, is fatally shot in the back of the neck? When Habakkuk looks out on his world he wonders aloud 'Lord, why do you countenance the treachery of the wicked? Why keep silent when they devour those who are more righteous?' He looks out on a world of chaos and he wonders at the silence of God. Do we, as we look out at our world, wonder the same thing? Do we wonder why God seems to sit still while the world we encounter is full of misery and chaos?

If we do wonder such things, and I imagine every one of us does, at some point or other, then we are essentially accusing God of having made a bad world. Could God have done better? Presumably if God is omnipotent he could have created a different and better kind of world. Maybe. But before we jump to conclusions we need to be clear about what we mean when we say that God has created a bad world. What does the word 'bad' mean? I suspect you will agree that badness in itself no more exists than, for example, yellowness. If I ask you to show me a yellow, you know that won't be possible; all you can show me is something that is yellow. Similarly you cannot show badness, only some thing that is bad. But what does it mean to say that something is bad? You see, I think there is a difference between saying that things are yellow and that things are bad. Things that are yellow all share a single property; they are all coloured yellow. Things that are bad, however, do not share a single property. I could say that a deckchair is a bad deckchair and that a strawberry is a bad strawberry, but I would mean something different in my two uses of the word 'bad'. A deckchair may be bad if it collapses when I sit on it; a strawberry that collapses when I sit on it is not necessarily good or bad. We use the word badness, then, to describe things that don't come up to our expectations. A car is a bad car if it continually breaks down; a book is a bad book if it is poorly written; a washing machine is a bad washing machine if it doesn't clean the clothes. Badness - to put it another way - is the lack of something; it is not living up to expectations.

Now that we have worked out what we mean by badness let us apply the notion to the situation of the fox and the chicken. A fox that kills a chicken is doing no more than a fox does; that is exactly the nature of a fox. Put a chicken before the fox and it will kill it,; in killing the chicken he is living up to expectations, he is a good fox. Of course, what makes the fox a good fox is by no means good for the chicken. I mention this example of the fox and the chicken because it brings home a difficult fact. If you are going to have a world that contains living things then it is bound to be the case that in some things being good they will damage other things. You might argue that God could have created a world where no such damage occurred at all. And perhaps he could have. But such a world would depend on constant miraculous intervention. God alone would have to feed all the animals and all the plants. If you want a natural world that follows an order of nature then there simply have to be some defects. Some suffering will occur simply because things are doing what they do best.

Now let us apply these thoughts on badness to Habakkuk's world and to our own. We are clear what we mean when we say a washing machine is a bad washing machine - it is a washing machine that does not clean the clothes. But Habakkuk is more concerned with human action than he is with washing machines. He wonders about crime and strife; he wonders about human action. Could there be such a thing as a bad person? Well yes there could, but defining what me mean might not be quite so easy. Unlike washing machines it is not ultimately unambiguous what it is that humans are supposed to do and to be for.

If a person kills a fish for food this is not a good state of affairs for the fish but the human is only doing what humans do. The person who kills a fish for food is not a bad or an evil person. But what happens when a person acts out of selfishness or greed or cruelty? I want to suggest that when a person acts from such motives he diminishes his humanity; he becomes less of a human being. Defining an action as wrong is not the harm it does to another but the harm it does to the perpetrator. When I purposefully cause dreadful things to happen to others, then surely other people suffer, but the evil done is in me, it is in the diminishment of my humanity. It is my not living up to expectations. A morally evil act then is a lack; it is the lack of true humanity.

What then about the charge that God created a bad world. My line of thought suggests that a natural world, one that displays the complexity and interrelatedness of our world will, by definition, contain defects - things, just by being good, will cause suffering to other things. In other words, without suffering there would be no real animals. And yet suffering is also caused by humans who, through morally evil actions, bring about suffering that also devalues their own humanity. I can understand why suffering exists; I do not understand why moral evil exists. Or to put it more bluntly I don't know why there is sin.

Did God crate a bad world? It seems that suffering is a part of a real world and is no mystery at all, the mystery relates only to the human possibility of sin. We have perhaps being asking the wrong question. It is not 'Did God create a bad world?', it is 'Why does God permit moral evil?' And that question does not have an answer. A God of goodness is not incompatible with the existence of moral evil but unless we have some kind of direct line to the mind of God we aren't going to be able to understand why this God of goodness allows moral evil. What we do know though, through the witness of God's own son, is that God loves us and loves the world he created, and that he invites us to pursue our full humanity so that we may share in his life of love.

[1] This sermon is inspired by the thoughts and writing of St Augustine and also by the teaching of Fr Herbert McCabe