John's evil cosmos-world

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 12th May 2024, the 7th after Easter, the Sunday after the Ascension.

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

I apologise for my singing! But I’m sure you all recognise the song – memorably sung by Louis Armstrong. And it’s true isn’t it - we all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to live in - a real Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it and use it rightly.

St John uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’, no less than 13 times in today’s reading from his Gospel (John 17:6-19). But this is not the beautiful material world which God made and saw ‘was very good’, as the 1^st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s world. The kosmos-world is a dark shadow of God’s good world. It is a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of that kosmos-world too, don’t we!

For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is eternal life, as Jesus tells us through John in the preceding verses, ‘This is eternal life, (to) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.

It is the night of the last supper, after he has washed the disciples’ feet. Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s twelve closest friends and disciples, has left the room. He has gone to betray Jesus to the authorities. Jesus is speaking to the remaining disciples, in what is known as his ‘farewell discourse’. Afterwards, he will go out with them to the garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron valley, where he will be arrested by soldiers and police led by Judas, as Peter recalls in our 1^st reading (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26).

Jesus is praying for his disciples, but he is also teaching them, for he prays out loud in their hearing. His words are dense with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak to them before he is arrested, tried and executed.

It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points from Jesus’s teaching about the relationship between his disciples and John’s kosmos-world.

1.       Jesus’s disciples are in the kosmos-world, but they do not belong to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.

2.       The kosmos-world has already shown it hates Jesus, and his disciples too, because they do not belong to it. Those mired in evil, in cynicism, violence and greed, cannot co-exist with those who live by God’s values. So Jesus calls on his Father to protect his disciples from evil, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.

3.       Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his redeeming work in the kosmos-world.

The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us, day by day.

It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract. It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on concrete examples. There are so many to choose from - but let’s focus today on the hatred people harbour in their hearts for others they see as different from themselves, as enemies.

Personal hatred wounds the soul of both the hater and the hated. It is often expressed anonymously on social media, as those of us who use it know only too well. Children are particularly vulnerable to online bullying, whether it is aimed at their body form or their gender identity or some other perceived weakness. Vulnerable adults can also be severely affected. It blights lives and in extreme cases leads to suicide.

We may think that we cannot be guilty of such hateful behaviour - but what about old fashioned gossip? How many of us can say that we have never been party to passing on rumours that damage other people?

Group hatred, hatred of others because they belong to a different race or religion, is even more damaging than personal hatred.

Such hatreds are evil. They have been with us since the dawn of the human species, a kind of original sin, to which we are all potentially vulnerable. They fracture communities. And in the extreme they have led perfectly ordinary people, not so very different to you or me, to attempt to exterminate whole populations as dangerous enemies.

The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews between 1941 and 1945, alongside innumerable Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. My father as an army chaplain was taken to see one of the extermination camps after its liberation, and he made sure that as a teenager I saw the horrific movies taken at the time so that I would recognise evil when I saw it.

We do well to remember this Holocaust every year in January. But that has not been enough to stop other genocides in my lifetime, such as those in Ruanda and in Bosnia.

Understandably, surviving Jews sought to establish a safe homeland for themselves. But tragically 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes as refugees when the state of Israel was founded in 1948. They were never allowed to return to their homes. Palestinians remember it as the Nakba or catastrophe. It is the root of the violence we see in the middle east today. Palestinians hate Israelis, and Israelis hate Palestinians. One group hatred begets another, in a vicious circle of evil. We see the consequences today in the horror of Gaza, in Israel, the West Bank, and other countries still hosting refugees from the Nakba and subsequent wars.

Lest we think that we cannot be caught up in such events, let us reflect on the cycle of violence in the North of our island. The Good Friday Agreement was meant to break the cycle, and we have had peace there for many years. But the hatreds still fester. And let us not forget the continuing prejudice in our communities against Travellers.

So to sum up:

The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We should rejoice in it and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always be on guard against the evil that spoils it.

As disciples we live amidst evil, but we do not belong to it, because God has given us to Jesus.

Jesus confronted evil and refused to collude with it, at the cost of his death on the cross.

Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming mission. God has set us apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found, and that includes evil hatreds, whatever that may cost us personally.

We can and we should take comfort that Jesus intercedes for us. He asks God to protect us from something much worse than suffering or death – that is, from being drawn into doing evil ourselves.

As Jesus’s friend and disciple Judas was.

 

The Kosmos World

Address given at Templederry, St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 13th May 2018, the 7th of Easter, the Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost.

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

I apologise for my bad singing! But I’m sure you all recognise the song – it’s perhaps best known sung by Louis Armstrong. And it’s true isn’t it - we all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to live in - a veritable Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it and use it rightly.

St John uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’, no less than 13 times in today’s reading from his Gospel (John 17:6-19). But this is not the beautiful material world which God made and saw ‘was very good’, as the 1^st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s world. The kosmos-world is a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of that kosmos-world too, don’t we!

For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is eternal life, as he tells us in the preceding verses, ‘This is eternal life, (to) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. And it is echoed in today’s reading from 1 John 5:9-13, ‘This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son’.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.

It is the night of the last supper, after he has washed the disciples’ feet. It is immediately before he goes out with them to the garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron valley, where he will be arrested by soldiers and police led by Judas Iscariot. Jesus is praying for his disciples, but he is also teaching them, for he prays out loud in their hearing. His words are dense with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak to them before he is arrested, tried and executed.

It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points about the relationship between Jesus’s disciples and John’s kosmos-world.

1.       Jesus’s disciples are in the kosmos-world, but they do not belong to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.

2.       The kosmos-world has already shown it hates Jesus’s disciples because they do not belong to it. Those mired in evil, in cynicism, violence and greed, cannot co-exist with those who live by God’s values. So Jesus calls on his Father to protect his disciples from evil, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.

3.       Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his redeeming work in the kosmos-world.

The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us, day by day.

It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract. It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on concrete examples. There are so many to choose from - but let’s focus today on the hatred people harbour in their hearts for others they see as different from themselves, or as opponents.

Personal hatred wounds the soul of both the hater and the hated. These days it is often expressed anonymously on social media, as those of us who use it know only too well. Children are particularly vulnerable to online bullying, whether it is aimed at their body form or their sexuality or some other perceived weakness. Vulnerable adults can also be severely affected. It blights lives and in extreme cases leads to suicide.

We may think that we cannot be guilty of such hateful behaviour - but what about old fashioned gossip? How many of us can say that we have not been party to passing on rumours that damage other people?

Hatred of one group for another on the grounds of race or religion is even more damaging than personal hatred. Such group hatreds are evil. They have been with us since the dawn of the human species, a kind of original sin, to which we are all potentially vulnerable. They fracture communities. And in the extreme they have led perfectly ordinary people, not so very different to you or me, to attempt to exterminate whole populations seen as dangerous enemies.

The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews between 1941 and 1945, alongside innumerable Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. My father as an army chaplain was taken to see one of the extermination camps after its liberation, and he made sure that as a teenager I saw the horrific movies taken at the time so that I would recognise evil when I saw it.

We do well to remember this Holocaust every year in January. But that has not been enough to stop other genocides in my lifetime, such as those in Ruanda and in Bosnia.

Understandably, surviving Jews sought to establish a safe homeland for themselves. But tragically 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes when the state of Israel was founded in 1948, an event they remember as the Nakba or catastrophe, the root of much of the violence in the middle east today. One group hatred begets another, in a vicious circle of evil.

Lest we think that we cannot be caught up in such events, let us reflect on the cycle of violence in the North of our island. The Good Friday Agreement was meant to break the cycle, and we have had peace there for many years. But the hatreds still fester. And let us also reflect on the continuing prejudice in our communities against Travellers.

So to sum up:

The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We should rejoice in it and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always be on guard against the evil that spoils it.

As disciples we live amidst evil, but we do not belong to it, because God has given us to Jesus.

Jesus confronted evil and refused to collude with it at the cost of his death on the cross, from which God raised him up.

Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming mission. God has set us apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found, and that includes evil hatreds, what ever that may cost us personally.

We can and should take comfort that Jesus intercedes for us, asking God to protect us from something much worse than suffering – that is, from being drawn into evil ourselves.

The Kosmos-World

Sermon preached at St Mary's, Nenagh on 20th May 2012, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Sunday after the Ascension, year B

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

 I apologise for my bad singing! But I’m sure you all recognise this song – it’s perhaps best known sung by Louis Armstrong. And it’s true isn’t it! We all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to live in - a veritable Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it and use it rightly.

St John uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’, no less than 13 times in today’s  reading from his Gospel (John 17:6-19). But this is not the beautiful material world which God made and saw ‘was very good’, as the 1^st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s wonderful world. The kosmos-world is a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of that kosmos-world too, don’t we!

For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is eternal life, as he tells us in the preceding verses, ‘This is eternal life, (to) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. And the author of 1 John echoes this in today’s 2nd reading (1 John 5:9-13), ‘This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son’.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.

It is the night of the last supper, just after he has washed the disciples’ feet. It is immediately before he goes out with them to the garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron valley, where he will be arrested by soldiers and police led to him by Judas Iscariot. Jesus is praying for his disciples, but he is also teaching them, for he prays out loud in their hearing. His words are dense with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak to them before he is arrested, tried and executed.

It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points about the relationship between Jesus’s disciples and John’s kosmos-world.

1. Jesus’s disciples are in the kosmos-world, but they do not belong to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.
2. The kosmos-world has already shown it hates Jesus’s disciples because they do not belong to it. Those mired in evil, in cynicism, violence and greed, cannot co-exist with those who live by God’s values. So Jesus calls on his Father to protect his disciples from evil, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.
3. Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his redeeming work there.

The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us, day by day.

It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract. It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on concrete examples. There are so many to choose from - but let’s focus on the child abuse which has so disfigured Irish society.

We were shocked to learn of the abuse perpetrated by a very few priests and religious in RC parishes and church institutions – a small minority, but still far too many. But lest we are tempted to believe it is not our problem too, we are now hearing the testimony of those abused in protestant institutions, such as Bethany Home in Rathgar and Westbank Orphanage in Greystones. 219 Bethany children are buried in unmarked graves in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin. Many who survived were sent into dysfunctional and abusive situations in places like Westbank.

It is now clear that the evil of child abuse extended far beyond the abusers themselves. It extended to their colleagues and superiors who colluded in it by failing to stop the perpetrators. It extended to organs of the State which failed to exercise their duty of care. And it extended throughout Irish society, to all of us who knew there was something wrong, but could not bring ourselves to say so publicly, thus allowing the evil system to fester for decades.

We must not forget that more children have been abused outside the churches than within them. But it is almost incomprehensible how so many who professed to be Jesus’s disciples could have gone so wrong – but they did. And that must be a lesson to us all not to underestimate the forces of evil. Every one of us needs God’s grace to prevent the forces of evil overcoming us.

So to sum up:

·       The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We should rejoice in it, and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always be on guard against the evil that spoils it.

·         As disciples we live amidst evil, but we do not belong to it, because God has given us to Jesus.

·         As disciples we must be ready to suffer personally when we confront evil and refuse to collude with it. But we can take comfort that Jesus intercedes for us, asking God to protect us from something much worse than suffering – that is, from being drawn into evil ourselves.

·         Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming mission. We have been set apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found, not to hide ourselves away like cowards in the face of it.

Let us put on the armour of God

Today we come to the last of this series of 5 addresses on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians
In the first 3 we explored key theological themes:

1. ‘We must start with Christ’.
2. ‘In Christ God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’; and
3. ‘In Christ we are members of God’s household, Christ’s Church’.

Last Sunday we looked at the ethical implications of Paul’s theology in the form of the advice he gave the Ephesians about how to behave as members of Christ’s Church. I summarised like this:

In God’s household - Christ’s Church - we must be kind and forgiving, we must live as children of light’.

Today we turn to the very end of the letter, Ephesians 6:10-20.

It is hard to be kind and forgiving much of the time, to live as children of light, very hard.
Paul knows that the Ephesians can be so only with God’s help – only by God’s saving grace, through faith, just like good works.

‘Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power’, Paul urges them. ‘Put on the whole armour of God’.

The armour of God is a striking metaphor, isn't it? For the Ephesians no doubt it conjured up the image of a Roman Legionary - for us, perhaps, the scary looking equipment of coalition troops in Afghanistan – light-weight body-armour, Kevlar helmet and night vision goggles. Paul no doubt also had in mind Isaiah’s description (59:17) of God’s breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation.

‘Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’, says Paul. I suppose we all have that sense sometimes of a voice whispering inside our head, tempting us to do what that other voice, our conscience, tells us to be wrong, to be displeasing to God. Paul personifies it as the wily devil, but it is really part of us, that part of our psyche that is disobedient to God. It is that part of us that is responsible for all the petty human sins we are all guilty of to a greater or lesser extent – the lies, the malice, the dishonesty, the words intended to hurt others - as well as our failures to be kind and forgiving, as God is kind and forgiving to us.

But there is more evil in the world than we create by our petty human sins.
As Christians we must confront evil outside us as well as within us.

‘For’, says Paul, ‘our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh,’ - or our own natures - ‘but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’.

Paul’s words sound like science fiction, don’t they? The ‘cosmic powers’ and ‘spiritual forces’ could almost be the Martians in HG Wells’ ‘War of the worlds’, or the Borg in ‘Startrek’.

But these evil powers and forces are real. Wicked ideologies, xenophobia and national interests too often cause the evil of war and violence. Bad economic and social systems generate the evil of hunger and poverty, ravish the planet’s resources and damage the precious web of life. What are they but ‘spiritual forces of evil’? And then there is disease and natural disaster that cause untold suffering. What are these but ‘cosmic powers of darkness’? We don’t understand why God permits such things – but they are surely not ‘acts of God’, since they are contrary to all God’s loving purposes.

Christians must ‘stand firm’ against all these evils, but to do so we must ‘take up the whole armour of God’, in order to ‘be strong in the Lord’.

Paul models the armour of God on the state-of-the-art equipment of a Roman legionary of the 1st Century.

• There is ‘The belt of truth’. The belt a Roman soldier wore was a wide piece of thick leather which protected his lower abdomen, his guts. The truth is God’s truth – the truth of the good news Jesus proclaimed. It is that truth which gives us the guts to resist evil.


• There is ‘The breastplate of righteousness’. The legionary’s breastplate was made of overlapping iron bands fixed to leather to protect the chest and heart from swords, spears and javelins. A righteous person relates to God in the way God intends. Righteousness, knowing what God intends us to be, protects the integrity of the Christian heart.


• There are ‘Shoes … (to) make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace’. The Roman military boot, open like a sandal, with thick leather soles and hobnails, enabled legionaries to march long distances without suffering blisters. Christians too must be able to travel far to proclaim the gospel of peace. It is ‘shalom’, inner wellbeing, the peace of the kingdom of God.


• There is ‘The shield of faith’. The rectangular legionary shield, made of bent-wood and covered with leather, was soaked in water before battle to extinguish flaming arrows. Christian faith acts like a shield to turn temptation aside.


• There is ‘The helmet of salvation’. Made of iron or bronze, with a neck-piece at the back and hinged cheek-pieces, the ‘Imperial Helmet’ was designed both to protect the head and intimidate opponents. For Christians, salvation is about God forgiving our sins. Knowing that our sins have been forgiven, we can think clearly, stand firm in the face of evil and not be intimidated by it.


• Finally there is ‘The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. The legionary sword was the short steel ‘gladius’, used in hand to hand combat for cutting and thrusting – it’s the origin of the English word ‘gladiator’. The Holy Spirit reveals the word of God to us, what God wants, what is good and right and true, and this is the weapon with which Christians must fight evil. Notice it is the only offensive weapon Paul mentions – everything else is defensive armour.

So, as Paul urges the Ephesians, ‘Let us put on the armour of God’.
Let us prepare ourselves to fight the good fight, to confront and defeat evil wherever we may find it, not just in our own natures, but in all the dark places of the world. We cannot be successful by ourselves, but God through Christ has given us all that we need for the spiritual fight – the whole armour of God.

Paul finishes his letter by urging the Ephesians to pray. ‘Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints’ - 'for all the saints', that is, for all Christians, because we are all saints in the sense Paul uses the word. Prayer by every Christian for all Christians raises the morale of Christ’s Church for the spiritual battle with evil in all its manifestations.

I shall finish with our parish prayer for March. It is a verse from St Patrick’s Breastplate, a powerful invocation of the name of Christ. It can be our breastplate too, part of the armour of God for us, which we can use whenever we feel anxious or fearful in the face of the enemy.

Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger
Christ in heart of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger
Amen

Child abuse and the kosmos-world

An address given at Shinrone and Aghancon on the 7th Sunday after Easter, 24th May 2009.

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

I apologise for my bad singing! But I’m sure you all recognise this song, perhaps best known sung by Louis Armstrong, with his gravelly voice. And it’s true isn’t it! We all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to live in - a veritable Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it and use it rightly.

John the Evangelist uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’, no less than 13 times in today’s Gospel reading. But this is not the beautiful material world which God made, and which God saw ‘was very good’, as the 1st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s world. It is a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of that kosmos-world too, don’t we!

For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is eternal life, as he tells us in the preceding verses, ‘And this is eternal life, (to) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’.

In the Gospel reading (John 17:6-19), Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.

It is the night of the last supper, after he has washed the disciples feet, just before he goes out with them to be arrested by soldiers and police led to him by Judas Iscariot. Jesus is praying for his disciples. But surely he is also teaching them, for he does so out loud, in their hearing.

Jesus’s words are dense with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak to his disciples before he is arrested, tried and executed.

It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points, all to do with the relationship between Jesus’s disciples and John’s kosmos-world.

1. Jesus’s disciples are in the kosmos-world, but they do not belong to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.
   
2. The kosmos-world hates Jesus’s disciples because they do not belong to it. Those mired in evil - in cynicism, violence and greed - cannot co-exist with those who live by God’s values. Jesus has protected his disciples from this evil, but now he is leaving them. So Jesus calls on his Father to continue to protect them, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.
   
3. Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his redeeming work in the kosmos-world.

The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us, day by day.

It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract. It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on a concrete example.

In the week following the shocking report of the Commission of Enquiry into Child Abuse, let’s focus on the evil of child abuse. The abuse was perpetrated in Industrial Schools and other institutions run by religious orders, by a minority - but far too many - professed religious. It is now clear that the evil extended far beyond the abuse itself. It extended to their colleagues and superiors who colluded in it by failing to stop the perpetrators. It extended to organs of our Irish State which failed to exercise their duty of care. And it extended throughout Irish society, to all of us who knew there was something wrong, but could not bring ourselves to say so publicly, thus allowing the evil system to fester for decades.

What I find almost incomprehensible is how so many who professed to be Jesus’s disciples could have gone so wrong – but they did. And that must be a lesson to us all not to underestimate the forces of evil. We need God’s grace to protect us from being overcome by them.

So to sum up:

• The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We should rejoice in it, and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always be on guard against the evil that spoils it.
  
• We disciples live amidst evil, but we do not belong to it, because God has given us to Jesus.
  
• We disciples must be ready to suffer personally when we fight evil and do not collude with it. We should take strength from knowing that Jesus intercedes for us, asking God to protect us from something much worse than suffering – from being drawn into evil ourselves.
  
• Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming mission. We have been set apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found. We must not hide ourselves away like cowards in the face of it.