14 February 2017
Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
There is plenty wrong with the world. Perhaps that’s why movies and shows about it’s end never quite lose their appeal. It is a way of pushing the reset button. We want the evil in the world to end, and sometimes it seems so pervasive that we just want to smash everything and see what could happen if we start over. In the first reading today, with the Great Flood in Genesis, we have an opportunity to see all the evil destroyed. But we see in hindsight that it didn’t exactly take–the evil needs to be destroyed again.
Every Christian can breathe a sigh of satisfaction that we have a very handy tool to destroy the evil of the world. When asked the question “what’s wrong with the world,” G.K. Chesterton famously replied “I am.” If we want to destroy the evil of the world, we need look no further than our own hearts. And for this, we have baptism. Through the waters of baptism, every last bit of evil in our hearts can be destroyed, and along with it the source of evil in the world. But for most of us, the evil has a way of coming back. When that happens, we can think back to the Creed and our baptismal promises, and resolve in prayer to live out our baptism even more. And, when the evil is too great, of course there is always confession to tear it all out. Because few things are as satisfying as destroying evil.