Is Evil More ComplICATED than doing harmful THINGS?

​I heard a pastor say something this week that has had me reflecting on the idea of evil.

Mark Moore said, "there's a lot of evil when bad people do bad things, but I wonder if there's even more evil when good people don't do good things?"

The first thing his statement got me wondering was - what is evil? So, I asked my trustworthy AI friend that very question.

What is evil?

And AI said, "in everyday language, "evil" is often used to describe actions, intentions, or situations that result in harm, suffering, or injustice, particularly those that arise from malevolence or deliberate wrongdoing."

That definition confirmed what I was pretty sure of. In our culture, evil is predominantly associated with people doing harmful things.

The definition made me wonder even deeper, though. Can I cause harm and suffering and injustice by NOT doing something good?

If an evil man is the one who does the bad he is clearly capable of doing to harm someone, am I an evil man for not doing the good I am clearly capable of doing to ease someone's harm?

How big, really, is the gap on the evil scale between intentionally causing harm and intentionally neglecting an opportunity to ease harm?

So much of our society, when it comes to evil, is built on addressing the bad things people do.

We arrest them. We write headlines about them. We revoke their right to vote, among other privileges. We kick them out of school and out of jobs and even out of churches.

In many ways, we are all in on accepting and addressing evil as the bad things people do.

What if there was any remotely similar pressure on the people capable of doing good to do good. Which, by the way, is all of us. We are ALL capable of doing both good and bad. It's just in the culturally accepted context of evil, good is simply not doing bad.

But what if evil was not doing good?

What if I was arrested for eating at a fancy restaurant without paying a lick of attention to the homeless person I walked by on the way in?

What if in the newspaper article about my latest offense, my rap sheet included all the times I could have helped someone in distress but didn't do it?

What if that same didn't-do-good rap sheet prevented me from applying for certain jobs?

What if I live my life never harming a soul in an evil way, but also never help the many thousands I could have? Does that make me anything like a serial killer?

I don't know is the answer to all of that. I'm not suggesting anything as a result of all my thinking out loud thoughts. And in the grand scheme of things, I'm not even wondering about our world so much.

But I am wondering more this week about God's view of evil.

I am wondering when I get my chance to stand before God if he's going to be more interested in the horrible things I could have done and didn't do, or if he's going to be more heartbroken about all the beautiful things I could have done but simply chose not to.

I am thinking about his son, Jesus. The stories we Christians tell about him as we hold him up as a model.

Almost none of those stories are about the horrible things Jesus could have done to others but somehow resisted doing. To the contrary, the stories we tell of Jesus are about all the horrific things people were suffering that Jesus couldn't resist helping them through.

I guess my takeaway is I want to keep becoming more and more aware of the good I am capable of. I want to be more and more grateful for the gifts I've been given and use them to heal as many people as possible who are hurting.

And for me personally, I do want to consider more strongly that it's possible not doing so is in its own way evil.

There's a lot of pressure in this world to refrain from evil.

For me, I just don't want it to look like refraining from doing the good I'm capable of doing.