No one on this earth is perfect. No one is without fault or blemish. It is us humans that look at it as a matter of degrees: ‘I occasionally tell a few white lies but he steals so he is worse!’ ‘I’ve only ever hurt people that deserve it but she ruins people’s lives so she is worse’.
In the divine, our imperfections are equal. No one person is slightly above the other because the nature of their wrongdoings are less odorous to us than another. What is wrong is simply wrong.
Righteous living always seems difficult to wrangle, more so in a world where it seems the more wrong you are the better things become for you. It is hard not to fight your conscience when stealing, lying, oppressing, and every other thing we have been told is evil, seems to be the currency of the powerful and the successful. Perhaps this allure is part of the reason why turning away from evil is so hard. It continues to cause damage and destruction in the lives of people around the world, yet we long to partake in it.
It’s selfish to ignore the cries of the people you trample as you climb to what you believe is the seat of power. It is selfish to sit in that seat and pretend that you cannot hear them wail and beg for respite. It is wicked.
The thing we most struggle with though, is the easy and ready availability of redemption for all. This is the real reason why we feel we must demarcate between evils. Because we cannot abide the idea that our ‘lesser’ evil will be forgiven just as easily as the wrongdoings of someone we consider worse off than ourselves. But that is exactly the case. The only thing required from us is that we turn away from evil towards the light and sincerely ask for His mercy and forgiveness.
This is uniquely deep and brilliant.