Twice in this chapter it is written “but no one laid a hand on [Jesus]“. The mob was thinking of taking him before the authorities to be tried for heresy but not one laid a hand on him because it was not yet his time.

There are times in life when God prevents evil things from happening, but God does not prevent all evil. There came a time when Jesus was taken, hands were laid on him, and he was crucified and killed. I would argue that the crucifixion of Jesus was the greatest evil the world has seen: humanity killed their God. But God turned the greatest evil to the greatest good. Through the resurrection of Jesus we can be reunited with God.

God does not stop all evil, but neither is God responsible for all evil. God allows us to do evil and allows evil to happen. Just as we have the free will to do evil, we have the free will to turn evil to good. This week, when you see evil, don’t bemoan the fact that there is evil in the world, or mutter a few prayers and forget it; take the time to turn evil to good.

What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to Reno to get divorced
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in California.
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.

Mother said, It’s because he was the middle child,
and Father said, Yeah, where there’s trouble
Jim’s in the middle.

When he lost his voice he lost all of it
to the surgeon’s knife and refused the voice box
they wanted to insert. In fact he refused
almost everything. Look, they said,
it’s up to you. How many years
do you want to live? and Uncle Jim
held up one finger.
The middle one.

“Uncle Jim” by Peter Meinke, from Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.