No Shadow without Light

An an article taken from Bishop Fulton Sheen's "Lenten & Easter Inspirations." 1967

If nature were indifferent to infractions of its laws, if health did not decline with the refusal to eat, if blindness did not follow the plucking out of an eye, if one gathered figs of thistles, and water ran up a hill, it would be difficult to believe that Supreme Intelligence had imposed order and law on the visible universe in which we live.

If the moral order were indifferent to our fractions, if the breakdown of the nations did not follow the collapse of family life, if the affirmation that man is an animal did not make men act like animals, if the denial that God is the Author of Law did not produce a lawless and therefore a warring world, it would be difficult to believe that God made a moral universe in which men reaped what they sowed, and where the wages of sin are death.

At no time in modern history has it been easier to believe in God than now. It used to be that evil was a stumbling block to a belief in the Goodness of God, but today men are coming to a belief in the Goodness of God because of evil. They admit that evil today has taken on such proportions that it can be explained only by the infraction of a universal moral law that must have come from God. In a word, modern man is coming to God by way of the devil.

Such is the lesson of this Resurrection day: We come to the glory of Easter Sunday through the evil of Good Friday; to halo of dazzling light through the ignominy of a crown of thorns; to the dawn of a new day through the darkness of a high noon.

Calvary is only a momentary scandal. Goodness in the face of evil, must suffer, for when love meets sin it will be crucified. A God who bears His Sacred Heart upon His sleeve as Our Lord did in the Incarnation, must be prepared to have daws peck at it. But at the same time, Goodness can use that suffering as the condition of overcoming evil! It can take anger and wrath and hate and say “Forgive!” It can take life and offer it to another. Evil may have its hour, but God will have His day.