Evil Within

Two notorious child killers figure in the news at the moment; the first, Ian Brady, infamous serial killer of the sixties; the second, Rebecca Shuttleworth who subjected her two year old to a prolonged and agonising death through torture and repeated beatings. Where do we draw the line between the psychotic, or damaged person, and plain evil?

What is disturbing about these people is their ordinariness. The young woman is, on the face of it, any mother. She is not bad looking and the way she is able to manipulate and deceive suggests that she is both intelligent and personable. Brady once had a certain malignant charm, enough to turn his accomplice into someone who, like him, exulted in the experience of evil as extreme power over defenceless children. But why are we fascinated by them?

I have only once visited a prison but in those couple of hours I experienced pure dread. Prisons are ‘dreadful’ places, not because the inmates are in any way weird or frightening, but because they are so ordinary. I did not know what crimes any of them had committed, nor did I want to, but seeing them there, in their ordinariness, reminded me that in every ‘ordinary’ person lies some sort of fascination with evil. For most of us, the fascination is unacknowledged, even unrecognised, but it is there, lodged inside the psyche, inside the human heart.

We think and remember out of this secret inner place and our thinking and remembering will, more often than not, tend towards darkness rather than light, towards the suffering we have experienced at the hands of others, and the bitterness or hatred which it has left us with, or to the evil, vindictive or otherwise, from which we have gained, and perhaps continue to gain, some sort of perverse satisfaction.

On the whole, dark destructive impulses remain in the realm of the imagination and of fantasy. We are thankful that, unlike the psychopath, we have not been tempted to work them out in reality, into some violent action or sadistic impulse to harm the innocent and the vulnerable. Exposing and punishing psychopaths helps, in some perverse way, to reassure us that our own fascination with evil remains safely in the realm of the subconscious. But there is a better way to deal with the evil within, and with the fatal attraction which it holds for people like Ian Brady and Rebecca Shuttleworth.

In Jesus Christ, we have a God who willingly takes what is dark, destructive and violent in the human heart into himself, into his own inner psyche, his own spirit. On the cross, he experiences the effects of this darkness as ‘God forsakeness’. In doing so, he takes our propensity for evil into himself and prevents it going any further, thereby preventing it from destroying us. Hence, the description of Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. This is what is meant by salvation. 

On the Cross, Christ allows himself to be ‘made sin’, to be completely taken over by the evil of which human beings are capable without himself thinking, imagining or perpetrating evil in any way, so two seemingly incompatible things are going on here. Christ takes into himself the things of which we are most ashamed, which we dare not own even to ourselves, and in exchange we are offered freedom. We are free to face the truth about ourselves in what is hidden and dark and to bring it all to the cross and nail it there, so to speak, leaving us with the kind of peace which only comes with being made OK with God, or, to put it in more formal language, being justified before him.

All of this invites us to look at people who have committed horrendous crimes in a different way. This is not to say that we should think of them as innocent, which they are not, but that we should mentally drag them, and the evil which they represent, to the foot of the Cross where they can see and be seen by Christ in their ordinariness, as we are in ours.