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Dr. Evil is back.
This summer, Mike Myers is reprising one of the all-time comedic bad guys in a new series of commercials for Verizon.
The gray-suited parody of early James Bond villains is attempting to launch Menace Mobile, a new mobile phone company, which he claims will have “the most confusing pricing plans of all time.” Now, that’s diabolical.
Dr. Evil typically hangs out in one of his secret lairs, hatching schemes to take over the world. His entourage includes the dashing Number Two, teenage son Scott Evil, Soviet-era femme fatale Frau Farbissina, the hairless cat Mr. Bigglesworth, and his sidekick clone Mini-Me, who is declared to be one-eighth his size but twice as evil.
What accounts for this relentless commitment to bad-ness?
According to the back story, Dr. Evil was raised by Belgians, which is what made him “so complex and evil.” And who can forget that it was the Belgians who eliminated the US soccer team from the World Cup two weeks ago? He takes it personally when people call him Mr. Evil. “I didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called ‘Mister,’ thank you very much!”
What’s interesting is that apart from video games, horror flicks, and Austin Powers movies, the word “evil” has almost disappeared from our vocabulary.
It seems outdated and extreme – something our grandparents believed in, maybe, but not an idea to be seriously entertained by modern educated people.
Haven’t we outgrown the whole notion of evil?
The problem is that it’s painfully hard to classify certain realities as anything less than spiritual darkness.
The agnostic poet W.H. Auden believed there was a logical, humanistic explanation for everything. But during the 1940’s, when he saw newsreels of the rounding up of Polish Jews at the start of World War II – and realized that Germans in the darkened theater were actually cheering – he realized that “evil” was the only way to account for such horror. That realization ultimately led him to trust God.
“Evil” is the only word to describe assailants shooting randomly at students and teachers in elementary schools; terrorists flying passenger jets into skyscrapers; and “revolutionaries” using trucks to run down families on Parisian sidewalks during holidays.
There’s something seriously wrong with these people.
But then, there’s something seriously wrong with you and me, too.
That dreadful something is the starting point for every religion and philosophy worth its salt. Whatever else people have believed, they have universally concluded there is a something wrong with humanity. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle believed that. So did the Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Marx, Freud, Gandhi, Tony Robbins, and Shirley Maclaine.
You can put Jesus into that crowd as well.
Author John Ortberg writes, “Something is terribly wrong and cries out to be put right. But it’s not just the world. Something is terribly wrong in me. I’m afraid, alone, aging, arrogant, anxious. And I haven’t even gotten to the B words yet.”
There are all kinds of problems outside of me. I usually experience them as suffering.
But when I fearlessly consider the condition of my own soul, I begin to grasp the depth of the problems inside of me.
According to Scripture, evil isn’t a disproved theory. Nor is it a spiritual virus that’s been “cured,” like polio. Evil is alive and well and lurking inside every human heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:8)
What is evil? It’s the rejection of love. It’s to cherish what I know is wrong. When I refuse to forgive the person who hurt me, and harden my heart to the needs of my neighbor, and choose to do what I know is self-serving, I am rejecting love and surrendering to evil.
The problem, in other words, isn’t Mini-Me. It’s me.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus makes it clear that fleeing evil is on the short list of what needs to occupy my attention every day. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
We may think we need to be on the lookout for the real-world equivalent of Dr. Evil today. But our gravest concern is far scarier: who we might become if we choose to reject love.
James Bond and Austin Powers appropriately spend their time thinking about how to save the world.
But our call is to think about how to receive and share the love God alone can provide.
That’s because it’s the only thing that can surely save us.