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Good morning. The war in Ukraine is a challenge not just to Kremlinologists and military strategists. It’s a challenge to all of us, to face some indigestible realities. A thousand civilian bodies have been discovered in Bucha region – many buried in shallow graves. All’s fair in love and war, they say. But it’s not true: the 1949 Geneva Conventions cover non-combatants in war, and 196 countries subscribe to them, including Russia. You don’t get to massacre unarmed local people, whatever your commander says, however intoxicated with violence you’ve become. People start sentences with, ‘Here we are in the twenty-first century…’, thus disclosing a belief that evil is something humanity should grow out of. There’s no question the notion of war crimes and the existence of an International Criminal Court are healthy steps. But evil itself doesn’t seem to be going away. I draw a distinction between sin and evil. Evil isn’t sin with a loud voice: they’re qualitatively different. Sin is where you’ve transgressed. You know it’s wrong, but you tell yourself a false story – everyone does it, no one will notice, it’s only a small thing, look at all the good things I’ve done that outweigh it, I’m not a bad person. But evil has an alternative logic: you tell yourself what you’re doing is actually good. Your story has dispensed with guilt and shame and replaced them with pride. I’m not shooting innocent people in the back; I’m denazifying a whole country. I’m not doing it behind the bike sheds; I’m doing it in the village square. We’ve had two years to observe how a virus works. Evil is like a virus. It tells a false story that justifies sacrificing other people for a hideous false god. Sin is living in a world without God, without good and bad, without judgement. But evil is creating a whole new and demonic god, and reshaping your entire life to assert that terrible things like cruelty and murder are actually noble. Evil on a national scale creates a mythical story that appeals to a grotesque past that needs honouring and projects a phantom future where those who slaughter so-called enemies will be rewarded. To defeat evil takes more than weapons. It requires a very different kind of story. Jesus told stories and lived a story that said the truth will set you free. To overcome evil you have to discredit the story that makes it seem good. You can’t destroy evil, any more than you can a virus. You can only tell and live a better story.