Sirach 27:24. "I have hated many things, but none to be compared to him; even the Lord will hate him." (Tell us how you really feel, Sirach!) The person Sirach hates, and is certain that even God hates, is one who "plans evil deeds, and no one can keep him from them. In your presence his mouth is all sweetness, and he admires your words; but later he will twist his speech and with your own words he will give offense." (Sirach 27:22-23).

I have to say, I didn't think I knew anyone like this for most of my life. I generally think the best of people, and take them at face value, and my life was pretty pleasant treating people that way up until a few years ago. But ever since the beginning of COVID, I started noticing people behaving the way Sirach describes. It was shocking, and extremely painful, but I was shown very clearly that people were speaking "all sweetness" to my face, but were turning around and misrepresenting me, my thoughts and my words, or even just flat out lying about me, to others. We saw this at the societal level, too. People we should have been able to trust, for example, people in government and the sciences, would speak to us with seeming concern and care, but their words turned out to be lies. They were planning evil deeds, while in our presence speaking all sweetness. Then, when some saw through their lies, it was the questioners, not the liars, who were treated as the enemy. The liars took sincere questions, or even statements of fact, and made them into lies, or "misinformation," twisting the questioners' words in order to give offense. Apparently, we were not supposed to notice or call attention to the fact that we were being lied to and people were being mistreated, because that put the liars in danger, and was a threat to democracy, or to public safety, or to science, or whatever. The whole thing was so evil, it could only have come from the devil.

But what of the word "hate" that Sirach uses? Does God really hate these people? Does God hate anyone? No, we know definitively that God is all love and therefore does not hate any person, He loves and wants to save each and every one of us. We also know that, because God is all love, He does hate evil and duplicity. "Hate" has become a loaded word in our culture, it is the worst of secular sins, but hatred of evil is a good thing. Evil is the opposite of God, who is all good. It lures people away from God to eternal damnation. It is the cause of pain and suffering. So evil itself is very worthy of hate. Psalm 97 tells us "The Lord loves those who hate evil." (Psalm 97:10).

People like those Sirach describes are bringing great evil into the world, so their actions and the effects of those actions should be "hated" and fought against. But the people should never be hated. Sirach is wrong to assume that God will hate anyone, unless he is using the word "hate" in a different way than we understand it, or is personifying evil and saying God hates "him" (that is, evil). Jesus told us not to hate anyone. He told us that hatred or animosity towards our fellow man in our hearts leads to our own condemnation (see Matthew 5:21-24).

So while there is much evil to hate, we must never hate our fellow man. What helps me is to try to think of evil as a pool of quicksand - something to be avoided, but something that we all fall into, to some extent, at some point or another, and from which Jesus (often working through others) pulls us out. There is nothing wrong with "hating" the quicksand for what it does to us and others, but we must love and try to assist any we see in it, just as we were assisted when we found ourselves in it.