Back in August of 1971, a Stanford University professor by the name of Philip Zimbardo wanted to do some research on the psychological effects of imprisonment and he needed to do some first-hand observations of prisoner behavior in a controlled environment.

So, Dr. Zimbardo did what any professor would do; he recruited student volunteers. After some psychological screening to weed out obvious pathologies, Dr. Zimbardo randomly chose one group of volunteers to be “prisoners” and another group to be “guards.”

The “guards” were given uniforms, mirrored sunglasses, and nightsticks. The “prisoners” were given hospital-like smocks, stocking caps, and numbers instead of names. Dr. Zimbardo put the “prisoners” and “guards” together in the basement of a Stanford classroom building where a simulated prison had been constructed and then sat back to see what would happen.

Most of the volunteers, “prisoners” and “guards” alike, fit the cultural youth stereotypes of 1971. They were idealistic and rabidly anti-authoritarian. Some were politically active in the New Left and professed to be pacifists. They routinely denounced “fascism” and “police state tactics.”

But . . . something happened to the “guards” when they put their uniforms on, donned their bad-guy shades, and picked up their nightsticks. Within hours of the beginning of the experiment, the “guards” began going through a frightening metamorphosis. These young men who believed so passionately in peace and universal freedom began to treat the “prisoners” with contempt and cruelty. They spoke to them as if they were no better than animals. They imposed demeaning and degrading punishments for the slightest infractions of arbitrary rules that they made up on the spot.

By the end of the first twenty-four hours, the experiment was spinning wildly out of control. The abuse of the “prisoners” became more and more severe. Some of the “prisoners” showed genuine symptoms of severe emotional distress. A few had to be removed from the experiment to prevent serious psychological damage.

Finally, less than a week into the two weeks originally scheduled, Dr. Zimbardo pulled the plug. For fear that somebody was going to really get hurt, physically or psychologically, he stopped the experiment mid-course. What had begun as a relatively simple inquiry into the effects of prison life had mutated into a terrifying demonstration of the power of institutional forces upon seemingly normal and balanced people.

What happened to those “guards,” Dr. Zimbardo concluded, could happen to just about anybody under the right circumstances (or wrong circumstances as the case may be). Dr. Zimbardo has written in his book, The Lucifer Effect, that:

Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in “total situations” that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.

And so German doctors who had dedicated their lives to healing others performed unspeakable acts upon Jews when immersed in the institutional evil of Nazi Germany. American soldiers, reared in God-fearing families and endowed with the high ethical awareness that is so central to our culture, shot unarmed Vietnamese villagers when immersed in the chaos of war. Well-heeled and morally aware Hutus massacred their Tutsi neighbors when immersed in the madness that was Rwanda in 1994.

Any one of us can fall prey to institutional evil and social pressure at any time. I’d love to think that if I had been born into the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South I would have recognized the evil of slavery and done everything in my power to put an end to it. I’d love to think that . . . but what are the odds? Slaveholders were not somehow inherently more capable of evil than anyone else. They lived within an evil system and the power of that system was irresistible. Had I been born into that system and indoctrinated with its ethic, I doubt seriously that I would have had the courage or the wisdom to look beyond it.

Dr. Zimbardo found two pre-requisites for the sort of evil that manifests itself in the mistreatment, torture, and massacre of other human beings. First is the pressure to become anonymous, to blend into a social grouping and thereby surrender one’s own moral compass to a group ethic. Second is the pressure to dehumanize others who do not fall within one’s own social grouping. And that is the process that the “guards” went through in the Stanford prison experiment. They gave up their individual identities, and with them their ability to make their own moral and ethical judgments, and they dehumanized the “prisoners” into objects who could be abused without any moral reserve.

And this cycle of anonymity and dehumanization has been going on for thousands of years. The Bible is full of examples. In the Old Testament, anonymity and dehumanization are usually reported without judgment. You might be forgiven for starting to believe that God actually sanctions this kind of evil . . . that is, until you got to the New Testament. And there, Scripture takes on a decidedly different tone.

In our passage from Acts today, Peter is confronted with a virtual ultimatum from God: step out of the anonymity of your own social grouping and stop denying the humanity of those who are different. Peter was a Jew, as was Jesus and all of Jesus’ followers. And the Jews were an oppressed people. One of the standard survival techniques for oppressed peoples is to draw the boundaries that separate them from others even more tightly and enforce them more rigidly. So rituals of circumcision and cleanliness were used by the Jews as very strict boundary markers. Gentiles were outside of those markers. Just as Jews were outside the markers created by Gentile cultures.

But Peter’s vision symbolically smashes down the boundaries that would have prevented the Gospel from reaching non-Jews and becoming the true universal Word of God. “. . . a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’” What God has made clean. God has made all of humanity clean, Jews and Gentiles alike. Peter must now face the Gentiles as an individual morally responsible to God and to God alone. And he must accept the Gentiles as human beings equally accountable to God. In Peter’s case, the evil of ethnic discrimination has been destroyed because Peter could no longer claim the anonymity of his Jewishness and he could no longer dehumanize Gentiles.

And I submit to you that this is exactly what Jesus is talking about in our passage from John when He speaks of a new commandment: “ . . . that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

The commandment to love another is one that we seem to find very difficult to understand. We have sentimentalized and trivialized this commandment. Everyone nods their heads and agrees that Jesus has just spoken a truly marvelous ideal. Yeah, the world would be a better place if we could all learn to love one another. But we can’t. So, let’s don’t inconvenience ourselves by trying to do the impossible.

That Jesus. What an idealist.

But Jesus was not an idealist. Look at the literary context of this passage. He has just foretold that Judas Iscariot will betray Him and deliver Him up for execution. And, immediately after our passage, Jesus will foretell Peter’s three acts of denial. Jesus knew that Judas and Peter would each succumb to social and institutional pressures. One would seek to have Him killed; the other would all but deny His existence. And yet, right smack dab in the middle of all that, Jesus commands us to love one another.

With the love commandment, Jesus is not giving us a dreamy Utopian vision. Jesus is prescribing for us the ultimate antidote to evil. Dr. Zimbardo’s two main prerequisites for evil to be unleashed: anonymity of self and de-humanization of others . . . those two pre-conditions simply cannot exist if we approach one another with love. The kind of love Jesus is talking about is not a syrupy, romantic stars-in-the-eyes love. This is a very tough and demanding kind of love, a love that first and foremost requires us to resist the pressures of anonymity and dehumanization that seem to plague all human cultures.

And when we look at the body count of the Twentieth Century (World War One, the Turkish genocide of Armenians, the deadly anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, World War Two, the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia, the neighbor-on-neighbor mass murders of Rwanda, just to name a few), we can see that there is a growing urgency to the love commandment. And in this new century, as we debate the threat of terrorism, we are forced to realize that no one flies airplanes into high-rise office buildings unless they have first submerged their own moral identities and then dehumanized those whom they are about to kill.

The Stanford prison experiment is a wake-up call to all of us who may fancy ourselves to be immune from the sort of social and institutional pressure that results in cruelty, torture, terrorism, or genocide. I am not immune. You are not immune. We are not immune. Any of us can become instruments of evil. And the first step down the path to evil is to deny the possibility.

Friends, the words we have heard today from Scripture send us an urgent message that has only grown in relevance since the day they were written. Pervasive evil seeks to infect every culture on the planet. Evil seeks to instill in us all an “us good them bad” ethic. Evil does not want us to hear the Gospel because the Gospel undermines the very foundation of evil itself.

We can rise above evil. I think that both Jesus Christ and Dr. Zimbardo would agree on that point. With the help of God, we can all learn to love the difficult and demanding love that Jesus Christ has commanded. With the help of God, we can turn to evil and say, “We are morally responsible people who seek to embrace our fellow human beings in ways you can never understand.” With the help of God, we can be true to the Gospel and we can live to see a day when the Word of God will truly have ended all evil.

Will you pray with me? Gracious and loving God, reach into our hearts and fortify us in our struggle against evil and our resolve to love one another. Make us instruments of your peace and help us to banish the evils of hatred, discrimination, and abuse. Amen.

©2006-2008, Philip G. Zimbardo