by CCW | 12 March 2010 23:00
Jesus “himself knew what was in man,” John tells us (John 2.25). It is a perplexing and yet an illuminating comment. What is in us? Not much, it might seem from this gospel story, other than the will to nothingness, that is, a disillusioning and destructive spirit. In a way, John’s insight complements the story which Luke tells. There is nothing in ourselves but the will to nothingness.
This is to speak in a kind of contemporary language, the language of despair. But, such a way of speaking, has its biblical basis in this remarkable and remarkably disturbing gospel story that speaks, on the one hand, so directly to the climate of disillusionment and despair in our contemporary culture, and yet, on the other hand, offers the real and true remedy to our fears and worries.
It is, to my mind, the darkest moment in the pageant of Lent before the darker realities of Holy Week. In a way, this gospel story for The Third Sunday in Lent corresponds to the darkness of Tenebrae on Wednesday in Holy Week. “How lonely sits the city that was full of people,” Jeremiah laments, even as we find ourselves in utter desolation here in Luke’s gospel.
The Lenten Sundays anticipate the grand and disturbing events of Holy Week. If the Third Sunday anticipates the shadows and darkness of Tenebrae, then the Fourth Sunday, with its story of the feeding of the crowd in the wilderness, anticipates Maundy Thursday when we are with Christ in the Upper Room and where he gives himself to us as bread and wine, anticipating his passion and resurrection.
The spiritual forces of evil have become intensified in the strongest way possible. Jesus, who in this gospel performs a double healing, at once exorcising a devil and making one who was dumb to speak, is accused of being in cahoots with Beelzebul, the prince of the devils. No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. Doing good he is accused of being evil. He is accused, actually, of being demonically possessed.
What is good is called evil. It is the perfect picture of sin and evil. Nothing in themselves, sin and evil are privations of what is good and true. The interchange between Jesus and his detractors here is most instructive. He reminds them about Beelzebul, an ancient name for the devil, a name which literally means “the Lord of the Dwelling” but which can also mean, “Lord of the Flies”, suggesting death and decay. Lord of the Flies, of course, is the title of a famous novel by William Golding, a novel written in during the cold war which examines “the darkness of man’s heart.”
Some accuse him; others want more signs and wonders from him, “tempting him,” as the gospel so tellingly puts it. Jesus’ “knowing their thoughts,” Luke tells us, points out the obvious contradiction. He plays upon the name of Beelzebul, with its suggested cognates of kingdom and house, to show the folly of their accusation and the consequences of their rejection. A kingdom, Baal or Beel, “divided against itself is brought to desolation”. A house, Zebul or Zebulon, “divided against itself falleth”. If Satan who is Beelzebul, the Lord of the house of rebellion, is divided against himself, how can he stand?
How can he stand, let alone, how can he cast out demons? He stands but only as upon that which he denies. He is a standing contradiction. Satan is the spirit of contradiction and rebellion, the spirit of the refusal to acknowledge the truth and goodness of God, the refusal to honour his own derivation. He defines himself in antagonism towards the known truth of God. But the fact of his denial of God cannot negate the fact of his creation. He simply exists in the contradiction of depending upon the God whom he denies. Such is utter futility. Such is the devil. Such, too, is the darkness of our own hearts.
We are no strangers to darkness and despair. At issue is how we face them. T.S. Eliot in his famous poem Ash Wednesday expresses the recurring motif of the dark side of modernity. “Because I do not hope to turn again.” A kind of mantra, it expresses a profound sense of unease, of hopelessness and despair.
It also signals another aspect to despair, namely, the death of desire, the dying of love in us. The poem explores the felt emptiness and desolation of human culture and the human soul. Eliot alters a line from a Shakespearean sonnet, changing only one word. He does not hope to turn, he says, “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope”. Shakespeare’s Sonnet begins:
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate, (Sonnet # 29).
The opening quatrain captures the human experience of dark despair. The image is that of Job, “in disgrace with Fortune” – stripped of everything and “in disgrace with men’s eyes” – despised even by the comforters, an outcast in every sense. And like Job, he “trouble[s] deaf heaven with [his] bootless – useless – cries”. God is not listening. Is there a God to listen to “the voice of my complaint”? The sonnet goes on to explore the further agonies of the soul in its distress:
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Eliot has changed one word; gift takes the place of art. A small change and yet one which gets to the nub of the issue. The issue for modernity is not about some art or techné, some skill or talent that we might acquire or some product like Prozac or Viagra that we might buy; it is really all about grace, the grace which alone can lift up and restore. The gift is grace in contrast to disgrace and despair. By the end of Ash Wednesday, the mantra has changed: “Although I do not hope to turn again”. There is the tentative sense of the possibilities of turning. The poem ends with a prayer, “and let my cry come unto thee”. Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer.
Eliot’s sense of hope-against-hope reflects the turning point in Shakespeare’s sonnet:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heavens gate.
“Haply, I think on thee.” Thee? Who? On love. Oh, I know, we aren’t supposed to think that might be the divine love but rather some more mundane romantic attachment. But that is to ignore the deeper realities of love, namely the divine love which shapes and forms all our loves.
The sonnet signals a transformation. “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings, that then I scorn to change my state with kings.” The Scriptures are emphatic about such possibilities of transformation. “Ye were once darkness but now ye are light” Paul tells the Ephesians, but light only “in the Lord”, light only in the one who is the very “light of light”, the very light of God, who gives his life to be our life. The light is Christ who casts out the demons of our souls and fills us with the light of his truth.
In a lovely image we grasp the wonderful sense of the power of God over and against the vanities of our humanity. The mere “finger of God” is enough to overturn the wicked follies of man. “Know ye that the kingdom of God hath come upon you,” Jesus says. “Stretch forth thy right hand,” pleads the Collect. “The finger of God” shall suffice, says Jesus. That finger is stronger than any strong man armed.
The Holy Spirit is the indwelling Spirit of the love of the Father and the Son. Where that Spirit dwells, there can be no place for demons. They are cast out by the finger grace of God. Yet Jesus is not content to leave things at this pass. There is more at stake in this business of Lent than simply cleansing the soul. There is more involved than just chasing out the demons of the soul’s disorder and disarray. What’s the point if our souls only remain barren and desolate, a desert within. For then we are in danger of a greater possession, a sevenfold possession, having despaired altogether, it seems, of the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of wisdom and understanding, the gifts of counsel and might, the gifts of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the gift of reverence. These are the gifts of redeeming grace.
Christ knows the greater dangers of our disillusionment, how our sense of the seeming endlessness of one thing after another leads us to deny that there is anything absolute, that there is any purpose or any purpose that can be known. To the contrary, he would make that purpose known even in the midst of the experience of desolation and despair. The darkest moment of desolation and despair is experienced on the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me.” But, here, the point of the finger grace of God is not to leave us empty and desolate, but to fill us with the grace of God.
It would place us in the company of Christ, hearing the Word of God and keeping it. He who cast out the demons of sin would fill us with his grace. He is the absolute goodness of God, the antidote to despair.
For centuries this gospel story was extended to include what immediately follows, namely, a voice crying from the crowd, a voice of a woman calling out to Jesus in praise. She says, “blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck”. Jesus’ response, too, is most intriguing. It has often been misunderstood, I think, as a kind of rebuke. He says, “Yea, blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.” He isn’t denying her insight and her honouring of his maternal and human origins, his mother, Mary, as it were. Rather he is pointing out the purpose of his Incarnation. Rather than being in the company of demons who deny the goodness of God, we are to be in the company of those who “hear the word of God and keep it”. That means, of course, attending to the word which overcomes our rejections and refusals of that word.
Providentially, in the week of the darkest moments of the pageant of Lent, we commemorate Gregory the Great (5th/6th centuries) one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church, himself no stranger to the darkness of souls and cultures, but one who provided marvellous pastoral direction for treating the diseases of the soul, his Regula Pastoralis and his Moralia in Job, works which “know what is in man,” namely, that which needs the grace of the healing word. He also provided a form of theological musical therapy, we might say, Gregorian Chant, the liturgical music which shaped European culture for a thousand years and more, the music of God’s story and the music which in its modes captures the full range of our souls, the highs and the lows. Father Crouse reminded us a number of years ago of Gregory’s epitaph: “In a straitened age, he disdained to be discouraged, though the world failed.”
Ours is the culture of empty souls and empty churches, and, yet, even a poet as religiously sceptical as Philip Larkin can recognise the significance of the holy places, “this accoutred frowsty barn” about whose worth, he says, he has “no idea” and yet senses some symbolic and holy meaning that speaks to our unease.
“A serious house on serious earth it is,” he says, “In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/Are recognised, and robed as destinies./And that much never can be obsolete,/Since someone will forever be surprising/A hunger in himself to be more serious” (Church Going, 1954). A hunger in ourselves to be more serious. Is that not the project of Lent, the project of the Church, too, in our distracted and discouraged age? Disdain to be discouraged.
The awareness of the joyous seriousness of God’s love for our humanity (“Thy sweet love remembered”?) counters our self-willed despair. It means to be serious about what Jesus is serious about, our blessedness. It is the counter to our emptiness, if only we will “hear the word of God and keep it,” honouring and knowing him who knows what in us needs reforming.
Fr. David Curry
King’s College
March 11th, 2010
Propers of Lent III,
Comm. of Gregory the Great
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/03/12/sermon-preached-at-kings-college-chapel-11-march/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.