“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”
It is a terrifying and frightening picture, perhaps, the most terrifying and frightening picture of the human soul in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, this is where the ancient gospel with all of its perplexity and confusion about devils and demons meets the darkness and despair of contemporary culture. No set of readings, it seems to me, speaks more directly to our confusions and uncertainties.
There is far more to this picture than the postures of moralizing righteousness that, at first glance, we might think is the message of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians with his proscriptions against “fornication”, “all uncleanness”, “covetousness” which is idolatry, “filthiness”, “foolish-talking”, “jesting”, all of “which are not befitting”, and “whoremonger[ing]”, as he puts it, all of which are summed up as being “the unfruitful works of darkness.”
It seems like quite a list of the usual suspects of human sinfulness with more than a modicum of focus on sex which troubles our age so greatly. And yet, this list of “the unfruitful works of darkness” is based upon something deeper and more profound, and perhaps, most troublingly so. It will belong to the tradition of moral theology to rank and place the vices and virtues of the human soul in a kind of hierarchy, a kind of system, if you will, such as the seven deadly sins, for instance. And there is something right about that culturally, politically and socially. There is, we might say, the recognition that our peccadilloes, our little sins, as it were, are not to be compared with the ranker forms of evil potentially and actually in our souls and our communities and that are before us in the endless parade of injustices and violences in our world and day. But, be that as it may, there is also the deep spiritual insight that all our sins, from the least to the greatest, belong to the darkness. Paul claims that all of it must come to light.
“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” These are the familiar words of The Collect for Purity at the outset of the service of Holy Communion. I wonder if we grasp the radical nature of their import. Here is the main point. The confession of sin is the confession of God, a form of the praise of God. We cannot have any real sense of our follies and wickedness without a prior sense of the majesty and the truth of God. This is the good news that belongs to the Anglican sensibility about penitential adoration. It is not really about ourselves. It is all about God.
That prayer signals ever so strongly the theological attributes of God as all-powerful and all-knowing and all compassionate, as perfect and eternal and as altogether worthy of our complete worship. We forget this at our peril. We forget that God is Absolute Goodness who seeks his goodness for us in our lives in spite of ourselves though not apart from us.
The Gospel for The Third Sunday in Lent presents us, I think, with the terrifying spectacle of the soul that has despaired and denied the Absolute Goodness of God. It is a picture of self-delusion; the soul is imaged as “a kingdom” or “a house divided against itself”, the will in contradiction with itself. The terror is only deepened when the finger grace of God which alone can cast out the devils of temptation is forgotten or denied. For then “the last state of that man is worse than the first”.
Only the goodness of God can overcome evil. When we think that we can do it on the merits of our own self-determination we only make things worse for ourselves. This may seem to be a hard lesson but I think it is simple truth. It is not about being passive. It is about willing the goodness of God, acknowledging his goodness as what is absolutely prior and recognizing that any good that we do is through his goodness at work in us and with us. In other words, “the unfruitful works of darkness” are always about human pride and human pride is always about putting ourselves in the center. As The Collect for Purity suggests that is simply ignorant and unthinking folly.
Desolation and despair. Our culture knows the experience of these things only too well but lacks the spiritual wisdom to embrace their overcoming through the grace of God. There are divisions and differences within the therapeutic culture, to be sure, about the disorders of the human mind but the overall tendency is to regard them all as meaningless and as being little more than some sort of “faulty brain biochemistry” (Andrew Scull, TLS, March 2, 2012) or some sort of physical neurological disorder best handled by way of the chemical prescriptions of psychopharmacology. It is surely part of the picture, perhaps, but the forms of madness and despair and depression go beyond such a reductive process. There is a greater riddle to the mystery of the disorders of our souls; they belong to the mystery of human sin.
A culture that denies or despairs of the Absolute Goodness of God is dead and deadly. In the mercies of Christ, we are reminded of just how deadly and destructive our wills in disorder can be. We may revolt against the language of devils and demons; the paradox is that we embrace only too readily the language of addiction and compulsive behaviours. We consign ourselves to the worst form of fatalism in the pathologies we so readily accept. We deny the very idea of redemption, namely, that human freedom and salvation have altogether to do with our openness to the God who knows our hearts, our desires, everything and more about us in all our disarray, yet seeks our wholeness and perfection. It is found in him and in his will for us. To recall this is to lay claim to the greater principles that underlie the list of our moral depravities and the darkness of our despair and desolation. “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, that wilt not despise” (Ps. 51.17). It is to be recalled to the finger grace of God.
It is a lovely image. The psalmist speaks of the right hand of the majesty of God that “bringeth mighty things to pass” (Ps. 118. 16). The Collect for The Third Sunday in Lent picks up on that theme of divine power and majesty “to be our defence against all our enemies,” even if our enemies are ourselves against ourselves and against God. But Luke gives us a profounder image of the majesty of God. Jesus says to his detractors who have accused him of being possessed of “Beelzebul, the prince of the devils”, an image of decay and evil captured in William Golding’s moral fable of the dystopia of our modern world, Lord of the Flies, another meaning for Beelzebul, that “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” The finger of God, the littlest part that stands for the greater whole, is enough to overcome the contradictions in our souls. If we are open to it and want it to move in us.
In a way, it is the simple truth of the Christian faith. We can only will what God wills for us. It is what we have been given to see in the passion of Christ, the Absolute Goodness of God that wills to bear and overcome all of the darkness of our sin and folly. And all because of the finger grace of God.
“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”
Rev’d David Curry
Lent III, March 11th, 2012