“But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the
kingdom of God hath come upon you”
The tune for our first hymn this morning is called “Batty” and the postlude which concludes our service is a musical meditation based on “Batty.” Today’s Gospel, too, may drive us all a bit batty!
Darkness and desolation, devils and wicked spirits, divisions and temptations. What dark and disturbing images are set before us in the readings for The Third Sunday in Lent! And yet the finger grace of God is more than enough, it seems, for the kingdom of God to be revealed and known.
The Lenten Sundays seek to draw us into the Passion of Christ and its meaning for Christian witness and life. The focus is on what Christ suffers for us and why. This Sunday marks the deepest and darkest part of that journey and corresponds, I suggest, to the shadows and darkness of Tenebrae, the service on the Wednesday of Holy Week that anticipates the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday; in other words, the days when the Passion of Christ is present to us in its most concentrated form. Somehow the darkness is light.
“The whole life of Christ was but a continuall passion,” the preacher John Donne reminds us, pointing out how the shadows of the Cross are ever with us. But how to think the meaning of the Passion? Holy Week will immerse us in its horror and its glory. It will seek to move our hearts and our minds with the spectacle of human betrayal and divine love and will do so in very profound ways, the way of the Cross and our part in it. To be sure. But to get to Holy Week and to make greater sense of it we need the Sundays of Lent and, perhaps, this Sunday more than most. Why?
Because we do not take evil seriously enough. We are unwilling to contemplate the darkness and the evil of our own hearts. We refuse to see that heaven and hell are all around us and within us on a daily basis. It is there in how we think, in how we speak and in how we act. And if ever the western world is going to make sense of terrorism and, particularly, the spectacle of jihadis, it will have to begin with itself and with this picture of ourselves that Jesus presents in this Gospel, the Gospel of darkness and desolation without which there can be no light and salvation.
Jesus casts out a devil from someone. All we are told is that “it was dumb” but when the devil was gone out, “the dumb spake.” Okay. Someone who was unable to speak speaks. Wonderful. Indeed, that is exactly what Luke tells us, “the people wondered.” But in what way? That is the beginning of the real question. There is a division of opinion about what Jesus has done. For some accuse him of “casting out devils through Beelzebul, the prince of the devils”; “others”, Luke says, “tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven.”
Jesus casts out a devil and the one who was dumb speaks. How do we make sense of the idea that a physical condition derives from something psychological? Already this is to use our language and to enter into the stormy waters of competing theories about matter and consciousness. More directly, the issue is the very idea of devils and possession. Are we even willing to contemplate the reality, at least as I see it, that you and I can become obsessed with any number of things to the point of being incapacitated in some way or another? That how we think can affect our minds and our actions and our bodies to the point that we lose control of ourselves? Does the biblical language of devils and demons and wicked spirits mean external forces acting upon us? Or does it mean that we become so divided from ourselves and within ourselves that we are no longer fully and truly ourselves? The language of devils and demons and wicked spirits speaks very directly to the realities of good and evil, to forces which seek to destroy, to powers and principalities that exist in contradiction to the very principle of goodness and creation. Not totally batty at all.
This whole idea of demonic possession concerns the very idea of sin – that we can deny the truth of our own being, that we can contradict ourselves to the point of losing ourselves. The idea of sin not simply as ignorance but as willful disobedience is one of the great insights and truths of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. It also signals the great truth and meaning of redemption, especially for Christianity.
Devils and demons and wicked spirits make no sense whatsoever apart from the goodness and the truth of God upon which all creatures depend even in their rejection of God. In other words, this kind of language speaks profoundly to the nature of human self-consciousness, to the reality of ourselves as selves and to the reality of a community of selves. Nothing more profound and yet nothing more difficult for us to grasp. I am aware that there are disorders of the mind and human personality that have to do with the neural pathways of the brain as an organism in such famous cases as Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, for instance, but I am pointing to something deeper that would include the possibility of such short-circuits.
All I am suggesting is that what we contemplate in this Gospel belongs to the deeper meaning of our fallen humanity, to the power of sin and darkness in its denial of truth and light. Jesus wants us to know how deep and dark that power is and yet how much greater is the power and the truth of God.
Something of that darkness is seen first in the assertion that Jesus is “casting out devils by Beelzebul.” The name can be variously interpreted but it takes us into the fearful world of ancient Mesopotamia and relates to the “lords of the dwelling”, hence possession, and to death and decay, hence Lord of the Flies, to use William Golding’s image in his novel by that name. It comes to be one of the biblical terms for the devil, for that principle which exists in opposition to its own creation. To put it this way is to highlight the ultimate futility of defining yourself in contradiction to the very basis of your own being, but such are the grim realities of sin. Here Luke concentrates the meaning of Beelzebul as “the prince of the devils,” the principle of evil itself.
In this Gospel, the point is quite simple. Good is called evil. This is breathtaking. It shows human perversity and yes, this is altogether present and potential in all of us and not just by a kind of ignorance but by our willfulness born out of those grimmer realities of what the older traditions of moral philosophy and theology called the seven deadly sins, especially the sin of envy, the most destructive of them. Why? Because it calls what is the good of another and for another evil. It refuses to rejoice in the happiness and the good of others. We know this in ourselves and others. We are deluding ourselves if we don’t think that we do. Totally batty!
The other response is equally instructive. “And others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven.” You will immediately recognize that this takes us back to The First Sunday in Lent and to the second temptation whereby “the devil taketh [Jesus] up into the holy city and setteth him on the pinnacle of the temple” and tempts him to throw himself down to prove that he is the Son of God since the holy angels will keep him from harm. Ah, yes, a spectacle, a show. The voyeurism of celebrity culture, too, perhaps? Signs and wonders to amuse and delight us but not to instruct and teach us. The deeper point here is that they have just witnessed a sign, a miracle, the sign and miracle of God’s truth with us in Jesus Christ who seeks the healing of our wounded and broken humanity, the opening of our minds and our tongues to sing his holy praise.
But this response also anticipates the reality of Christ on the Cross and the mockery of those who taunt him to come down from the Cross if he be the Son of God. Think about this and realize how such temptations ultimately result in such cruelties. Again, a picture of our disorder and disarray, the only fitting name for which is sin and its awful darkness.
It would be enough, it seems, to have stopped at this point but the Gospel goes on to address these aspects of human perversity. The theology of the goodness of God teaches us about the nature of the contradiction in these responses to Jesus’ healing act. “A kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation”; “a house divided against itself falleth”; how much more so, then, with Satan? It is a strong refutation that brings out the classical idea that the power of the good is always greater than evil, that evil is ultimately nothing but a privation and a denial of the good which is necessarily prior and primary. Even more, it sets us up for the deeper meaning of the Passion which is about how God and only God can bring good out of evil. That is the perfect wonder of Jesus’ statement, “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God has come upon you.” It is a wonderful put down of all of our pretensions to power and prestige and to the utter folly of Satan. Simply the finger of God! That is enough and more than enough to conquer sin and evil.
Is that enough for us? It might seem to be and yet the Gospel goes on to make a further point which challenges any and every idea that somehow we might be able ourselves to get our souls in order. For then we would have forgotten the point that has just been made about the finger grace of God. Something is required of us in the journey of Lent, to be sure, but the moment we think that we can heal ourselves of the sicknesses of our own souls which we have brought upon ourselves then we are in a far worse state, for “seven other spirits more wicked” than the problem that we thought was our problem enter in and “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Jesus does not hold back on the seriousness of the sin which so easily besets us. It may be deeper than we realize.
Enough now, finally, it seems, and yet for centuries this rather long Gospel concluded with the story of a woman in the crowd blessing Jesus in terms of his mother, “blessed be the womb that bear thee and the paps that gave thee suck” to which Jesus replies “blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.” That is the fuller meaning of the Lenten project. It is about our hanging upon the words of Christ and learning more and more about ourselves, even the darkness of our sins, but also learning about the light and life of Christ who alone overcomes our darkness and conquers our death. He is the Word and Son of God who hangs upon the cross for us. Is it too much for us to hang upon these words and learn from him?
But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the
kingdom of God hath come upon you”
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2015
(It is worth noting that this Gospel passage – Luke 11.14-26 and traditionally Luke 11.14-28 – does not appear at all in the Revised Common Lectionary.)