by CCW | 20 March 2022 08:00
We cannot free ourselves from what enslaves us to ourselves. Nor is it enough simply to be released from the obsessions that possess our minds and our thinking. Today’s remarkable and terrifying Gospel speaks to our divided world and our divided selves. We are divided against ourselves in the confusion and conflict of opinions and emotions, in a whirlwind of fears and anxieties that pit us one against another about what is good and what is evil. At stake is any real passion for the absolute, for God, not just a freedom from what possesses us but a freedom to God in his openness to us.
To say that the world, whatever that means, is united in the demonizing of Putin with respect to the invasion of Ukraine only points to another division especially when it extends to the demonizing of all Russians and all things Russian including the music of Tschaikovsky! We need the wisdom of such Russian writers as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn to help us think more deeply about evil and particularly about the Devil. Rowan Williams’ rich examination of the novels of Dostoevsky includes a chapter called “Devils,” subtitled, “Being toward Death,” which aptly captures the problematic of evil in today’s Gospel. “The triumph of the diabolical,” Williams suggests, “is when we cannot bear to see what we cannot deny is truth, in ourselves and in the world – the systematic cruelty and the humiliating world of inner fantasy and revolt against ‘good’.” “If there is no God, all things are permitted”, it is famously said in The Brothers Karamazov, but as Williams observes “the devastating truth is there is no escape from the diabolical”. “If there is no God to pass judgment, there is no acquittal or release either”. The self is immobilized in self-hatred and in denial of the principle of its own freedom and being. Such is possession.
Freedom perverted is the essence of the diabolical for Dostoevsky as Williams sees it. “The Devil is the enemy of any real freedom … since he is the spirit of destruction” (p. 93), thus “being toward death” which is the deeper contradiction which the Gospel dialogue brings out. The contrast in the Gospel and the Epistle is between “being toward death” and “being toward life.” Paul exhorts us in Ephesians to be “followers of God” and to “walk in love,” “walk[ing] as children of light,” while recognizing that we “were sometimes darkness, but now are [we] light in the Lord.” Light and life triumph over darkness and death.
The pericope ends with what may be an early Christian hymn in an adaptation of Isaiah’s “Surge, Illuminare” (Is. 60.1). “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, / and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” is transformed into “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead,/ And Christ shall give thee light.” It sounds a positive note in contrast to the dark and negative picture of “the last state of that man.”
The dialogue highlights the nature of the self-contradiction of “being toward death” since it involves not just a denial of our created being but a perversion of our wills. We will the destruction of ourselves. We are given life and we seek death. The real freedom of our wills is found in God.
The Gospel begins with a healing, a healing of the soul. Jesus casts out a devil from one who is dumb, meaning without speech. The recovery of his speech is the recovery of his mind; he is returned to the truth of himself, a form of metanoia, here in the sense of nearness to the kingdom of God by our thinking with or after God. But this obvious good is challenged. Some wondered. Some claim that Jesus “casteth out devils through Beelzebul, the prince of the devils,” while “others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven.” In other words there is a division of opinion where the good is seen by some as evil or made subject to some sort of human measure, “a sign from heaven.” Beelzebul is an Aramiac version of Baalzebul, the god of Ekron, mentioned in 2 Kings as Baalzebub, a deliberate Hebrew twisting of the name. Baalzebub means “lord of the flies,” deliberately associating the name with death and decay. It becomes the title of William Golding’s famous novel, Lord of the Flies. The Baals are the Canaanite deities.
Beelzebul is mentioned in three places in the New Testament and is one of the terms for the devil, for what opposes the truth of God. Baalzebul can also be understood as ‘Lord of the Dwelling’ with all of the connotations of possession and then associating that idea with death and decay. The dialogue brings out the contradictions in us, in our thinking. The devil is in us, we might say, in the forms of self-contradiction wonderfully brought out by Jesus, “knowing their thoughts” and ours. In other words, the whole dialogue is meant not only to bring us to account but to recall us to ourselves in the truth of God.
Jesus begins with a political metaphor. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against itself falleth.” This is the ancient wisdom of the Jewish world especially (though not uniquely) where political events are not seen simply in terms of the external forms of sheer force and power but always in moral terms. Satan, Jesus says, is “divided against himself” and thus his kingdom cannot stand. The language here moves from Beelzebul to Satan, the tempter, another one of the terms for the devil. But the underlying logic is that of a creature who is divided from the author of his own being and thus stands in contradiction with himself and in the further perversion of pretending to be the author of his own being. Thus evil is always a parody of the good, always “being toward death,” not towards life and healing.
Jesus highlights this contradiction and turns the accusation back upon his accusers. “If I cast out devils through Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out?” referring to the rituals of purification and cleansing from sin in Israel. Such things point to another power than what belongs to the human community, to an openness and an opening to the divine. Thus, what follows is Jesus’s strong statement. “But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God has come upon you.” The finger grace of God is greater than all the powers of evil and temptation in our divided world and in our divided selves. And what this means is more than simply being cleansed and emptied of the things which possess us.
Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and philosopher, sees the last two hundred years as dominated by the left hemisphere or left-brain thinking at the expense of the right hemisphere or right-brain thinking. What this means is a focus on things and the re-presentation of things in our minds but as abstracted from the whole of which they are a part. It is a problem about our thinking, mistaking the parts for the whole or emphasizing one way of thinking at the expense of other ways of thinking, a kind of reductionism, which carries over into the technocratic forms of our manipulation and destruction of nature and ourselves. As if an instrumental and calculative reasoning is the only form of human thinking. The philosopher Martin Heidegger contrasts what he calls “calculative thinking” to “meditative thinking” which is about the same problem. “Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.” How to reclaim a balance is about our openness to reality in all of its wonder and truth. That openness is about our engagement with the reality of God’s creation of which we are an integral part through the forms of our thinking.
In a way, it is what Jesus means with the trenchant observation that “he that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.” The gathering is about that sense of the whole of reality; the scattering is about fragmentation and our fantasies of control and power. Such is the problem not of technology itself but of our idolatry of it and the way in which it comes to possess us and reduces us to thinking like machines. The illusions of our self-control and mastery lead to that state of despair and misery, of desolation and death. The Gospel provides us with a striking illustration of the human condition in our denial and perversion of our reasoning and our being. But it does so in order to awaken us from this death of ourselves and to call us into what Paul names as “the light of the Lord,” the light of Christ who here names our darkness and shows us its overcoming in our being released and opened to the whole wonder of God’s creation and truth. That and that alone is the counter to the illusions of ourselves that result in the indwelling in us of “seven spirits more wicked than [ourselves]” and where “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Such is our predicament.
The answer is found in our openness to what transcends our penchant for a kind of linear and calculative thinking and grounds us in a larger view of reality found in Christ’s engagement with us in our demonic brokenness that results in our “being toward death” rather than towards life. This point is made even clearer when we remember that for centuries upon centuries this rather long and difficult Gospel reading included two more verses, verses which simply underscore what Paul is saying and which the Gospel illustrates. “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” This to find ourselves as gathered into the vision of reality opened to us rather than scattered and bereft in the confusions and contradictions of ourselves. It is to be opened to God and to the region of creation in which we find our freedom and truth.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 3, 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/03/20/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-lent-11/
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