Day: March 23, 2025

“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it seems so stark and dark and not a little foreboding and threatening. Yet the readings for the Third Sunday in Lent mark a crucial and critical moment in the journey of the soul to God. If Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of love setting our loves in order, then it must consider in a serious manner the nature of sin and evil as it appears in the negation of the goodness of our created being and thus the denial of the end or purpose of our humanity as ordered to God. Such is the darkness in the Epistle from Ephesians, on the one hand, and the compelling image of “the unclean spirit” in the Gospel reading from Luke, on the other hand, the one who takes to himself “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” and whose state “is worse than the first.” What is the devil except the explicit image of self-contradiction? Lucifer created to be the bearer of light contradicts his own being by claiming to be God. But God is God, not Lucifer. This kind of fixation upon ourselves as absolute is mere fantasy; it means willing a lie. Self-contradiction is self-deceit.

In other words, these readings require us to take seriously the destructive nature of sin and evil as belonging to self-contradiction and the spiritual emptiness that results. This is powerfully shown in the Gospel without which we cannot really understand Paul’s exhortation for us to “walk in love as dear children of light,” rejecting “the unfruitful works of darkness,” since light makes manifest or known the things of darkness. The light is greater than the darkness of human sin and evil. The psalmist’s words that “the right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass,” alluded to in the Collect, is further intensified by Jesus’s words that “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” The light is the light of the Gospel, the light of Christ, the good news of the Word of God which alone overcomes the darkness of sin and evil.

What is this all about except a strong argument for the absolute goodness of God which sin and evil negate and deny? Like last Sunday, we have a healing of the soul. Jesus casts out a devil and the one who was dumb or mute, meaning unable to speak, is now able to speak. “The people wondered,” we are told. But in what way? There is a division among the people but even more there is a division in our hearts and minds that goes to the very nature of sin and evil. It is about calling what is good evil. That is to will a lie. Every lie is nothing in itself. It depends utterly and completely upon the truth which it negates but renders us paralyzed and obsessed with what is only partial and incomplete. This is what is meant by demonic possession however differently we might want to speak about it in the language of mental health.

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