Day: March 8, 2026

“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt, the kingdom of God hath come upon you”

It is not enough, as this Sunday shows us, simply to be “delivered from evil,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. The purpose of Lent as the Penitential Service says is “To decline from sin and incline to virtue; that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore.” “Walk in love,” as Paul puts it, means to act in ways that “becometh saints,” in the pursuit of holiness. That is the love of Christ for us in his sacrifice and his love active in us. But that requires the overcoming of all sin and evil.

But what is it that overcomes sin and evil? What are we to make of the language of devils and Beelzebul, the prince of the devils, of Satan and his kingdom in the Gospel and the language of darkness and light, of all uncleanness and covetousness in the Epistle? Such language may seem strange and foreign to us but speaks profoundly, I think, to the experience of devils in our times and, perhaps, nowhere more clearly than in these readings that confront us with the reality of sin and evil.

They bring to a certain clarity what we have already seen in the story of The Temptations of Christ by the devil, the tempter, Satan, on the 1st Sunday in Lent and to the story of the woman of Canaan whose daughter is “grievously vexed with a devil” last Sunday. “Ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul rather gently but firmly reminds us this morning about our thoughts and actions that are contrary to “all goodness, and righteousness and truth,” all the things that run counter to the love of Christ and his sacrifice for us.

We know only too well in our own world the problem and power of obsessions and addictions, of the disorders of hearts and minds, that can sadly lead to extreme pathological states of dysfunction, and of being imprisoned in ourselves. What are such things except tendencies, in varying degrees, of the fixations of the will upon some finite thing or person, whether ourselves or some agenda, as if it were absolute? Treating finite things as if they were God is why Paul can speak of idolatry as the underlying principle of all the forms of attachment to the lesser things of the world. False absolutes, as it were, treated as if they were divine.

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