by CCW | 8 March 2026 10:00
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.
But they aren’t. Even devils are not simply evil since they belong to the created order; good, therefore, in their being. Lucifer – the name appears only once in the Scriptures (Is. 14.12, KJV) – means the bearer of light; that is the truth of his very being which he denies and contradicts. How? By the folly of claiming to be God, a fixation upon the self as absolute. That is to will a lie, a fantasy that is more than an error in our thinking. What is, in one sense or another, something willed results in a loss of ourselves in the illusions of our own making. In other words, the whole question about sin and evil concerns human agency in the form of the self-contradictions which enslave and possess us, thus diminishing and distorting human personality. What is lost is our humanity as made in the image of God. In its place is a simulacrum of that image, a distortion and an illusion that belongs to “the unfruitful works of darkness.”
To know this marks the beginning of the overcoming of sin and evil. How? By negating or reproving them. “All things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.” What is that light? It is the light of truth. It makes known what is truly absolute and exposes and counters all our lies and illusions.
As the Gospel shows, the light of truth casts out the devils of deceit and lies by making manifest all that is false and wrong. That light, as Paul says, is the light of Christ who not only casts out a devil from one who was unable to speak but counters or reproves the false thinking of “some” who “said, ‘He casteth out devils through Beelzebul, the prince of the devils.’” The term is used once in the Hebrew Scriptures (Baalzebub, 2 Kings 1.2,3) in reference to the Baals, the gods of the Philistines, and means Lord of the Flies. Later Jewish traditions understand it to mean The Lord of the Dwelling – Baal combined with Zebulon, meaning habitation or dwelling, hence, the idea of possession. Both senses influenced William Golding’s 1954 cold war novel, Lord of the Flies.
Yet Jesus “knowing their thoughts” simply points out the contradiction in their thinking. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,” and so Satan, who is divided against himself, exists in contradiction to his created being. Evil cannot cast out evil for it is nothing more than the negation of the good upon which it completely depends. Lies have no power apart from the truth; all evil is a perversion, distortion and negation of the Good which alone is absolute. Desolation is the result, a kind of emptiness through disillusionment.
Yet we need to be disillusioned about our lies and fantasies in order to be freed from them. How? By the word of truth, wonderfully imaged here by the ‘finger-grace of Christ’. Our illusions need to be shattered and shown for what they are. But it is not enough just to be disillusioned and freed from what is false and untrue; something more is needed than to be left disillusioned, empty, and desolate in ourselves.
The Gospel follows a pattern and logic that runs throughout the Scriptures. “Did God say?”, the serpent says to Eve in the story of the Fall, the story of temptation. He insinuates doubt about what God in fact did say and offers a half-truth or false interpretation that “you shall not die” but “you shall be like God knowing both good and evil.” A knowing that is, we discover, only partly true. We know, yes, but not as God knows, perfectly and absolutely. Our knowledge now happens through the experience of separation, suffering, and death. It is both finite and limited, and flawed and imperfect.
God’s questions bring this to light and catch us out in our lies. “Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked?” “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” “What is this that you have done?” They call us to account and launch us into the long journey of redemption, of our being recalled to God from whom we have turned away. Thus in Exodus, it is not enough just to be freed from slavery in Egypt; there is the greater need to be freed to the Law, to the truth of God for our humanity. Likewise in this Gospel.
“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you,” Jesus says. This is the deeper point. God would not leave us desolate in ourselves and in the emptiness of our disillusionments, leaving us in a worse state. What is wanted is to be filled with the truth of God that is always more and greater than the lies and illusions of our lives. Such is the meaning of the kingdom of God coming upon us.
The readings for today are rather long but I think it unfortunate that our 1962 Canadian Prayer Book omits the last two concluding verses of this passage, present in the Prayer Books since 1549 as derived from the earlier Sarum rite. They would fill us with blessings rather than leaving us desolate and empty. They offer a strong corrective to the nihilisms of our contemporary desolations and fill out the meaning of our text.
For “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.”
Hearing and keeping the word of God returns us to the truth of human agency because it frees us to the things of God. Without that we are lost in the illusions of ourselves.
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2026
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