Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B – Racial Justice
Sunday (30 & 31/1/21) Demons and exorcism: we need to avoid two extremes here. The first is
complete disbelief, thinking that it’s just all down to psychological
disturbances, and the second is attributing everything bad to the activity of the
devil. So firstly, what is the origin of the devil and his fellow demons? We can piece
various parts of scripture together to get something of a picture, and it goes a
bit like this: before the creation of the world, God created the angels. But
before they were to enjoy the bliss of heaven, like us, they had to undergo a
trial. Some chose to obey God, whilst Lucifer and those who followed him
chose to rebel against God. They refused to serve God, and so the archangel
Michael and all the angels that had chosen to serve God cast Lucifer and his
fallen angels to hell. The devil has had his wish (and is now known as Satan),
but he lives in a rather miserable kingdom. A place of domestic violence
might be a bit of an understatement. But now, in their envy of human beings,
they want to stop us getting to heaven and send us to join them in hell as well. The good news is that God is in control. I think it was St Augustine who said
that if God didn’t limit the devil’s power, the devil would have killed us all by
now. But as human beings, we do have free choice, and through sin, especially
serious sin, and also of course getting involved with Ouija boards, seances,
the occult etc., we can open the door to the devil and open up spaces for him
to work in our lives. We all suffer from temptation, but there are also other
degrees of influence the demons can exert, leading up to full-blown
possession, which is quite rare.
There is always a way back. It’s through repentance and return to Christ. In
the Gospel today, He shows Himself as having power over the demons. I may
have said before that there have been two occasions in my life when I have
witnessed something similar to the exorcisms in the Gospels, and both
involved people being blessed by the Blessed Sacrament. On the second
occasion, someone started shouting and shrieking in a way that, when you
hear it, you can tell it’s not a normal kind of shouting. You can imagine in
Capernaum when this happened that the people in the synagogue were rather
afraid, and then relieved and amazed when Christ liberated the person from
the unclean spirit. Today, those who are appointed by the bishop as exorcists
in the Church have the same authority. Little priests like me can only do minor
exorcisms – a major exorcism, if you like, taps into the prayer power of the
entire Church to zap the demon or demons. The evil spirits are evil, and they have perverted their nature. Rather than
being angels of light who worship God, they live in servitude to Satan. They
are evil, and like criminals, they work in all sorts of devious ways to obstruct
the reign of Christ through His Church. In the Gospel today, the unclean spirit
is actually threatening Christ. One of the underlying themes of St Mark’s
Gospel is what is sometimes known as the “messianic secret”. This basically
means that Christ knows that once people know who He is, it will be regarded
as blasphemy and, as we know, the punishment for blasphemy in the Jewish
Law is death. So it is only gradually that Christ reveals who He is. The demon
in the Gospel is trying to threaten Christ’s ministry: “I know who you are:
the Holy One of God”. There’s also another dimension to this too. In some
of the exorcisms that Jesus performs, He asks them for their name, because
that gives power over them. To this day, in an exorcism, the exorcist wears
the demon down and tortures it with the prayers of exorcism until it reveals
its name, and then it can be cast out. In the case of a human exorcist, the
exorcist would normally go to confession first before beginning an exorcism,
as a form of defence in the spiritual warfare that an exorcism involves. With
Christ, of course, He has no sin, and He is God – He is the Supreme Exorcist.
The demons don’t stand a chance. So spiritual warfare involves serving the Lord with an undivided heart. The
same thing is emphasised in the first and second readings today. In the first
reading, Moses directs the people to follow all that the Lord has commanded,
including all the valid prophets; those that speak in the name of other so-called
“gods” are to be ignored. An important moral for us would be to avoid
listening to New Age philosophies, occultic knowledge or any similar things,
as well as also dodgy forms of psychology – follow the Church instead. In
the second reading, St Paul explains the benefits of celibacy in serving the
Lord with an undivided heart. Obviously not everyone can be celibate,
otherwise the human race would die out; the important point for us all though
is to serve the Lord wholeheartedly. Spiritual warfare concerns all of us. We
are all exposed to temptation, even though it’s not usually quite as dramatic
as what happened at Capernaum. So yes, the devil is real, but so also is God, and God is much more powerful.
Follow God then, and the devil will have no power over you. |
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