Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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overflowing.
“Jesus rebuked him saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”
It’s easy to pass over passages like this morning’s gospel reading. It’s certainly a familiar scene. We’ve probably read or heard this gospel passage hundreds of times in the course of our lives. But it’s more than that, I think. We’re very modern in our reading of scripture. We don’t really believe in spirits in that way anymore. We’ve figured out that the demons Jesus rebukes in the gospels were really more like psychological ailments or even mental health disorders.
And then there’s the whole aesthetic element of rebuking and binding spirits. Which us good, polite Episcopalians generally lump in with things like liturgical dance and speaking in tongues. Certainly not something to be done in church, and not where other people could see you. That’s what those other sorts of Christians do. Which, by the way, has all sorts of class and racial overtones, but that’s another sermon for another day.
To deny or explain away Jesus’ rebuking of the unclean spirit is also to deny Jesus’ authority, a key word for understanding both this morning’s reading and the whole of the Christian life. The word authority derives from the root that means “creator” or “originator,” as we see clearly in its near twin author. Jesus’ casting out of this morning’s unclean spirit reveals his divine nature as the author of creation. In other words, God’s healing action is also the revelation of God’s original love poured out in creation.
You’ll notice that the spirit knows who Jesus is, even when the crowds do not. The spirit recognizes Jesus’ identity as creator and therefore bows to Jesus’ power to heal, command, and save. And it makes me wonder if perhaps that unclean spirit has a wisdom that we church-going Christians often lack.
I suspect that our reticence to focus on the rebuking of unclean spirits has more to do with our discomfort with Jesus’ authority in our own lives than it does with mere politeness or modern understandings of psychology and biology. We all suffer from various sorts of spiritual, physical, and emotional ailments. The more religious we are, the more likely we are to twist and contort our experience of God to our own ends. That’s why Jesus is always concerned in the gospels with the hypocrisy of the religious elites, which is to say with people very much like you and me.
He understands that a passion for God’s justice can very easily become judgmental self-righteousness. He knows that a reverence for liturgy and worship can turn into obsessive and pietistic compulsion. He sees how easily true compunction—which the ancient monastic writers called the “wound that leads to joy”—can entangle itself with our shame and become a bludgeon of self and others. The more religious or spiritual we are, the more we are in danger of focusing on the gift rather than the giver and of using that gift to reinforce our own sense of power and control. I’m speaking from personal experience here, folks.
Instead, Jesus constantly invites us to surrender and self-emptying. When we find ourselves caught up in self-righteous anger, pietistic compulsion, or shame masquerading as compunction, we can turn to the one who has true authority, not only over our own lives but over the spirits—however you want to understand them—that plague us.
Last year a good friend shared with me the deliverance prayer, to be used in case of spiritual emergency:
By the authority of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus
I command any spirit of [fill in the blank with your ailment]
to be bound an infinite number of times
and rendered impotent.
In the name of Jesus I cast you out
and send you to Jesus
to do with you according to his will.
I can see some of you clutching your pearls. But I assure you, this prayer has a powerful lineage and came to my friend from a very wise and gentle solitary nun who lived on a mountain nearby. This prayer may be something of an advanced technique, because it requires us to be unselfconscious enough to recognize that our ancestors may have known a bit more about spirits and God’s authority than we do. Further, it begs the question: do we really believe in Jesus’ power to save?
Scripture tell us that there is power in the name of Jesus. And if we are reticent to ask God to rebuke that which is plaguing us, we may need to ask how much we truly recognize and celebrate Jesus’ authority in our lives and our world. In the old way of putting it, the Devil is a liar. And whether we believe in a little red man with horns or some inner force of self-sabotage, the Liar whispers in our ears all the time telling us to be afraid; telling us it’s all up to us; telling us we’d be just fine if so-and-so would behave themselves. Sometimes the only way to get the Liar to shut up, is to rebuke him in the name of Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
I particularly love the second part of the deliverance prayer, though, in which you send the spirit that is plaguing you to Jesus to do with that spirit according to his will. It is too easy to think that whatever plagues us—internal or external—is somehow beyond redemption. But if Jesus is always undermining religious hypocrisy, he is also always bringing to the center for healing and integration that which was once on the margins.
Several years ago a friend sent me a quotation from Urban Holmes’ book What is Anglicanism? that has stuck with me: “One commonplace access to the chaotic powers of the earth is obscenity. […] A trivialization of the obscene is the dirty joke, whose humor is built on the incongruous and is the obverse of our fear of the dark mysteries of life associated, particularly, with the orifices of the body. […] [But] is it possible that obscenity taps an energy for mystical union?”
Is it possible that obscenity taps an energy for mystical union? The word obscene means “that which does not belong.” By casting out whatever is plaguing us and sending it to Jesus, the source of all life, we invite Jesus to heal and integrate whatever is broken or unwell. In that action, the very spirits that torment us become the gateway of fuller life in God. And in the light of Christ’s mercy we can begin to see our shame, our compulsions, our self-righteousness, and whatever else plagues us, as part of the beautiful texture of these lives God has graced us with.
You see, there is, ultimately no part of us or of this world that is truly obscene. There are no boundaries, no margins, no barriers between us and Christ the Beloved. We are already one, and we always have been.
In the words of the late John O’Donohue: “It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. […] It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”
Amen.
