Today we find ourselves back in Ordinary Time, but with a gospel that isn’t an ordinary everyday gospel. We are right at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in the gospel of Mark, and Jesus has begun his work, but he hasn’t begun it with quietly teaching and preaching. He is telling people that the Kingdom of God needs to be built on this earth, but he is also confronting some opposing powers head on, the forces that don’t want that Kingdom built. And his opposing powers aren’t the scribes, coming around already here to pick at him and question him, he is opposing something bigger: He is confronting demons, the power of evil in this world, and he says he can overcome them. And this has even his family wondering what on earth he has become and whether he’s crazy.
So right at the beginning of Ordinary Time we face a big question too: We have to confront how we feel about this whole issue of demons and the power of evil and what it looks like, and how we can know it when we see it. Just to make sure we don’t miss this question, our first reading today goes back to the serpent in the book of Genesis, asking us to think about how sin entered our lives ages ago and still does now. We all know this story. It’s a story of humans coming to believe that there is something that is going to give them happiness, there’s some special fruit that is going to make them whole. It will make you truly happy, you need that fruit, just take it, that’s what will work. But it turns out to be a lie, the fruit doesn’t work, in fact, it leads us away from the relationship with God we already had. The fruit we thought would give us life took a kingdom that was already a paradise and started tearing it down.
So is that how evil works with all of us, getting us to desire something we think will save us that it turns out really won’t? Maybe not always. There are other ways. St. Ignatius Loyola says that the enemy finds our weakness, whatever it is, and reinforces that weakness until without realizing it we lose our freedom. This enemy might tell us that our faults and imperfections are greater than they are, and paralyzes us in a sense of unworthiness so we can’t move. And so we stay on the sidelines hoping that other stronger people will be the ones who can do God’s work. Or, here’s another way that this enemy works, the enemy whispers to us that we’re fine, we’re great in fact, but that it’s other people who are to blame for everything we see that’s wrong in the world, who are getting things they don’t deserve, who need to be eradicated or sent back where they belong. These are all ways to make sure that the Kingdom of God can’t possibly get built.
So is there really a single crafty powerful devil or lots of smaller devils who are doing all this, finding ways to take humans off track from building the Kingdom of God? All we can say is, if we’re honest when we look at the world, when we look at troubled human lives, it isn’t hard to think that there is an enemy power like this, someone or something always undermining the building of a kingdom of peace and generosity, always occupying people with conflict and hatred or self-hatred. But the Kingdom of God that God actually wants us living in is a place where all that anger and conflict and exclusion and demonization are overwhelmed by sheer generosity and self-giving, the way Jesus lived. That apparently is what the enemy doesn’t want.
But right here at the beginning of Mark’s gospel Jesus has revealed that whatever this opposing power is, he has come to fight every element of it. When he tells this strange parable today about how you can’t steal from a strong man’s house unless you first tie up the strong man, that’s what Jesus himself is proposing to do. He is going to tie up the strong man, he is the one we can always count on to do that for us. This must have sounded as crazy to everyone listening to him as it perhaps does to us. Who is this person who thinks he has power over every evil spirit, this ordinary-looking man who says he is bigger and more powerful than all of them? And yet if we don’t believe that, then we are doing what Jesus calls sinning against the Holy Spirit, we are refusing to see that God does have power over these demons. Because when we decide that God can’t overcome this, when we stop even seeing these demons for what they are, then we’re saying the fight can’t be won, that we can’t be made over into something closer to what God desires for us. and when we think God can’t do that, we’re lost.
But instead we have to have confidence that Jesus wins, that he will have the last word. That St. Ignatius I mentioned earlier said that we can’t let evil powers frighten us, they are weaker than they look, Christ can overcome them. We need to recognize demons and call them what they are, enlist the power of God to help us see them and banish them. It doesn’t often seem to us as if our lives are a battleground between the forces of love and the forces opposing it, but today’s gospel reminds us that it can be true. But for people who are open to grace, evil breaks down, it loses, we throw demons out, and the Kingdom of God can finally start to become real, one person at a time.