Our souls as the battleground

Today's gospel (Mark 5: 1-20) is one of the most touching and bewildering in all of St Mark’s life of our Lord. It is most touching, on the one hand, because Jesus delivers a man who is in utter torment from a large number of demons. It is most bewildering because it is not really clear why Jesus should send these demons into a local herd of pigs who then destroy themselves by running off a cliff.

Our hearts must go out to the man possessed in this incident. He is tortured by the demons who have possessed him. Demonic possession is a real, not a symbolic, spiritual event, and it requires a real ministry of exorcists to manage it even today. But this man’s misery is not only spiritual or psychological. In addition to his internal torment, he lives in a cemetery, howls his pain day and night to whoever will hear him, and even gashes himself with stones. This last action may in fact be an attempt at self-therapy, but self-therapy of this kind is itself a torture and cruel burden. If we read these events at a spiritual level, however, this possessed man could stand for any soul who becomes seduced by passions or appetites within, only to find that such passions and appetites themselves become torturers who exact full payment. Perhaps these appetites are for bodily or sensuous pleasures or, for the more pious, perhaps these appetites are for spiritual satisfactions: certainties, signs of approval from God, self-validation and things of this sort. These too can torture no less than sensuous passions to which one has become enslaved. Religious idealism is not a sign of integrity but a dangerous disguise of inner disorder. Who can free us from the body of this death? We know the answer And it is not ourselves.

What is more bewildering in this gospel is the fact that Jesus drove out the demons from this man's soul and allowed them to enter the herd of swine which then plunged themselves over the edge of a cliff. The effect of this event was so great that the people of the town begged Jesus to leave the area. Indeed, the gospel tells us that the people of the town were afraid at what had happened. The Fathers of the Church commenting on this scene offer various interpretations of its meaning. Perhaps the most persuasive, however, is the Jesus is showing the townspeople, and by extension anyone who hears about this event, about the terrible, destructive power that demons can wield. The only “solace” the townspeople had offered to the man possessed was to attempt to put him in chains which he broke in his fury. But this will not do. We cannot protect ourselves from evil by pretending it does not exist or by building imaginary safe spaces for our modern souls. We cannot guard against the gates of hell by minimising the risks.

Especially in our own day, the ambient culture is so enamoured of individual choice that we do not like to think upon the consequences of those who give themselves to evil actions. The story of the men set free of the legion of demons should be a lesson for us that ignorance is no protection, and that we are called to conversion because our souls are a battleground of the Kingdom of God.

The devil and our vocation

In today's gospel (Mark 3:22-30), Jesus crosses swords, as He so often does, with the scribes, but his argument is subtle. The principle on which it depends is that no Kingdom divided against itself can stand. Jesus applies this principle to demonstrate that He cannot be in league with the devil.

The strength of this argument, however, was probably more apparent to the onlookers that heard it. How could anyone think that Jesus was an agent of Beelzebub if they had witnessed the ways in which He had cured the sick, healed the leper, restored hope to the hopeless, and shown mercy to those on the brink of despair? The very fact that the scribes raised the question says more about them and the state of their souls than it does about Him. This is yet again an example of something which today is unfashionable to say. Although we must not judge people’s intentions, the reality is that some people do act in bad faith with bad intentions, and all the while are quite happy to lord it over others.

This, by the way, seems to be the subtext of Jesus’ final remark about those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. Once someone has decided that God is wicked, that God is the source of evil rather than the source of all good, how will that person ever turn again? In the case of the scribes, they were witnesses to some of the most remarkable interventions that God had made in history, and yet here they were speculating about whether Jesus was really of the devil. Sinners can only be saved by God Himself, so how can they be saved if they have said God is in fact the source of evil?

In truth, however, the kingdom of the devil, such as it is, cannot but be divided against itself. Even if it is united by the desire to pull down every effort to build God's Kingdom, it is shattered with the division that comes from the ego-centred choices that separate every fallen Angel and every fallen soul from its Creator. Those choices are wrong not just because they are oriented towards the ego and not God; they are wrong also because they are an assault on the place that God wishes to assign us in the symphony of His goodness. The diabolical is literally that which is ‘thrown across’ - something violently at odds with the path it is meant to be on. 

The failure to recognise and pursue our vocation is not just a missed opportunity.  It is literally an initiation to the diabolical path that contradicts our eternal call.

Going out with tears, coming home with gladness.

 In today's gospel (Mark 2:18-22), Jesus shares with us a paradox that shapes the life of every believer who is committed to following Him. Some of his critics question why his disciples do not fast, and Jesus tells them that as long as the disciples are with the Bridegroom, it is not fitting that they fast, but that a time for fasting will come. It is probably worth noting that while penance is a deeply unfashionable not to say enduringly unpleasant feature of our religion, it is one which comes from the Lord himself. As he says elsewhere, “Unless you do penance, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13: 5).”

But let us dwell on the paradox here. We are the disciples insofar as we dwell with the Bridegroom, and happily we always dwell with the Bridegroom as long as we do not lose Him through mortal sin. Jesus himself tells us that He and the Father (and, thereby, necessarily the Spirit also) dwell in the souls of those who love Him. What is eternal life except to dwell with Him? In this limited sense, we already hold eternal life in our hands. Our horizons should be different from those of other human beings. We walk with another compass and guide ourselves by another map. In the final analysis, a soul living the Christian life is held in God's almighty embrace of love and returns that embrace to the God who has saved them.

But here comes the paradox. While in one way we are with the Bridegroom, in another way we are still wayfarers on our journey towards the wedding. While He dwells in our souls, our attention and our hearts are constantly surrounded by the things of this world, and being the fallen creatures we are, our minds and hearts too often seek their happiness there. And we are fallen creatures! If any man thinks he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says Saint Paul. The good that we wish to do, we do not, while the evil we would avoid we sometimes do (again St Paul who is not letting us slackers off the hook!). Actually, the same wisdom about the fallibility of human nature can be found in the writers of classical antiquity. It was the poet Ovid who wrote:

I see and approve the better things,

But the worse things I follow.

Like all the paradoxes in our religion, we have to hold these two things together. Rejoice because we dwell with the Bridegroom. Mourn because we are sinners and we need to do penance, not only to train our wills in some ascetic sense, but to share in the Bridegroom’s sufferings and so to help make reparation for our sins - to fill up in our bodies the sufferings wanting to the passion of Christ, as St Paul tells the Colossians.

Those who forget either end of this paradox are in trouble. If we lose hold of the necessity of living joyfully in tour hearts with the Bridegroom, we risk becoming a grim burden to ourselves (and others) for nothing alleviates the heavy atmosphere in which our hearts then live. If we lose hold of the necessity of penance, we become doe-eyed religious narcissists who never even think to darken the door of the confessional.

We live in joy but must season our smiles with tears until we reach our journey's end.