I saw a cartoon once in which there was a person lying in bed, two doctors standing nearby, and a priest holding up a crucifix, while a huge, monstrous demon was flying out of the person in the bed. One doctor commented to the other: “So much for our anemia diagnosis.”
The mystery of the presence of demonic elements in this world is one which is often disbelieved or
variously explained away, but for all that it still remains. A psychiatric or other medical disorder is often the diagnosis offered for otherwise unexplainable phenomena. But, in the context of today’s Gospel (Mt 8:28 – 9:1), I find it difficult to understand how a psychiatric disorder could leap out of two men and enter into a herd of pigs and drive them to their deaths in the sea. It is true that people who really are merely psychotic can seem to have demons, or think they have demons, and so every case has to be evaluated by competent professionals. But we need to understand that there are distinctly spiritual maladies that are incurable by psychotherapy and medications.
St Matthew’s account of the possessed men of Gadara is quite brief, compared to the parallel accounts of St Mark and St Luke. So rather than concentrate on the details of the story, perhaps today we ought simply to reflect on the mystery it dramatizes. For even if we are not called to be professional exorcists, we all have to deal with the presence of the devil in our lives, and so we have to know how to drive him out and remain safely under divine protection.
First of all, we have to learn something about how the devil enters in the first place. It’s a lot easier to protect ourselves from evil than to try to get rid of it once it is firmly planted within us. Quite simply, the open door for the entrance of evil spirits is sin. The more grievous the sin, the wider the opening of the door. The devil inhabits things like pornography and sexual perversions, crimes against life like abortion, crimes against love like adultery and fornication, crimes against holiness like blasphemy and sacrilege and occultism, crimes against innocence like child abuse, crimes against truth like the lies and corruption of politicians and others who wield power. The list can go on and on. But we have to be aware that even if we aren’t guilty of heinous crimes, and even if we haven’t made an explicit pact with the devil, to the extent we commit sin we make ourselves vulnerable to his presence, activity, and gradual entrenchment in our minds and hearts. Anger, disobedience, unforgiveness, laziness, selfishness, etc, are also open doors to the devil.
We hear in the Gospel that the men who were full of demons were fierce. If demons manifest themselves it is usually as fearsome specters, for they want to fill us with fear. But that is only because they don’t want us to know that they are already afraid of us—especially if we are baptized into Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit. They know that Christ has already defeated them by his death and resurrection, but if they can deceive us into thinking they have more power than they really do, it is less likely that we will confidently rebuke them by the power of Christ.
In the Gospel account, when they saw the Lord they were afraid of Him and tried to talk Him into leaving them alone and not to torment them. His very presence was a torment, for He was holy and they were unholy and thus could not endure Him. So we have to realize that if we are in Christ the demons are afraid of us, and anything they try to do to us is just bluster and deceit, and all their saber-rattling is just a bluff. But that is the case only insofar as we are in Christ. To the extent that we are not in Christ, that is, to the extent that sin abides in us, there really is something that can give the devil a foothold in our souls, something that can feed him and make him more powerful than he could possibly be if we stood against him in the full armor of divine grace. All our sins, especially ingrained habits of sin, are so many chinks in the armor, and the devil will constantly be trying to gain access through our vulnerabilities.
If we’re already to some extent in thrall to evil, then we have a lot of strenuous work to do to get free. We have first to confess our sins, do penance, and then labor to overcome the habits that have been formed by our repeated acquiescence to the temptations of the devil. This takes time, but frequent reception of the sacraments, immersion in the word of God, prayer and steadfast resistance will go a long way toward deliverance. One professional exorcist says that the mortification of the flesh is the best exorcism one can perform upon oneself.
If we’re already more firmly rooted in Christ, the repulsion of demons is easier. We do what Jesus did in the Gospel: we say, “Go.” That’s all He did. He didn’t wave his hands, make long incantations or engage in Hollywood-style theatrics. He just said: “Go.” And they went.
This is the power that is given to us who have received the sacraments that incorporate us into the life of God. I’m not talking here about casting demons out of other persons—for which there are more requirements and specialized training—only about keeping ourselves free from the influence and presence of the devil. But in order to have the spiritual strength to simply say “go” and have the devils actually obey, we have to be totally with Christ. “He who is not with Me is against Me,” said the Lord, so a half-hearted rejection of temptation will be ineffective. But if we really desire and decide to do the Lord’s will, really desire and decide to stand with Him, really desire and decide to have nothing to do with the seductions of the demons, then in the name and grace of Christ, we can say “go” and they have to go. That’s because we thus have the power of Christ’s victory at our disposal. And thus the jig is up for the devil, he is unmasked, his blustery façade falls, his clever deceits suddenly look silly, and his stranglehold on our souls is released. For we are now acting as members of the Body of Christ, the same Christ who tore open the gates of hell and robbed the devil of his power.
There’s something else we ought to be aware of, and we get some insight for this from the Epistle reading (Rom. 10:1-10). First of all, St Paul says that the ignorant and unenlightened do not submit to God’s righteousness because they try to establish their own. Here is another access point for the devil that I failed to mention in the above list of evils. You don’t have to be some sort of slimy pervert or devil-worshipper to be eligible for dominance by demons. You can simply be self-righteous and the devil will be happy with you. He might like you even better than the creepier sinners because they are more likely to repent as soon as the Light shines in their darkness. But the self-righteous are practically immune to repentance because they don’t think they need it!
There’s something else the Apostle says that we need to know for being strong against evil. In our spiritual warfare we need to use the one-two punch of both inner and outer fidelity to Christ. St Paul says that our salvation comes from believing with the heart and confessing with the lips. These are practical expressions of the two main elements of our spiritual life, the interior and the exterior. We even begin our prayer before Holy Communion by saying “I believe and profess…”
In the context of our overcoming the works of the devil in our lives we have to engage our inner life of faith in Jesus and love for Him, and cultivate our desire to be loyal and obedient to Him in all things. And we have to feed and strengthen our souls with the Holy Eucharist, with word of God and with prayer. Exteriorly, we have to put our faith into practice, avoid near occasions of sin, give a good example to others, make use of sacramentals (like holy water, or wearing blessed medals or crucifixes) and icons, etc, to keep ourselves in a holy environment where it is less likely for us to fall prey to the works of the devil. And, as the fathers say, we may need to attack the particular temptations to which we are vulnerable by practicing the opposite virtue or mortifying ourselves in that area: fast if we are gluttonous, keep vigil if we are lazy, guard the eyes and thoughts and mortify the flesh in other ways if we are prone to sensuality, etc.
It is clear, then, that casting out the devil is not merely a matter of a formula of words or rituals. It is a way of life that is rooted in faith in Christ and love for Him, steadfastly following Him and drawing strength from his love and the power of his grace, which flows from his pierced Heart, offered on the Cross for us as He was taking away the sins of the world and handing the devil his doom. The devil has only the power that we give him, by our fear and our failure to make use of the means God has given us to submit freely to his righteousness and thus be invincible.
The Book of Revelation speaks of our ultimate victory over the dragon, who is called the accuser, who in the end is vanquished. God’s faithful ones “have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” The devil made war “on those who keep the commandments of God and bear witness to Jesus” (12:11, 17), but he ends up getting cast into the lake of burning sulfur forever, while the righteous rejoice in the everlasting wedding feast of the Lamb. So our efforts to root out sin in our lives and to leave no place for the devil to gain access to our souls are oriented not merely to maintaining some inner peace or spiritual equilibrium in this life. We are part of the great and universal struggle of the people of God to enter into the definitive victory of Christ over the power of sin and death. It’s not a matter of indifference whether or not we give in to temptation. It’s a matter of either feeding the evil one or casting him out. Our ultimate victory is the culmination of the many small acts of daily faithfulness to the will of God.
Let us then be consciously with Christ in confronting the powers of darkness, drawing on the power of his grace, aware that we redeemed by his Blood and sealed by his Spirit. Thus when we sense the approach of the demons with their wicked designs for our undoing, we can simply say, “Go”—and by the power of God that’s just what they’ll do.
