The Third Sunday in Lent (March 7, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.

This morning’s Gospel reading from St. Luke’s Gospel includes three main panels. First, there is our Lord casting out demons and receiving opposition from the crowd present who accuse him of being an agent of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. The second panel is this puzzling parable Jesus tells about a strong man being defeated and spoiled by an even stronger man and an unclean spirit finding its way back to its dwelling with seven other spirits. And the final panel is this exchange Jesus has with an unnamed woman who proclaims a blessing over the womb that bore our Lord only to have him counter the praise by addressing a blessing to those that hear the word of God and keep it. In these three panels, the reading teaches us about who Jesus is and what our proper response is to his identity.

So let’s look at the first panel which involves our Lord performing an exorcism and the resistance from some in the crowds.

It’s important to recognize here that Jesus is not an exorcist among exorcists. He’s not performing them by reciting magical words or invoking some special name. Rather, he performs them of his own power: “I with the finger of God cast out devils.” Christ is the ultimate exorcist because he is “very God of very God.” But some of the people present think he’s able to cast out demons because his authority is derived from Beelzebub, the prince of demons, while others ask for a sign of his authenticity (as if the exorcisms themselves weren’t sufficient).

Both the objection and the request for more signs highlight an important truth about the human person, namely the power of the human heart to reject the truth by talking itself out of it, even when the truth is right in front of it. Jesus, of course, shows how ridiculous these objections actually are: to say Jesus exorcized demons through Beelzebub is to say Satan is divided amongst himself, as he proves by quoting Abraham Lincoln: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; a house divided against itself falleth.” In other words, the skeptics in the audience have missed the point: God is among them. Jesus is able to cast out the demons because, as God, he is omnipotent. It only requires his finger.

In fact, this reference of the finger of God is an allusion to the Old Testament. During the Exodus, when God used Moses to manifest his powers to the Egyptians, the Pharaoh asks his magicians how the signs are performed and their answer in Exodus 8:19 is “This is the finger of God.” Of course, this doesn’t persuade the Pharaoh; just like Jesus’ audience in Luke 11, his heart remains hard. But the implications of the link between what Jesus does and the Exodus is clear: Jesus is initiating a new Exodus in which he delivers his people from their bondage to the Devil, sin, and death.

And that leads us to the second panel which is a parable of a strong man who guards a palace, protecting the goods therein. Everything is safe until an even stronger man attacks and defeats the first, taking the spoils.

We should understand the devil as the first man and Jesus as the stronger man. In performing exorcisms, Jesus disarms and plunders Satan. The exorcisms are temporary victories, pointing us to the ultimate victory of Jesus over the devil, which is the Cross, as St. Paul tells us in Colossians 2:15, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” All of Jesus’ actions represent the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven which is brought about through God’s power and liberates his creation from the tyranny of “him who holds the power of death” (Heb 2:14). That the Kingdom of Heaven comes about through Christ’s salvific actions for us and the Church’s continual participation in him means that there is no room for neutrality: “He that is not with me is against me.”

But implicit in this parable is a warning: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” We are reminded here of St. Peter’s words in the fifth chapter of his first epistle that, while Jesus has won the victory on the cross, Satan still roams like a lion seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8-9). In other words, while we are saved in Baptism, the possibility of apostasy is always present if we buckle to the devil’s temptations and the desires of our flesh. The possibility of confession is always available when we fall but the insidious nature of sin is that it dulls our senses to the need for repentance by opening the door for all kinds of self-justifications and rationalizations which come all to easy to us. St Peter vividly and graphically describes apostasy in his second epistle (2 Pet 2:20-22): “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in the them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For ti would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment that was passed on to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, ‘The dog turns back to its own vomit,’ and, ‘The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud.’” The corruption of the best is the worst of all, an important principle for us to remember. Undergirding our observation of Lent is the recognition of the ever-present possibility of apostasy and so we work in co-operation with the Holy Ghost in almsgiving, fasting, and prayer to train our own passions so we can continually submit to Christ.

And this brings us to the final panel of the reading: the praise from the woman in the crowd.

“Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” Jesus’ answer is corrective: “Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” There are two issues at play here. The first is what exactly is the point of Jesus’ rebuttal here and the second is whether his response should be interpreted as a slight to the Virgin Mary, his mother.

So what is the point of Jesus’ corrective of the woman’s blessing? I would say it’s not that the woman is incorrect in anything that she says but that it’s the wrong response for this moment. If it’s true that Jesus is ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven through a new and spiritual exodus, that he calls us to repentance, and that he bids us to pick up our crosses and follow him, the proper response isn’t words of applause but obedience.

This is tied very closely to the question about our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary. The woman pronounces a blessing on the womb that bore our Lord and the breasts at which he gave suck. But Jesus seems to direct praise away from her to a more generic blessing on those who hear God’s word and keep it. While upon first read, that may seem to be the case, we have to remember that St. Luke’s Gospel is home to the Magnificat and the Annunciation to our Lady where she grants her assent: “Be it done unto me according to thy will.” The problem in Luke 11 then lies not in this unnamed woman’s desire to pronounce blessing on the Blessed Virgin, the Angel Gabriel does that in the same Gospel: “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” Mary is so venerated by the Christian tradition precisely because she is the example par excellence of what Jesus says here: she was bestowed with a special gift of grace to hear God’s word and keep it. If the cross is the standard and model for our behavior, our Lady is the first and best example of cruciformity besides our Lord himself.

Conclusion

Our Lord is the New Moses leading the New Israel, his Church, in a New Exodus from the land of bondage that characterized our lives pre-baptism, into the Promise Land, that heavenly country where we will finally see our Creator face-to-face in the eternal sabbath of the beatific vision. But just like the original exodus, the journey is fraught with peril. In the Exodus, the people complained and some even lost their faith. Many who set off with Moses did not arrive at the final destination because their rebellious hearts made them oppose God and his appointed leader. Similarly, those of us journeying in the Church to the Promise Land struggle with those exact same tendencies.

How do we persevere? How do we make it to the end of our journey? By obeying our Lord’s bidding to pick up his cross and follow him. And God has not left us without examples: the great cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints stand before us as examples who have lived out this cross-shaped obedience and they stand behind us, supporting us with their prayers and aid. Most of all, his Mother who is our Mother stands out for us and behind us. So may this Lenten season be an opportunity for us, through self-discipline, to pick up our cross and follow him.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.