Our Gospel today is the Matthew version of a healing we heard a couple of Sundays ago; the exorcism of a possessed man in a region across from the sea of Galilee. There are significant differences between the account we heard then, and also a similar account in Mark, and the account we hear today. Those differences can tell us a lot about the different early communities of Jesus Followers and, when viewed as holistically, not simply comparing one to another, can help us appreciate the broad power and beauty of the Gospel and of Christ himself.
First though, we need to address the very unmodern concept of possession and exorcism. As mentioned in our previous sermon, modern views of possession as misunderstood physical or psychological ailments completely miss the mark when it comes to understanding the ancient worldview that Jesus lived and moved within. That view however, that we, the world and everyone within it, is surrounded by an invisible but powerful realm of unseen entities that can, through a huge variety of reasons, have a negative and devasting impact on our lives, is really hard to come to terms with in 21st century Australia.
Without in any way countering that traditional view, a view that is still shared by innumerable first nation and traditional cultures across the globe, we can perhaps look at demons and possession in a way that both honours that view and draws from a core Christian proclamation – the Incarnation.
Because the world changing event of the Incarnation collapses the hard boundaries between the personal, the social-political and spiritual spheres, the personal is political is spiritual. Christ as the ultimate spiritual agent, God incarnate in body and flesh, comes to liberate not only our spirituality, but also our personal lives and the political-social conditions that scar and limit those lives.
And so, we can look at demons and possession, in a modern way without resorting to a dismissive, “it’s all illness really”, approach.
A few years back I attended a birthday party for a family member whose name begins with the letter M. One of her presents was a little neon-tube desk light shaped in the letter M. As she unwrapped the present and revealed the ‘M’, her toddler grandson, just learning to read, joyfully declaimed: HAPPY MEAL.
Happy Meal … referring of course to the children’s meal at McDonald’s. While this is an example of clever saturation marketing, it is also something far worse, far more spiritually damaging. This young boy’s cognitive capacity, his tender developing ability to recognize letters and communicate has been affected and, in some way, taken over by a commercial spirit with no regards for his personal wellbeing. The marketing has entered him, has used his own God given cognition and mind against his best interests, which is a parallel to the effects of possession.
As with McDonalds, so too with all forms of exploitative consumerism which value people and the earth as only resources, which position families and communities as only markets. As with consumerism, so too with any social ideology that is more concerned with converts and adherents than people as people.
For we, all of us, like this boy are constantly under the sway of ideas, trends and cultural norms which function like spirits which seek to use ourselves against ourselves and against God’s creation. It is not just advertising.
But the Good News is that we can change all this, us here, right now through the love and power of Christ, just as we hear in today’s Gospel. And though it is perhaps it is easy to miss, the demons in today’s story also, as they always do, have a social effect, as we hear in our first verse: “They were so fierce that no one could pass that way.”
The presence of the demons, the physical embodiment of evil and demonic force is impacting this community – no one can travel, trade or connect across the land, as they should be able to do.
Now, we notice immediately that Jesus does not ask or demand the name of the demons.
That does happen in Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, and in Luke, the latest Gospel to have this story.
Matthew chooses to omit this aspect of healing. And this is extremely significant. As we detailed in our previous sermon, discerning, getting possession of the name of an invisible force, be it demon, angel or deity, meant one had power over that force. That was part of the time-tried, universal and ubiquitous method across the ancient near east and ancient world in general. Without the name, the possessing force was unable to be controlled and finally expelled.
Yet here Jesus simply says, “Go!”.
The emphasis, more than in Mark and Luke, is on Jesus’s power in and as himself. He, as the demons themselves recognize, being Son of God, does not need their name – he himself has all the divine power.
And the title applied to Jesus by the demons is also very significant – “Son of God”. In both Mark and Luke, the title is “Son of the Most High God”. As a title, Son of the Most High God was more often used in Gentile, non-Jewish cultures, cultures that still worshipped many Gods, one of whom was “the most high”. This is why the man healed from possession in Mark and Luke is often seen as Jesus’s first gentile disciple.
Here, Jesus is described as Son of God, God, singular, which is appropriate considering Matthew’s community were largely a Jewish community being transformed and challenged by the enduring stories of the life and resurrection of Jesus.
In the Jewish culture of the time, 30s CE, Son of God did not refer to Christ, did not refer to the Messiah nor the second Person of the trinity. It referred to either angels or humans who had a special relationship with God, like Kings in the line of David.
It is through its reframing in the New Testament that Son of God comes to refer to Jesus, and later as the second person of the trinity. And today we hear one of the very first recorded instances of this reframing, one of the very first recorded moments when the developing community of Jesus followers come to understand Jesus as divine, and full of such divine blessing and power he does not need a name to exorcize, but can exorcize by his own divine power.
And so it is today for us today … we do not need the name of the demonic or socially possessing or repressive forces, forces and powers that oppress us or hinder our connection with life and with God – however we see those forces, as external powers or internal and psychological.
All we need is the one who is both God and human, the one who holds all in his power, who is all power - all we need is Christ. And Christ comes when we call; when we pray, ask and be open, he will simply be with us. He will be with us, and then say, Go! And all the powers are gone, all the social and internal forces that keep us from life - because all the forces and all the powers are subject to him who is Son of God. Amen