Luke 4:31–44
A sermon preached in Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 2nd May 2021
Today’s reading is about evil: Jesus heals a demon-possessed man. So the first question we need to ask is whether the Devil is real? Because most of our materialist neighbours think not—though if you go to Africa or South East Asia it will be different. But wherever you are, it only takes one experience to change non-believer into to a believer.
It was my second year as a student. I lived with twelve other students. Some of the girls at a women’s college were holding seances. A chap in my house asked me what I thought of it. I had become a Christian earlier that year and knew that contacting the dead was forbidden in the Bible. I told him I thought it was dangerous. He was amused and thought he would join in—just for fun. I advised him not to. He returned thoroughly frightened. Strange things had happened. He now believed the Devil was real.
A few years later I was working with a church youth group in Sydney. Liz was in her second last year at high school. Her friend at school watched a television program on spirit-writing. To amuse herself during a dull lesson she would hold her pen above a blank page and ask a spirit to send her a message. Her hand would write a message. At the beginning it was a game, but gradually it got out of control—she would get messages into her mind without even asking. She became afraid and confided in Liz, who told her about the Holy Spirit, and they prayed for the Lord Jesus to send away the unwanted spirit. She was not troubled again, became a Christian herself, and eventually a full-time Christian worker.
You can make what you will of such stories; those who are caught up in them need no convincing that there is a spirit world out there.
What convinced me as a young science student was reading history. John Foster’s book, After the Apostles, tells of how the early Christians would go into a pagan village and challenge them to bring out their worst cases of demon-possession. In the name of Jesus, they would order the demon to leave, and it would. His source for this story is Athanasius in the fourth century. Athanasius is appealing to people who had witnessed it; it was common knowledge about Christian missionary activity in the early centuries. And listen to Tertullian earlier in the third century: He is answering the mockers who ask, “Who is this Christ with his fables? Is he an ordinary man, a sorcerer, and was his body stolen from the tomb by his disciples?” Tertullian replies, “Mock as you will, but get the demons to mock with you! Let them deny that Christ is coming to judge every human soul. At our command they leave the bodies they have entered, distressed and unwilling. Before your very eyes they are put to open shame.” Other ancient writers attest this; it is one of the reasons Christianity spread so powerfully. Wherever the gospel was preached there was a rolling back of magic and demon-possession.
But you should not rest your faith on other people’s experiences: it is because of Jesus that we should believe in the reality of a spirit world. Today’s reading (Luke 4:31–44) lets us glimpse through a window a dark world, which although we may not have seen it, is there and dangerous.
Luke says, “Jesus went down to Capernaum …”
Capernaum was a large rural, fishing, and industrial town situated on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The lake is surrounded by hills; the only way to get there is “down.” On the sabbath day Jesus taught in the synagogue. It is one of the oddities of history that in the ruins of Capernaum stands the best-preserved synagogue from the ancient world. You can Google a picture.
Jesus was a preacher people listened to. His style was different to anything they had heard. First century Judaism was very authority conscious. A preacher wouldn’t dare to give his own opinions. He would quote Moses, then one of the prophets, then a famous rabbi, and then a lesser known rabbi. Perhaps at the end, if he was a trained rabbi, he would venture an opinion of his own. But Jesus spoke like he knew the truth, like he knew God personally, and what he said made sense. Anyway, on this occasion Luke doesn’t tell us what was his subject, only that while he taught, a man began to shout. Luke says he had “the spirit of an unclean demon.” Among the Greeks, demons were not necessarily regarded as evil. Socrates had a daemon that spoke to him. But this one is unclean, which probably means it is associated with the dead. Often demon-possession caused epilepsy or some physical disorder, but I don’t imagine this man appeared any different to anyone else, since he is sitting among them in the synagogue. His outburst is a complete surprise, perhaps even to the man himself. He reacts to Jesus’ person. “I know who you are!” “Have you come to destroy us?” He is afraid. “What do you want with us?” “We don’t want you here.” Something is disturbing his world; Jesus shouldn’t be here. “I know who you are,” the man shouts. He has knowledge no one else seems to have. “The Holy One of God!” that’s who you are. He recognizes Jesus as the Messiah, and the Son of God. Jesus silences him, because his outburst is malicious. Jesus has not disclosed his identity, and doesn’t wish to at this point.
During the week we watched a program on the history of Russia. Czar Nicholas II and his whole family were shot and mutilated by communist revolutionaries, so there could be no resistance to the revolution. Imagine you are in Moscow in 1920: “I know who you are; you’re a child of the Czar.” If someone said that about you in a public place, it would be a death sentence. In the first century it was like that for people who claimed to be the Messiah. Jesus tells him to shut his mouth, and then orders the spirit out. The man is thrown to the floor, and the evil presence leaves. He is unharmed. The synagogue explodes with amazement. “What on earth …” Everyone is talking to everyone else: authority and power are the two words most often heard. “With authority and power he even commands the evil spirits and they come out.”
Let’s step back now and ask what Luke means by this story. There are many accounts of demon-expulsion in the Gospels. What is special about this one? Well, it is the first. Jesus comes into Galilee and the first account Luke gives us of his ministry is his experience in Nazareth; we looked at it two weeks ago. He announced liberation: a great jubilee emancipation of Israel from the many forms of bondage it was caught it: poverty, captivity, oppression, sickness and so on. Nazareth rejects him. He goes on his way—down to Capernaum—and the first thing Luke tells us about is his healing of this demon-possessed man. Is this what liberation means? If you read the first two chapters of Luke and pay careful attention to the Songs of Mary and Zechariah you will see that Jesus has come to liberate Israel from all its enemies. But who are these enemies? Mary could have told you—or Zechariah, or any Jew of the day. It used to be Assyria, then it was Babylon, then Persia, then the Greeks, and now it is Rome that rules, oppresses, crushes, and humiliates. If Messiah’s task is to liberate, then he must raise an army.
But that is not how Jesus sees it. At his baptism God appoints him as the King-Messiah. His task is to liberate God’s people and establish them in peace. But the very next thing we are told is that he is driven into the wilderness for a forty-day confrontation with the Devil. He comes away from that, and next Luke lets us see him in the synagogue at Nazaeth announcing freedom; and then today’s story. Can you see where Luke is going? Could it be that Israel’s real enemy is not Rome, but the whole kingdom of satanic power. It confronts him in a demon-possessed man and he sends it packing. He has authority and orders it to leave, and it does. If he is the king, of course he has authority. But they also see he has power—power to do what he has proclaimed.
Jesus saw Satan, not Rome, as the true enemy. As the story unfolds we will see this again and again. Evil has many faces; the fear caused by evil spirits is just one of them. Straight after this we see Jesus heal a woman with a life-threatening fever. He commands the fever to leave. Everyone comes bringing their sick and he heals them. He calms a storm, feeds the hungry, and, of course, we see him confronting corrupt leaders and stupid disciples. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner of the communists in a Siberian concentration camp. He saw much evil, but it was not only in his captors. He said, “The battle-line between good and evil passes through the heart of every man.” As Jesus saw it, Israel’s bondage was not just Rome. Rome was just one more manifestation of a deeper evil. Destroying Rome would not fulfil his mission; nor would it help to bring Islamic extremism, China and North Korea, and Covid into line. Cruelty, lies, false ideas, greed, envy, lust, cowardice, false pride: these things are in all of us.
Islam’s second greatest mistake is to think that the kingdom of God can be established by force of arms, that by making the world Muslim you can make it good. I say this, because the Ayatollah Khomeini said Jesus great mistake was not to take up the sword—but Jesus knew what he was doing. And Islam is not the only movement to make a mistake here. The modern social reform movement, thinks evil can be dealt with by more education and more and more laws; as though people will do good, if you tell them what is right, and threaten them if they don’t. For many Satan is a joke, but he may have the last laugh. The truth is we will never understand evil, nor its seriousness, nor its cure, if we ignore Jesus and discount the reality of Satan and the evil spiritual realm. Jesus knew it, saw it, and set his sights on the heart of the evil empire.
We will explore this further as we unwrap the rest of his ministry. For now I want to explore further the meaning of what happened in Capernaum that day.
The main thing we are meant to learn from this incident and many others like it, is that Jesus has authority and power. He teaches with authority, heals, and forgives. Everything he does is with authority and power. That is because God has commissioned him as king of the world—forever. And if you want to have a place in the future that is coming, you need to recognize that authority and make him your king. That is the main thing we are to learn.
But the second is that we are to see that he also has authority even in the spirit world. Evil manifests in many forms, as I said, and blatant interference by demonic powers is one of them. For most of history many people have been held in bondage by fear of spirits. This is still true for many Muslims, even today: failing to understand Jesus’ victory over the spirits, they still live in fear of the djin. There is a pure form of Buddhism which does not believe in God, but most Buddhists believe in gods and spirits and are fearful of not making offerings to placate them. Much of Africa has embraced Christianity, but when illness or misfortune strike, the sanghoma may be called in to communicate with dead ancestors. There is fear of ancestors, sanghomas, witches, and the spirits they control. Our Australian aborigines have been troubled in their past by spirits, and some still live with fear. From time to time we hear of a powerful political leader in a western country—even the White House— consulting an astrologer before making an important decision, or taking advice from an occult medium. And I have no doubt there are some here today in this congregation who have had or are having experiences with ghosts, or spirits of the dead. Seances and Ouija boards, spirit-writing and tarot cards may fascinate and attract at the beginning, but eventually they will lead you into fear.
We learn from today’s reading not to mock such experiences as superstitious imagination—though sometimes they can be—but to realize they may be serious, but at the same time to know that Jesus has demonstrated authority and power over the demonic power and can be called upon to banish it.
Once I was called in by a senior scout leader to deal with a scout hall some thought was haunted. The hall had been used for seances by a spiritualist group and parents were afraid for the safety of their children. The scout leader consulted a Roman Catholic priest and asked whether he should take it seriously. He was advised to, and asked for my help. I had no way of knowing whether the hall really was haunted or not, but it could have been, so with him and some others present, I asked the Lord Jesus to be present, read from his Word a couple of passages about his authority over the powers, prayed, and in Jesus’ name ordered any evil presence to depart. There was no further problem. A Catholic priest-in-training, who was there at the time, was later asked whether he would have done differently. He said he would have used holy water, but otherwise approved of what had happened. I have had to do something like this several times throughout my ministry. But it is something anyone who trusts in Christ should be able to do. I don’t suppose the high school girl I mentioned at the beginning was consciously performing an exorcism. She just prayed in the name of Jesus against whatever was troubling her friend, and the Lord heard. Christians have been doing this for 2000 years. It is not the power of a priest, or the magic of holy water, it is the authority and power of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus over the demonic world, which the spirits fear.
The gospel story is in part a record of Jesus’ struggle with the powers of evil. There are any number of separate incidents. The all lead up to his final confrontation at the cross with the one he called “the prince of this world.” Satan threatened to kill him, if he continued on his path of obedience to God. Jesus did not flinch—not even when he was dying in agony—and his obedience brought the whole kingdom of Satan crashing down. By annulling the guilt of our sins, in St Paul’s words, “he disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (Colossians 2.15) So, if you are ever in a place where you fear the presence of an evil power, don’t be afraid. Call the Lord Jesus to your aid in simple believing prayer. Know that it is the spirits that fear you—or Jesus in you—you need not fear them. The gospel enables us to live a life of confidence and joy; we need never be bound by fear of the dark powers. Jesus had defeated them.