Jesus Drives Evil Away

Title: Jesus Drives Evil Away

Date: October 9, 1987 - Friday of the Twenty-Seventh Week (I)

Readings: Joel 1,13-15;2,1-2 / Psalm 9,2-3.6.16.8-9 / Luke 11,15-26

Our Gospel today might strike one as wholly appropriate as we enter into the Halloween season. The stores are filled with Jack-o-Lanterns, paper skeletons, and monster masks. Many of the local television stations are running horror movie marathons. Admittedly, I watch these things too, although I am more a fan of Japanese rubber monsters that walk over cities than in the kind that "go bump in the night". We seem to almost celebrate the dark side. It is as if we are fascinated by evil. We have all felt it. I grew up with the old serial "Dark Shadows," in which many of us actually cheered for the vampire Barnabas Collins. I suppose there is nothing wrong in a little fun and especially in a good story of good versus evil. After all, our Gospel relates to us how the good of Jesus could drive evil away. However, what does alarm me is the growing fascination with evil which seems more than a harmless or amusing aside. There are rock entertainers who wear inverted crosses and for some time the strange slogan "Satan Lives!" has been associated with the Heavy Metal music and the drug culture. A few years ago, in the first "Oh God!" movie, George Burns remarked about how strange it was that people could go to a movie like "The Exorcist" believing in the devil, but still not have any room in their lives for God.

We, like the possessed person in the Gospel, need to fill ourselves with God so that evil may have no place to reside in us. We are baptized as living temples of the Holy Spirit. As such our bodies are sacred and we should seek to care for them. There is nothing ugly about us being in flesh, after all, Christ took upon himself our human nature, too. We are holy creatures, creatures who belong to the light and not the dark, who were made for God, and not for a small ban of renegade angels to debase. The victory in Christ is already won, there is no one and nothing to compare with God -- our hearts belong to him.