4th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

Today’s Gospel passage can seem a pretty harmless passage, perhaps irrelevant, even unreal. Yet Mark, who wrote the Gospel, deliberately chose to place it where it is, right at the beginning of Jesus’ public life, the first detailed description of Jesus at work. In his mind it provided the key to understanding the rest of Jesus’ public ministry. Jesus had a showdown with demonic evil, and it happened in a religious context, with its mention of sabbath, synagogue and scribes. It took the shape of an exorcism. Talk of exorcisms can seem countercultural in our sophisticated world. If we approach the incident symbolically, however, we might learn to see that encounters with demonic power are constant, though rarely recognised as such. And there lies their power – we do not see them.

After the destruction by Islamic terrorists of the Twin Towers in New York, the de facto leader of the Western world declared a “war against terror”. Since then, countless innocent lives have been lost, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria. What many Western powers encouraged as an Arab Spring has turned into a devastating Arab winter. With few exceptions, everyone claims to want peace. But instinctively most believe that peace will be best secured by superior counter violence. 

Unfortunately popular religion regularly becomes part of the mix. Islamist fundamentalism does not have it on its own. The “war against terror” became a “crusade against evil”, certainly in the US, if not in secular Australia. Thank God, the Catholic/Protestant conflict has quietened down in Northern Ireland. 

Public emotions occasioned by the brutal murder of eight employees of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, are simmering down. The tragic incident triggered a huge popular wave of condemnation of fundamentalist Islamic violence and a clear reaffirmation of the right to freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. But is there a danger of another underlying current of  a different violence that has passed almost unnoticed? There are other expressions of violence than the barrel of a gun. Violence and oppression can also be psychological or verbal, sexual, religious, economic and social, etc. The demonic flourishes in the unrecognised. Its power lies in the ease with which it can blind us as individuals, and even more so as members of society, where it lurks in our collective unconscious. After all, at every Mass we remember that respected leaders, unquestioningly convinced of their own rightness, calmly condemned Jesus to death; and the crowds went along with them.

A society cannot survive if people insist simply on their personal rights, even legitimate rights. Society is built on commonly accepted responsibilities to the common good. More than that. Responsibilities call for wisdom, thoughtfulness and respect, even common sense. 

There is a constant need to challenge important opinions and attitudes on which people disagree; and that provides scope to ridicule pretension. Yet ridicule can degenerate into a form of violence. There is a world of difference between the cartoons of Michael Leunig and those on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. If people genuinely want to convince others and work towards change, they need to work out how best to succeed; and that can rule out otherwise legitimate options. Even in the family you learn that there are times when you consider your words carefully, even hold your tongue, and when you do not insist on your rights.

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus will warn that Satan does not cast out Satan. [He could less cryptically have said that violence does not cast out violence.] He then added, But if by the Spirit of God I cast out devils, then know that the Kingdom of God has overtaken you. The Spirit of God is the power of God. That divine power is never the clenched fist nor the gun nor the hateful sneer but the power of truth and love. And it is at work. More and more people are coming to see that violence does not, after all, cast out violence, coming to say, "Not in my name". The Kingdom of God is steadily overtaking us!