Jesus was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered.
This morning I speak to you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. I can do so because I was ordained 21 years ago into the Apostolic ministry that goes all the way back to Jesus’ chosen Apostles. I did not receive Apostolic order from the faculty of Duke Divinity School. A Bishop who had been consecrated by other Bishops who themselves had been consecrated by other Bishops in Apostolic Succession ordained me. This is why I, and our other priests and deacons, may speak to you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. I say this because so much of our text today revolves around the question: “by what authority does Jesus teach and act?”
As your priest, one of my driving concerns is to build up your trust in the Bible and especially in the New Testament. Not because the Old Testament is secondary but because the New Testament is a precious and reliable collection of Apostolic memories, of eye-witness recollections, of the life, death and resurrection of our precious Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And in his life all the Prophets and the Law has been fulfilled. I am as certain of this – of the authenticity, of the candidness, the truthful history of the New Testament – I am as certain of this pulpit I stand in, of this parish church that shelter us, of the ground under our feet.
And in addition to that objective truth, I am concerned to teach you a hermeneutic, that is, a way of interpreting these weird and undomesticated narratives that have been handed down to us. Mainly I want you learn not to read them apart from the Common Prayer of the Church. It is Common Prayer that provides us with the hermeneutical grid we must have to “rightly divide the Word of truth.”
The great New Testament scholar E.C. Hoskyns described the proper end of New Testament studies: “You look down your critical microscope at the New Testament text with a view to describing the religious life of the first-century Christians, and you find that God is looking back at you through the microscope and declaring you to be a sinner.” That is why I am just as concerned that you present yourself to the these narratives as a pliant and living sacrifice. In short that you and I open our life to the living Word of God, so that this text may interpret, may judge, and may form our life according to the will of him who loved us and died for us on the Cross.
Now let us look today’s text.
Jesus was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered.
There is no question that a demon came out of the person and the person spoke. No one denied that. What Luke wants us to see is that this miracle did not automatically win the people over. Some said out loud that Jesus was able to do what he did because he was in leagues with Beelzebub – The Lord of the Flies – Satan. Others were more cautious, and yet wanted to see more miracles before they made up their minds. Jesus answered that Satan’s kingdom, like any other kingdom, would fall apart – house falling upon house – if it were divided against itself. Besides that, there were sufficient miracles already to make up your mind about Jesus.
To get some perspective we need to back up to Luke Chapter Four. There is recorded the occasion when Jesus was preaching in a synagogue in the city of Capernaum. The people were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority. Luke is literally describing the way the people were taking his manner of teaching. But just then a man in the synagogue began shouting at Jesus. Luke tells us that he was possessed by a demon and it was the demon speaking:
“Let me be. I know who you are Jesus the Nazarene, the Holy One of God! You have come to destroy us!”
Jesus said: “Be quite and come out of him!”
Luke says that the demon immediately came out without harming the man. Luke underlines this point: “without harming the man.” Here is the point I want you to get: Jesus came into this world to save us, but the demon was right: Jesus was intent upon the total destruction of the demonic world. To save mankind he had to tear down, he had to bring devastation upon the invisible demonic kingdom. That is exactly what Jesus and his disciples were doing.
From our text today just back up one Chapter of Luke’s Gospel and there you will read of our Lord sending out his disciples to teach, to heal and to cast out demons. When his disciples returned to him they were saying, “Lord even the demons are subject to us in your Name!”
And He said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Jesus said, later on in our text:
“And if I by Beelzebud cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore shall they be your judges.”
The “your sons” Jesus is referring to are his own disciples, true sons of Israel. I want you to understand that Jesus’ reputation as a healer and teacher was due to his reputation as an exorcist. Remember last week that the healing of the Gentile woman’s daughter involved casting out a demon. Israel had never seen an exorcist like Jesus. Everywhere he went, before he even said anything, the demons cried out in great agitation. And please realize that Luke and the other Evangelists and Apostles, and Jesus, understand these events to be literal, historical events. The occasion described in our text for today is not an artful metaphor or parable designed to speak about evil on the level of the pre-modern folk in Jesus’ day. His assumption was that he had entered a world through the incarnation that was infested with unclean, spiritual entities – demons that fed on human destruction. How weird is that? So how does your worldview compare to Jesus’ worldview?
“When a strong man armed keeps his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armor wherein he trusted, and divides his spoils.”
What is Jesus talking about? This is a description of a specific act of binding. The Strong Man who has a guarded kingdom is Satan and the palace and the armor represent his kingdom. The Stronger Man is Jesus and he is saying that he has over run Satan. He has laid siege to that kingdom of evil, he is stripping away the armor, which represents Satan’s power, and he is bringing it down. And Jesus is dividing the spoils with his own disciples. The “spoils” of this war are the benefits of salvation through Jesus Christ: forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, eternal life with God, and the souls of men and women set free from bondage to the devil.
The initial act of binding was Jesus’ defeat of Satan at the temptation in the wilderness. Jesus established his authority over that evil kingdom and then he began to delegate his authority to his disciples. The exorcisms demonstrate that the Kingdom of God has come upon the world. And now, in our day, with his death and resurrection, this little band of disciples we see here has become his Church. And through the gift of the Holy Spirit, by forgiveness, through the grace of the sacraments, we are equipped to live according to the will of God.
Jesus is a man of miracles and an exorcist. That may embarrass some people, but it is still the truth. His life makes no sense without the miracles and his exorcisms. He raised children from death. He gave sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf. The lame walked. He walked on water. Demons fly from his Presence. Miracles spontaneously burst forth when Jesus is Present. All that torments men and women, all that bends us down, all that breaks us, all that snatches sight, sound, happiness and wholeness from God Creature of Man – in the presence of Jesus all any of them can do, burning within, is to bow before him and declare: “Thy will be done…”
