As most of you know my children are all teenagers. There are four of them and, because they are all so close in age, they often share interests in terms of television shows, well at least the three girls do. One of their recent favorite has been Once Upon a Time which has taken all of our childhhod fairty tale favorites and woven them together with a modern day story. I can't claim to be an expert having only caught a couple of episodes one Saturday afternoon when one of them was on a watching marathon in the living room but what struck me was the real contrast in the show between light and darkness. The battle between good and evil. One character in particular struggled with, for lack of a batter phrase, inner demons, as she fought for a child who no longer recongnised her due to a powerful magical spell beyond her control.
I notice these themes present in many of the shows which captivate my children, these big powerful questions of the triumph og ultimante good and how that comes about. It is, after all, the them of movie after movie. The current trend towards dystopian tales like The Hunger Games and the love of old fashioned Superheroes surely points to a world where people are asking - we will be OK won't we?
Today's Gospel contains stories of Jesus casting out demons. To us that might sound a little like a farytale, perhaps a little caped crusader. But perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss the fact that we need a way to contain the theme of evil in out world.
The Graeco-Roman world, that world which grew up from the Greek empire and into the Roman empire and in which first centure Israel sat, had a very different way of looking at things than we do. It is not enough to say that they had no understanding of mental health and blamed things on little men running around in red uits - their whol understnding of what it meant to be a human being was different.
Being a person in the first century meant being a part of something - there was no split between being a religiong person and being a secular person, spiritual and psychological and, really, physical, had not been broken down into all those little pieces which we now understand. That fraction did not happen until the seventeenth century - at least not in the wat we would recognize it. Neither was there such a thing as science. Life on earth is much more of a continuous whole, much less individualistic and demons and angels are simply part of the way things are, part of the divine realms.
So what happened? Well quite accidentally, as we developed as a society we sort of swallowed God - we didn't really mean to. Just as a passing remark a chap called John Scotus postulated that instead of God being other, God was essentially the same just a little bit bigger and better. This really messed with everyone's head because eventually if you let this sort of thig go for a while you end up with no God at all.
Why? Because if you swallow God, everything that is good and just and true and wonderful up into one end of humanity - guess what - you kind of have to swallow everything bad and junky and nasty up into the other end and then what are you left with? Not much of anything. A sort of superhuman Jesus, who dies on a cross but does what exactly? Carries sin to the other end of a long continuum of humanity - well thanks......I guess.
So humanity ended up swallowing everything good and everything bad in something called science and feeling pretty depressed about itself, and frankly, quite scared because at the end of the day there are questions that science can't answer but science and faith have been set up against each other as if they are two prize fighters in the ring.
Back to demons. When Jesus casts out demons it is to restore health. Although we do have some clear accounts of a few people with demons in the New Testament we alo have these blanket statements which seem to refer to general ill health - we do not even know whether mental or physical.
If we look at human history and even at our current culture there does seem to be a definite question to be asked about the action of good and evil in our world. it does also seem that this has been linked at various times through history to both physical and mental health - but this is where we need to be careful, because this is where we need to step out of the boxing ring.
Health, especially mental health, requires, determination. If you are unfortunate enough to suffer from a mental health disorder you already know that. Putting the science of the medicine which can help you against your religious faith is going to be destructive to the highest degree. Refusing medicine on the grounds that religion is somehow superior is often a symptom not a sign of salvation - as is talk of devils and demons - and clergy are all too aware of this.
Personally, I am not completely averse to the concept of demon posession, but I have to say I have, in twenty years of ministry, only seen one person who came close to that category, and even then I was not 100% convinced that it was not severe mental illness. I do know there are things beyond our explanation and I do not believe for one second that God is just a bigger and better version of me - God is something so much more than that, so different, so other......so very big indeed.
Jumping to demons as an easy excuse when we do not want to deal with hard explanations would never be a good idea - allowing for the possibility that there might be some things out there that we cannot easily explain - I would go for that - but not little characters runnng around with tails and pitchforks.
I do think that by allowing there to be conversation beyond the obvious, be reconnecting with the mysytica - not the magical - but the mystical, we might begin to answer the longing of those who look to fairy tales and legend for reassurance. When we make God too small and too accessible we make God impossible.
A human Jesus, touched these human people around him, but he cast out cosmic powers of darkness - reflect on that contrast a while - the smallness of a human hand and the hugeness of God's healing touch.
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