In grad school Beth and I had a friend who wrote horror novels. He was a Christian and would say that his fiction was “a portrayal of the darkness in the world, the conflict between good and evil.” Honestly, I didn’t much like his earliest books, which seemed fascinated with blood and gore and graphic violence, as well as the demonic perpetrators of all that.
I probably should also say that I do not much care for the “horror” genre in general. I’ve never seen “The Exorcist” or the many supernatural thrillers and frightfests it spawned. Yet as I turn to our text for this week, Mark 1:21-28, I’m reminded of all of that, a widespread cultural obsession with the evil side of the supernatural.
Even in the horror films and stories in which the “good,” sometimes in Christian form, comes to the rescue and exorcises or in some way defeats the evil forces, I am uncomfortable that evil seems to have center stage. That feels completely different from the Gospel story. The demon definitely has a prominent role, but Jesus is always firmly at the center of the narrative and in control.
The Gospel way of telling demon stories is a model for Christian life in responsive to pervasive evil in the world. The evil cannot be ignored, but power of Jesus Christ standing over and above it, and able to save from it, is where our attention is to be centered. I heartily commend words from C. S. Lewis’s original preface to The Screwtape Letters, words which have probably shaped my thinking about these things for fifty years: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to be believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
Other than my natural squeamishness and distaste for deliberately setting out to be frightened, I take Lewis’s advice to heart in regard to stories which dwell on and seemingly relish explicating and displaying supernatural forces of evil, believing such tales to be examples of falling prey to the second error Lewis named in regard to devils. But I also recognize that both my squeamishness and affinity for viewing the world “rationally” may make me incline to the first error. Unless confronted with a text like this week’s Gospel reading, I’m not very apt to take the demonic into consideration as a factor in most of what happens around me, even in my work as a pastor.
Honestly, I don’t exactly know how to connect what Jesus did for the man there in the synagogue in Capernaum with the spiritual and emotional struggles I see people facing today. And, while I believe that there is much blatant evil afoot in the world today, with racism especially seemingly willing to appear more candidly, I am also reluctant to surmise that there is an “unclean spirit” out there at work in a particular white supremacist or, say, in a perpetrator of sexual abuse.
Here again, though, I find Lewis helpful in a lesser quoted passage from an other preface to Screwtape, a later edition. Talking about some of the images he used to portray the devilish community as a sort of modern bureaucracy, he says that it “enabled me to get rid of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil…” Instead, Screwtape, his uncle and Lewis’s other fictional fiends are motivated by two things: fear and greed. The first is primarily fear of each other in the vicious diabolic pecking order, and the second is a kind of insatiable hunger to possess and control others. Put in those terms, it is easier to recognize truly diabolic motivation in many of the bad actors (and I must say systemic structures) of our world.
Yet recognizing those “diabolic” motivations of fear and greed in those whom I might be inclined to simply call “evil,” offers another point of view that goes back to the text. They, and I truly must and should say “We” and “I,” are/am represented in and by the man in the text. He is portrayed as so captive to the force within him that he cannot even speak with his own voice. It is the demon who talks to Jesus. The man himself is simply waiting for his deliverance, for Jesus to speak the words of salvation which will exorcise the demon and set him free. The Gospel invites us to sympathize with and root for the one possessed, to rejoice in his freedom when Jesus achieves it. It’s a viewpoint that we Christians may need to strive for a bit more in these times.