Christ’s Driving Out the Ruler of this World, 10th Sunday (B), June 10, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
June 10, 2018
Gen 3:9-15, Ps 130, 2 Cor 4:13-5:1, Mk 3:20-35

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

First time in 21 years

This is a very rare Sunday. The last time the Church celebrated the 10th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, was in 1997, two years before I was ordained a priest. In most years, the 10th Sunday will be suppressed by the Feast of the Holy Trinity or Corpus Christi, both of which outrank Sundays in Ordinary Time. This year, however, we have the privilege to be able to focus together on the important message of today’s readings, which describe for us the work of the devil, Christ’s response to him, and what he wants our response to be.

The devil’s empty seductions

First, we have the work of the evil one. We see it in today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis. He successfully seduced Eve and Adam to distrust God and eat of the fruit of the one tree in the Garden that God had explicitly forbidden them to consume. The devil had tempted them to eat it saying that they would become like God. God, however, had made us in his image and likeness. His whole plan for us was to help us to become more and more like him. But the devil, rather, wanted them to become not like God but like him, disobedient and distrustful. To lives like God in his image means not only that we think and choose like God, but that we exist in a loving communion of persons, and we see that that’s what the devil, through getting us to sin, seeks to rupture. Immediately after the sin, Adam and Eve hid themselves from God because they were afraid of him, they covered their most vulnerable parts because they were afraid of each other, and none could take responsibility for one’s choices: Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the devil. The devil always seeks to get us to sin by distrusting God and his promises and then he seeks to disrupt the communion with we with God, with each other, and even within ourselves.

Today in the Gospel, we see the continuous work of the devil. Various of Jesus’ relatives came to seize Jesus saying “He is out of his mind.” They evidently couldn’t understand why he would leave his job in Nazareth, surround himself by a bunch of fishermen, tax collectors, zealots and others, preaching in such a way that many of the religious leaders of the time — the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and eventually high priests — would turn on him to have him killed. They couldn’t deny his miracles and his exorcisms, but some of the scribes accused him of doing his work through black magic, casting out the little demons, we could say, by the power of the great demon. The evil one had gotten Jesus’ critics to begin to believe the lie that Jesus’ work was diabolical rather than divine. Jesus answered them quite clearly, cutting to the heart of the devil’s technique of dividing and conquering: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand.” The devil is a divider, Jesus is saying, and would never permit his kingdom to be divided because then his plans would be defeated. He would never turn his principal weapon against himself. Today the devil continues to try to work his plan of division, to divide us from God through sin, to divide us from others, to divide husbands and wives, to divide families, to divide countries into terrible partisanship, to divide the Church into liberals and conservatives, social justice versus pro-life Catholics, to divide us on music, to divide us on which priests we like, to divide us any way he can. Jesus prayed during the Last Supper that we might be one, just as He and the Father are one. The devil seeks to make us a bunch of isolated, unhappy monads, like we see the devils divulge in a possessed man elsewhere in the Gospel, who said, “We are legion, for there are many of us.”

Exorcism and Drawing

But Jesus is stronger than the devil. He came into this world as the “Stronger Man,” to use his phrase from today’s Gospel, to bind the “strong man” of the devil and divide his spoils. In the Gospel verse we quote how he does so: “Now the ruler of the world will be driven out,” he says, and “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:31-32). Jesus exorcises the devil by his crucifixion, when he was lifted up on Calvary, but in the very same action of expelling the devil he is attracting us to himself. To defeat the devil, Jesus wants to draw us to him in three ways.

The first is through repentance and mercy. In the Psalm today, we prayed, “If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, Lord, who can stand? But with you is forgiveness.” The Lord wants to forgive us. In the middle of the Gospel, Jesus talks about the unforgivable sin, telling us “All sins and blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” What is this sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes says that it is impenitence, which means either a failure to recognize our need for God’s mercy, a failure to think God has the power to forgive our sins, or a failure to repent and come to receive his mercy. “There are no limits to the mercy of God,” the Catechism declares, “but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1864). The only sin God won’t forgive is, in essence, a sin we won’t allow him to forgive, because we, like the devil, seek to hold on to our sin rather than let him take away our sins and those of the world. So the first response we need to have is a great love for the Sacrament of Penance by which Jesus, who defines himself as the Stronger Man in today’s Gospel, binds the devil and divides his spoils, allowing us to begin anew to be free.

The second response is by associating ourselves with Our Lady. God tells the devil in today’s first reading, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers.” He describes the scorn that Jesus and his mother Mary — whom Jesus would repeated call “Woman” because he would make her the Mother of all the Living as he looked at her as he was defeating the devil on Calvary — would have for the slithering serpent. Yesterday the Church celebrated the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary and we were able to celebrate how her heart was full of God and free of sin. Immaculate literally means without stain. From the first moment of her life, in her Immaculate Conception, she had this total enmity for the evil one and she wants us to have the same. Our second response to the devil is to entrust ourselves to our Lady, to her prayers, and to ask her to help us have that same scorn for the devil, all his evil works and all his empty promises.

The third response is obedience to God. In the Gospel, when the crowd said to Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters — his male and female cousins, because there’s no distinction in the terms in the spoken Aramaic of Jesus’ day — are outside asking for you,” he said that his mother, and brothers and sisters are comprised of “whoever does the will of God.” This wasn’t a put-down of Mary but Jesus’ greatest praise. Mary was one whose whole life can be defined by her response to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Her whole life was a fiat, an amen, a yes. And she seeks to help us to respond to the Lord in this way. We know that the devil’s great theme song is “Non serviam!,” I will not serve, I will not obey. He seeks to bring us from distrust, to disobedience, to disunity, to definitive self-alienation. The response of a Christian is “Serviam!,” is the desire to hear the Word of God always as words to be lived. It’s to say, “Yes!” to God, not “No!” Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family, a functional family, all of whom seek to help each other to put God’s saving word into practice, to do this in memory of him, to follow his example, to love one another as he has loved us first.

The devil fighting against God’s drawing us to himself in holiness

In his recent exhortation on holiness, published two months ago yesterday, Pope Francis wanted to wake us all up to the work of the devil in the world. In the fifth and final chapter, he said very forthrightly, “The Christian life is a constant battle. We need strength and courage to withstand the temptations of the devil and to proclaim the Gospel. … We are not dealing merely with a battle against the world and a worldly mentality that would deceive us and leave us dull and mediocre, lacking in enthusiasm and joy. Nor can this battle be reduced to the struggle against our human weaknesses and proclivities (be they laziness, lust, envy, jealousy or any others). It is also a constant struggle against the devil, the prince of evil.” He went on to say that the devil is not “a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea,” things that would lead us to lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable.” Rather the devil is “present in the very first pages of the Scriptures. … Indeed, in leaving us the Our Father, Jesus wanted us to conclude by asking the Father to ‘deliver us from evil.’ That final word does not refer to evil in the abstract; a more exact translation would be ‘the evil one.’ It indicates a personal being who assails us. Jesus taught us to ask daily for deliverance from him, lest his power prevail over us.” God’s word, he continues, “invites us clearly to ‘stand against the wiles of the devil’ (Eph 6:11) and to ‘quench all the flaming darts of the evil one’ (Eph 6:16). These expressions are not melodramatic, precisely because our path towards holiness is a constant battle. Those who do not realize this will be prey to failure or mediocrity. For this spiritual combat, we can count on the powerful weapons that the Lord has given us: faith-filled prayer, meditation on the word of God, the celebration of Mass, Eucharistic adoration, sacramental Reconciliation, works of charity, community life, missionary outreach. If we become careless, the false promises of evil will easily seduce us. … Along this journey, the cultivation of all that is good, progress in the spiritual life and growth in love are the best counterbalance to evil. Those who choose to remain neutral, who are satisfied with little, who renounce the ideal of giving themselves generously to the Lord, will never hold out.”

Being raised with Jesus

The Mass is a great means to focus on all of these realities. We begin Mass by focusing on our need for God’s mercy, crying out “I confess,” and “Kyrie, eleison,” turning to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and asking him to have mercy on us and grant us peace. We pray together with Mary and the whole Church as we listen attentively to the Word of God. We seek to obey what Jesus told us to do and do this in his mercy, not only celebrating Mass but learning from his self-giving how to say to others, this is my body, this is my blood, this is my sweat, these are my tears, given out of love for you. This is where we pray as a family, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” This is where Jesus, the Stronger Man, seeks to bind within us whatever seeks to harm us, draw us to him in his Passion and fill us with himself. This is where we prepare, as we read in today’s second reading, for the “one who raised the Lord Jesus” to “raise us also with Jesus” and place us with him in his presence, where he is “producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: