Readings: Isaiah 66. 10-14; Gal 6. 1-6, 7-16; Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20
Theme: ‘I watched Satan fall like lightening from heaven’
How should we understand this enigmatic phrase? What are the scriptures inviting us to contemplate in this mysterious statement of Jesus?
To understand just what Jesus is teaching us here it is good to compare this statement of Jesus with another one about Satan that Jesus utters in the gospel of St Mark. The passage in question is Mark 3. 23-27: “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom is divided against itself that kingdom cannot stand. And if Satan rebels against himself and has been divided, he is not able to stand, but it is the end for him.”
This passage from Mark comes as a response from Jesus to the allegations of the scribes who were accusing him of casting out demons through the power of Satan. In other words, Jesus is explaining to us the meaning of his mission on earth. Jesus’s mission is to proclaim and to embody, in his life and teaching, the kingdom of God. The kingdom of Satan is opposed to this. Consequently, when Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God, to heal the sick and to cast out demons, he says to them “rejoice because your names are written in heaven”. That is to say, those who follow Jesus, the disciples like these seventy in our gospel today, belong in heaven. Those who follow Satan do not.
Hence, Satan, the prince of devils, as the scribes call him, is cast out as lightening out of heaven. This means that there is an almighty clash between these two kingdoms that is taking place in the ministry of Jesus: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.
Now, depending on your understanding of Satan, you will read this conflict in one of two ways; either you will see it as two opposite forces clashing, but with Jesus landing the knockout blow on Satan and casting him out of heaven. That is to say, he is cast out of the command and control centre of earth. Or, on the contrary, you will understand Satan, as St Augustine does. For Augustine, Satan is a fallen angel. He was cast out of heaven because of pride; for wanting to be the ‘top dog’, so to speak, in the heavenly realm. The problem, though for Satan following the victory of Jesus over him, is that in being cast out of heaven all that he can do is imagine an upside down world in which he is the ‘top dog’, rather than actually see the reality in which he is the ‘bottom dog’ on earth through resisting the coming of the kingdom of God.
However, following the victory of Jesus on the cross, Satan, the “strong man”, has been bound and his kingdom has now been defeated (Mark 3. 26). Satan has been relieved of his duties, because following the death and resurrection of Christ, he has no power to do us harm.
So, when Jesus says, “I saw Satan as lightening from heaven fall”, he is proclaiming the replacement of the kingdom of Satan by the kingdom of God. From now on, following the death and resurrection of the Christ, the kingdom of God is sweeping throughout history and transforming violence into peace, injustice into justice, and sickness into health. This is because through the death and resurrection of Jesus the old order has passed away and the new one has been inaugurated by and in the risen and ascended Lord Jesus.
This is quite a transformation, to put it mildly! It is the epochal moment in human history, inaugurated through the visitation of our God from on high who saves us from “the powers of darkness and the shadow of death, and guides our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1.79).
But the question remains, if Jesus has won the victory over Satan and his kingdom of evil, if the ‘strong man’ of Mark 3. 27 has been bound and his kingdom ransacked, how is it that things still seem so dark in the world? Does the fight go on between these two kingdoms with Satan bruised and battered, but still struggling on?
For St Augustine, the key to understanding this conundrum is given in our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The power of evil and Satan is only parasitic. It inverts the creation of God into a grotesque caricature of itself: truth becomes lies, peace becomes violence, health and wellbeing become sickness and misery. None of these are real in the kingdom of God. The victory of Jesus on the cross against the illusions of this kingdom of Satan means that the mirror which Satan has been holding up to us in history, using it to invert reality, has been shattered. It no longer has the power over humanity because Jesus has unmasked this “Truman Show”-like world imagined by Satan as but a demented fantasy. This is why our second reading, from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, says, “For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.”
The reality, as Paul and St Augustine knew from their own personal experience, is that outside of God’s kingdom, we are nothing. We are but an imagined mirror image of God’s reality; an inversion of the truth in the imaginative fantasy of the lies of the prince of demons. This is not to say that evil in the world is to be ignored. Suffering, violence, illness and death still persist as seemingly powerful illusions in our world. But the truth is, they are not real. As our Buddhist friends will tell you, they are nothing, they are not real, but only simply fabrications of the truth of reality molded by our desires into an inverted semblance of reality that we each struggle not to fall for in our daily lives.
Nevertheless, the appearance of this inverted fantasy is seductively captivating. However, for us Christians, we can say with Paul, that Jesus has “unfolded things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Mt. 13.35). As St Paul says, “neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present or still to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8. 38-39), Amen.