13 October 2023 - Homily for Friday of the 27th week in Ordinary Time – Luke 11:15-26

      This is the time of the year when we get ready for Halloween, for haunted houses and haunted forests. Halloween has become a very popular holiday in our secular world, especially with young adults and youth. In recent years, TV shows and movies about vampires, zombies, evil spirits, and ghost hunters have become very popular. Are these demons and monsters just make believe creatures for our amusement?  Can we take at face value the healing today Jesus undertakes of the man possessed by a demon?

       With all of our education and technology that try to find a rational and logical explanation for everything, with modern drugs that treat our diseases and mental illnesses, we might think that believing in demons would be for the uneducated and the superstitious. Indeed, when I lived in South American and Africa, belief in the existence of spirits both good or bad was a belief held by most of the population, whether that person had no formal education at all or had a PhD. I remember telling one of my teachers in seminary that I think we have lost something in the modern world by thinking that these good and evil spirits are not a reality in our world. She said she agreed with me. In some ways, I saw how in other cultures their belief in the spirit world here on earth enhanced their view of their faith.  

       In the Gospel today, the people don’t understand how Jesus can cast out demons, so they claim that he must have that power from the Devil.  Jesus casts out these demons due to his authority over them, an authority that comes from God the Father.    

        We are uncomfortable with things that we don’t understand.  But, in some ways, all of us have our own demons we battle with. We see how addictions have become so pervasive in our modern world, to the lives they have destroyed. We look to the mass shootings and acts of terrorism that baffle us and horrify us. Those things I would see as our demons today. In the end, I would have to say that language of demons and spirits has a place in our modern world, in naming the spiritual and moral issues we wrestle with. That language helps us talk about the real dangers that confront us in our lives here on earth.