10/13/2017- 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. I remember as a child how movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist enthralled movie audiences  In recent years, there are vampires, zombies, and evil spirits all over the place in TV shows and in movies.  Are these demons and monsters just make believe creatures we create for amusement?  Can we take at face value the healing today Jesus undertakes of the man possessed by a demon?

       With all of our education, with our confidence in our technology and our scientific methods finding a rational and logical explanation for everything, with the drugs that modern medicine gives us to cure our ills and treat our mental illnesses, we might think that believing that demons can actually exist 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 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 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 himself.  Jesus casts out these demons because he has authority over them, an authority that can only come 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 wrestle with, don’t we?   And we just have to look to the way that 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.  In the end, I would have to say that language of demons and spirits has a place in our world today 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.