Note: For Parts 4 and 5 of the series, check out my associate, Joe Iovino's blog at joeiovino.com, or download the audio on our website.
Matthew 12:22-32
Let’s begin with a quick review of where we’ve been in this series: We started the series by talking about the meaning of Jesus as emerging from the whole story of Scripture. We’ve often missed that full story because we’ve tended to think along a continuum that divides left and right, liberal and conservative, spiritual and material, and we tend to operate with a truncated or edited version of the gospel, depending on our position on the continuum. We began the series by saying that the story and meaning of Jesus doesn’t lie on this continuum, but is out here—a completely different kind of story with a meaning that lies outside our usual categories. But to get at that story, we have to be willing to embrace the whole story of Scripture.
In the second sermon, we talked about the perfect storm that was gathering in Jesus’ day: the clash between the imperial occupation of Rome and the Jewish expectation of liberation. But at the intersection of these two opposing forces comes Jesus, with a message that overshadows both expectations: the message that God himself is becoming king. God will overshadow Caesar, but God will also come to his people Israel in a way that did not fit their categories. Using Israel’s formative story of the exodus, Jesus begins to describe and act out a new exodus that will lead people to freedom from slavery to sin and death, and toward a freedom to grow into the image of God they were created to be in the first place.
Jesus leads that new exodus as God’s appointed leader, prophet, savior, and son. In the third sermon, we looked at Jesus’ mission – the mission of God – a mission to restore God’s good creation. Jesus came announcing a great Jubilee – that God becoming king was going to change everything. Those who were on the outside would be insiders, and those who held on to power would soon find that power pales in comparison to the power of God, who is coming to set the world right. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God was already arriving, and it wasn’t just for God’s chosen people—it was for the whole world, even the Gentiles like the Romans who occupied the land.
Joe then talked about how Jesus describes and embodies the work of this kingdom. Jesus describes it in parables—stories that invite the hearers to see themselves in light of the coming of God’s kingdom, and stories that describe how that kingdom permeates all the aspects of life. Many of Jesus’ parables were about banquets and parties: the ultimate sign that everyone was invited. Jesus acts out those parables by eating with people who are outside the continuum of respectability, and thus declares that they are welcome in the kingdom. The kingdom of God is a banquet where no one goes hungry, and everyone has a place at the table if they will only respond to the invitation.
Last week, then, Joe talked about how Jesus the Messiah began to carry out his mission as God becoming king. He talked about the expectation that the messiah would pave the way for God to come again and dwell with his people, with the temple being the ultimate sign of that dwelling place. The temple was where the people of Israel believed heaven and earth met, and they believed that when God returned that God would eliminate all of their enemies and make Israel a great nation once again. The messiah would cleanse the temple in preparation for God’s return. Jesus, indeed, cleanses the temple, but he also announces God’s judgment on it and on those who would use the temple as a symbol of national pride or as a place from which the rich and powerful exploit the poor. This temple would be destroyed, Jesus says, but a new one would rise in its place. The new temple would be Jesus himself: the one in whom heaven and earth come together, and one in whom both God and humanity fully dwelt.
That brings us to this week, and the second part of the expectation that the people of first century Israel had for a messiah. The messiah was to cleanse the temple and herald God’s return, but the messiah was also to be the one who would fight Israel’s final battle with her enemies. For first century Jews, there was no greater enemy than Rome, and plenty of would-be messiahs took on the role of trying to pull off an armed revolt against the occupying pagan oppressors. In fact, if you were going to be a messiah, you’d better be willing to fight.
In AD 4, for example—when Jesus would have been a young boy--a would-be messiah named Judas the Galilean led a revolt against the Romans over the issue of taxation. That revolt was quickly crushed, and the Romans destroyed the town of Sepphoris, just five miles or so from Nazareth. A lot of scholars believe that Joseph and Jesus were later employed to help rebuild the town, which would have been a constant reminder of the consequences of messing with Rome. Other military messiahs emerged after Jesus, like Simon Bar-Giora, who led a revolt in AD 66 that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70, and Simon Bar-Kosiba, who led a revolt in 135 that resulted in all the Jews being expelled from Jerusalem, and the emperor Trajan renaming the city Aelia Capitolina and rebuilding it as a Roman city. The point is: would-be messiahs were expected to fight Israel’s enemies. The downside? They always lost.
Jesus understood this as well as anyone. He knew that as God’s anointed king he was going to have to go out and do battle, but the battle in which he engages looks nothing like his contemporaries or even his disciples imagined. It wasn’t a battle involving fighting in the normal sense of swords and spears, nor was the enemy the kind that you could fight on a traditional battlefield. This was a different kind of battle with a different kind of enemy. For Jesus, the battle wasn’t with Rome or any other empire, but the power behind all empires, all oppression, and all of human evil. Jesus, the messiah, comes out to do battle with evil itself, personified by the figure the Bible calls “the satan.”
Who is this Satan? Well, most of us know him as a devilish figure who is all red, carries a pitchfork and has a forked tail. Some might think of him as the one who causes people to do evil things, much like Flip Wilson’s old character Geraldine who was famous for making the excuse, “The devil made me do it.” Others see Satan and his demonic minions as a constant spiritual force battling with angels for control of the world. There’s a lot of talk in some Christian circles about “spiritual warfare” going on around us all the time, and that Satan can be found under just about every rock. In some Christian circles, you’ll hear almost as much talk about Satan as you do about God—as though they are equal but opposite forces vying for control of human souls.
Well, a couple of caveats before we dive in here. First, I remember C.S. Lewis’ admonition in his wonderful book The Screwtape Letters. For those of you unfamiliar with that book, Lewis playfully writes it from the perspective of a junior demon receiving advice from his uncle Screwtape on how to bring his human charge down to hell. But I love how Lewis begins the book. He writes this:
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally please with both errors and hail and materialist and a magician with the same delight.” What we need is a biblical understanding of Satan and evil, and how Jesus goes out to do battle with him as the enemy of all humanity.
The word “Satan” in the Hebrew means “accuser,” and the Bible makes it clear from the very beginning that Satan’s main role is as the one whose accusations push people to believe that they can and should be more or less than the humans they were created to be.
Remember the snake in the garden for example, who told Adam and Eve that they could be more than human—they could be like God himself (Genesis 3:5). They bought the lie, and their sin, ironically, made them less than human, less than they were created to be. In the book of Job, Satan oppresses the righteous Job through disaster, but more insidiously through the accusations of Job’s friends and his wife, who keep speculating that Job must have done something wrong to deserve this. The accuser wants Job to believe that he is less than what he was created to be—less than valued by God.
That’s how Satan’s evil accusations work—they get us to believe that we are more or less than human. When we believe we’re more than human, better than others, we begin to “demonize” and dehumanize others as being only worthy of our contempt. We are right, they are wrong. We deserve the best, they deserve nothing. Evil and self-centered sin cause us to dehumanize others, and this happens all the time in our world. Lust dehumanizes people into objects of pleasure, greed dehumanizes people into commodities, war dehumanizes people into targets. The list goes on. We typecast people into the categories of “people like us” and “people like them,” never realizing that evil is a dark force that stands behind all human reality. We can wind up buying the lie that evil is something other people do, and that we’re the righteous, deserving ones. Satan’s work drives a wedge between humans and each other, and between humans and God.
But Satan can also get us to believe that we are less than human—that we deserve nothing and that we are nothing. Much of the pathology we see in people comes from a belief that they have no worth. The man caught in addiction, the girl who cuts herself, the woman who sells her body to be used by others, the executive who is working himself to death trying to prove his worth—all of them are caught in the lie.
Jesus understood how Satan works. Indeed, one of the first acts of Jesus’ ministry is to go out into the desert and confront Satan directly. Satan tempts Jesus to act as though his status as Son of God gives him carte blanche to serve himself and impress others—to be the kind of messiah everyone expects. If you are the Son of God, turn these stones to bread and eat your fill. If you are the Son of God, jump off the Temple and land unscathed and everyone will know you’re more than human. If you are the Son of God, rule all the kingdoms of the world just like the emperor. I like the way Bono sings Satan’s line in the U2 song Vertigo: All of this can be yours. Just give me what I want, and no one gets hurt. Satan wants to drive a wedge between Jesus and his mission. Jesus, of course, refuses, but in Luke’s version, the writer makes it clear that the battle wasn’t over after those 40 days. In fact, Luke says, “Satan departed from him until an opportune time.”
Indeed, everywhere Jesus goes he sees the same Satanic forces at work. It’s at work in the Pharisees, who divide the world between insiders and outsiders. He sees it in the face of those possessed by demons and who are driven to act more like animals than humans. He sees it in those whom society considers worthless—the broken, the sick, the used. He sees it even in his own disciples, who believe that they deserve places at Jesus’ right and left hands and who can’t wait to pick up a sword and join the revolution against Rome. Notice it when Peter says, “You are the Christ,” but then rebukes Jesus for even thinking about dying. Jesus’ words to Peter are telling. “Get behind me, Satan. You have not in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” Jesus sees Satan as the one who snatches away the word of the kingdom, like birds eating up freshly sown seed (Matt. 13), in the face of a woman crippled by ailments (Luke 13:16), and in the accusing role of Judas, one of his own disciples. This is a more insidious enemy than Rome or any other empire could ever be.
Indeed, when Jesus refers to hell, most often he is referring to a present reality. The word “Gehenna” is the word used for the Hinnom Valley outside of Jerusalem—a place where the garbage dump was—a dump that smoldered and smoked all the time. Many of Jesus’ warnings to Israel were about checking their idea of revolution against Rome—otherwise the city would become the trash heap. The way of violent revolution, says Jesus in effect, is the way of Satan. The destruction of the temple would be hell for the people of Israel—the end of the world as they knew it. But Jesus is offering another way.
So Jesus comes to do battle. But notice how he does it. In the text we read earlier, the Pharisees ironically accuse Jesus (note the parallel) of being in league with Satan because he casts out demons. This makes no sense, of course, because, as Jesus clearly points out, Satan would be stupid to be casting himself out of people. That may be the unforgiveable sin Jesus is talking about—equating what he is doing with Satan’s own work. No, this is the sovereign power of God at work—the kingdom of God is on the doorstep.
In Matthew 12:29, Jesus gives a metaphor for what he is doing: he is “binding up the strong man” (Satan) and “plundering his house.” How does he do this?
He does it by restoring people’s humanity. Indeed, everything that Jesus is doing—from healing, to teaching, to casting out demons, to eating with known “sinners”—represents a victory, a reversal of the effects of Satan’s accusatory work. Jesus makes broken people whole. As Joe said last week, Jesus makes the unclean clean just by his presence and touch. He called people to love their enemies, even the hated Romans, by humanizing them—going the extra mile and turning the other cheek. You don’t fight evil by perpetrating more evil, says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Violence crushes the humanity of both parties involved. No, the only way you conquer evil for good is with the humanizing force of love, forgiveness, and peace.
Indeed, the Gospel writers tell us that Jesus’ ultimate weapon in the battle against evil was unleashed on the cross. It is on the cross that Jesus becomes an innocent victim of the worst human evil that we can imagine. And there is Satan at the foot of the cross once again—in the voices of those who shout derision at Jesus: If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross. If you are the Son of God, show us the power you have over your enemies. If you are the Son of God…
And yet, Jesus doesn’t fight…he forgives. He humanizes even his enemies. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” The cross, the ultimate icon of defeat, somehow becomes the place of victory. We will talk about the meaning of the cross in more detail next week.
One of the questions that often gets asked at this point is this: If Jesus defeated evil, then why is there so much of it around? Why do we still see it at work every time we open a newspaper or turn on the TV? What can be done about that? It’s pretty overwhelming.
Big questions for which answers are hard to come by. It’s too easy, though, for us to see the magnitude of the problem, throw up our hands, and wait for Jesus to return to fix it all. The message of the kingdom is that Jesus will ultimately set everything right—God is becoming king. But as Joe said last Sunday, the kingdom isn’t just a future reality. It’s also a present one. If we really believe that, then it should change our approach from acquiescence to the presence of evil to active engagement in defeating it. As Jesus says in verse 30, whoever is not with him in this work is against him. Whoever doesn’t gather in those who are outside, scatters them. Therefore, I want to leave you with a few ideas to ponder in that vein.
First, the Gospels make it clear that Satan and evil aren’t just spiritual concepts. Remember, in Jesus’ world, there is no separation between spiritual and material, sacred and secular. All this talk about spiritual warfare in many Christians circles, I think, distracts us from the real battle that is taking place around us every day. If Satan’s influence was merely spiritual, then it would be easy to ignore or defeat. Instead, evil infiltrates all human systems: economics, politics, even the church! Walter Wink wrote a great book a few years ago called Engaging the Powers, which looks at how human systems become hijacked by the dehumanizing forces of greed, power, and violence. The apostle Paul uses similar language when he talks about the “powers and principalities.” He’s not merely referring to the spiritual realm here, but to all those forces that drive injustice and break down our full humanity.
I would argue that one of the reasons that there seems to be no abatement in the powers of evil in the world is that the Church (capital C) has dabbled to long in the spiritual realm and not enough in engaging the powers.
Instead, we often wind up colluding with them. We mesh Christian faith with political ideologies that don’t match up with what Jesus taught—and both the left and right are guilty of that. I am often appalled at the things that people claiming to be Christ followers post on Facebook about government officials, or the other political party, or about immigrants or the poor, or you name it. We can’t fight the powers if we’re using their language and their tactics of demonizing others. The Church needs to return to the language and tactics of Jesus, who ate with sinners and humanized everyone he met—even his enemies.
Second, we need to become more and more aware of the places around us every day where the powers are at work, and then stand up to them with sacrificial love. I had a meeting this week with some other pastors, the executive director of Tri-Lakes Cares, and the Monument Police Department, and learned about a couple of places where there are gaps that people are falling into. We have a growing number of children in our area, for example, who receive free or reduced cost lunches in our schools. The forces of greed that contributed to the downturn in our economy cause a trickle down effect that impacts the most vulnerable among us as more people continue to be out of work. Yes, the economy might be improving, but not in a way that helps these kids. For many of them, a school lunch is the only real meal they’ll get in a day. Many of them don’t eat much, if at all, over the weekend. Tri-Lakes Cares has put together a snack pack for students in that situation at Palmer Lake Elementary School, but they have not been able to cover the other schools. We have hungry kids in our own community, and that’s a systemic evil. I think this is a battle we can fight. I am proposing that as a church we take on at least one school in our district, maybe more, and provide TLC with all the food they need to make sure these kids get to eat. I have a meeting about this tomorrow. That’s a gap we can fill, and one more way we push back the forces of poverty.
We are also facing some severe budget cuts in our school district that will likely force families to pay for their kids to be bussed to school. Now, we can throw up our hands , or we can look at ways that we, as a church, can help cover the gap for some poor families who may have to choose between eating and transportation. I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I want to work with our district to make sure that those who need help get it. That’s pushing back the powers, even if it’s just in a small way.
I learned about those two simple things at one meeting in an hour. You’re out there in the community every day in a wide variety of places—places where the powers that dehumanize people are constantly at work. Jesus calls us to go to battle—to muster up all the love and courage and peace we can and fill in the gaps that keep people from being fully human.
The meaning of Jesus is a call for his church to get back in the fight—not with weapons and angry rhetoric, but with love, forgiveness, peace, and sacrificial service. Many of the great movements in history that brought about positive change began with one person choosing to stand up to the powers and say, “No more.” Jesus did that, and calls us to do it, too.
Someone once asked a wise man, “If God is real, why doesn’t he do something about all the evil in the world.” The wise man answered, “He did. He created you.”
Actually, that same idea is right there in our membership vows. “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Jesus was empowered to fight Satan on his own turf. So are we.
Jesus defeated the power of Satan. It’s up to us to go out and implement the victory until he comes.
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