The sending out of the 70 disciples in Luke’s Gospel is a good passage for a newly ordained Deacon to have spent his first week meditating upon. It echoes many of the charges that I received from the Bishop of London last Saturday. But ordained Christian ministry is, of course, primarily an intensification of the ministries to which we are all called as followers of Christ. So this passage is addressed to all of us and challenges all of us, particularly in our modern age, in three particular ways:
– Firstly, Jesus calls these 70 disciples to a simplicity of life that is very far removed from our experience of life today in the Western world. They are to carry no purse, and no bag, no sandals. That rejection of materialism has certainly felt very distant to me as I have trudged back and forth to the Brent Cross shopping Centre over the last few weeks, kitting out my new home!
– Secondly, it is very clear that what Jesus is calling his disciples to is quite probably a ministry that will be rejected by most people. That’s a very uncomfortable thought because we all want to be popular. But it seems that for Jesus’ first followers, that was simply not a likely prospect.
– And finally there is some language in this passage that makes it difficult for the modern ear to hear: the casting out of demons (which I don’t anticipate being a daily part of my ministry!) and then, in verse 18, where Jesus refers to the devil. When the disciples follow his call to discipleship Jesus responds by saying “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening”.
The devil has been pretty much airbrushed out of the teaching of most mainstream Christian denominations. Even when it was fashionable to demythologise scripture, the devil didn’t usually get even that treatment; he was just ignored. But I actually think that this verse is the key to understanding this whole passage and that it can help us reflect on how we might feel able to hear Jesus’ call to us today to live the life of discipleship authentically. So I want to consider a little this morning what is signified by the devil in scripture and how an understanding of the fall of this figure might help us respond to this morning’s Gospel.
Insofar as the devil is spoken about today, a large part of the difficulty has been a loss of orthodox teaching about Satan towards something more sinister and dramatic, but untrue. Today people think of the “prince of darkness” of the horror film genre some kind of embodiment of pure evil. Many are also influenced by the Eastern idea of Ying and Yang a world of competing opposite forces of good and evil, locked in combat. And as a result many today think that the devil is some kind of anti-God an externalised force against whom Christians are in a constant state of spiritual warfare. This can sensationalise our fears, and I think here of the line in 1 Peter, used in the old compline service, that warns of our adversary the devil prowling like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour!
In fact, while playing its role in popular piety, this is not how the devil has been properly understood in theology. The devil does not have his own being or realm independent of God. The devil is, as we read in the books of Daniel and Revelation, a fallen angel, created by God and by no means independent of God. He is, on the contrary, parasitic on God and on God’s creation, seeking to distort how things are meant to be and preventing creation from flourishing in the way God intended. Milton gets it right in Paradise Lost where the devil is not a horror film Prince of Darkness. He is a sad figure, at once both tragic and comic, whose pride has trapped him in a predicament of his own making. His inability to acknowledge that he was not the top dog in the celestial hierarchy has resulted in his own expulsion from it:
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King!
The key words in these verses are “pride” and “ambition”. These are the all-too- human qualities by which the devil is identified. In this sense, the devil is very real and we know him very well: He is that constant turning of human desire from the cooperation and love that is of God towards an adversarial rivalry and competition, with all of violence, scapegoating and victimising that that creates. Thinking of the devil in these terms goes a long way towards helping us understand that difficult passage in the gospels in which Jesus rebukes Peter saying “Get behind me, Satan, for you are a scandal to me”. This is a response, of course, to what Peter perceives as Jesus’ resignation to his death on the cross, Jesus’ refusal to play the games of worldly ambition. Peter can’t cope with Jesus’ refusal to meet violence with violence and to deflect victimhood away from himself and onto another.
And don’t we all know deep those desires run in our hearts? How hard it is to overcome that instinctive desire to do better than others rather than to build one another up in the way that seems to be the principle theme of the New Testament. When I think of my own academic career, for example, there’s always been someone who I’ve wanted to do a little bit better than in the exam, someone who I’ve always wanted to believe that my thinking is more sophisticated than theirs, someone for whom it doesn’t matter so much whether or not I make the grade so long as they don’t. And the scandal of that for me is that that person has usually been an otherwise much loved friend.
So returning to our passage, why might Jesus say that he has seen Satan fall like lightning as the 70 are sent out to live the life of discipleship? Perhaps it is that in living this life, human desires have been turned from competitive rivalry towards a life lived for others. The disciples are unencumbered by the things that can make us competitive and they live in such a way as to put themselves at the service of others, listening to others, eating together, healing. They are proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near by doing what St Paul urges the Christians of Galatia to do in bearing one another’s burdens. Quite simply, this is how we fulfil the law of Christ, this is how we walk the way of Christ as Peter eventually did with Jesus to Calvary. And the glory of Christian discipleship is this: that because on the Cross the Prince of this world was defeated by God’s own submission to human violence, so when we walk that way with Jesus we too see Satan fall in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.
As we hear Jesus’ call to discipleship today, we need to acknowledge that the forces of human rivalry and competition have become more pervasive than ever in our affluent Western world. That is exemplified in what Alain de Botton in his popular book has called “Status Anxiety” and, as I read about what de Botton sees as driving contemporary life, what really struck me was that the real danger of our consumer society is not in material acquisition or wealth in themselves. But rather in that they mask, in so many cases, people’s need to feel loved and valued. And consumerism can only achieve that by allowing people to feel more valuable than those who cannot afford to buy the things and thus achieve the status that they can. That is so much of a distortion of what is the gospel tells us about ourselves: “do not rejoice at this… but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”. And that throws some light on the other difficulty with this text, of the unpopularity of the gospel of which Jesus warned us. It seems to me that that fundamental Christian truth that you matter because your name is written in heaven, you are loved by God is always going to be unpopular with those who have a great vested interest in selling people a different story about themselves.
So as we hear Jesus’ challenging words to us this morning we need to remember that his call to discipleship is a call to liberation. Jesus wants to liberate us from those things that distort our relationships with others and prevent us from living life in all its fullness. As Sidney Carter put it in a song of which I’m rather fond, “it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back”. It’s hard truly to follow Jesus Christ unless we turn away from the temptation to play the world’s games of competitive rivalry and human worth defined against other people. Instead, we were created to bear one another’s burdens and, as the diaconate reminds us, to be servants to one another.
For some disciples that will be the kind of ascetic renunciation that we encounter in this passage. But the calling of most of us is probably different more perhaps like the calling of Joseph of Arimathea to be agents of the Kingdom of God within our positions of influence and within the materiality of our lives. But for all of us it will involve allowing God to transform those desires within ourselves that are reluctant to bear the burdens of others and that would prefer to be the competitor or the rival. So my prayer for my years ahead here in Hampstead is that I will see Satan fall like lightning, both in my own life and in our collective life together, as we learn in the company of one another about what it means to enjoy the wonder of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Amen.