Evil spirits confess Jesus’ name

January 21, 2016 Thursday, 2nd Week in Ordinary Time 1st Reading:1 Sm 18: 6-9; 19: 1-7 Gospel:Mk3:7–12

Jesus and his disciples withdrew to the lakeside and a large crowd from Galilee followed him. A great number of people also came from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, Transjordan and from the region of Tyre and Sidon, for they had heard of all that he was doing. Because of the crowd, Jesus told his disciples to have a boat ready for him, to prevent the people from crushing him. He healed so many that all who had diseases kept pressing towards him to touch him. Even the people who had evil spirits, whenever they saw him, would fall down before him and cry out, “You are the Son of God.” But he warned them sternly not to tell anyone who he was.

D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)

Years ago a reader of this column asked for Latin prayers because he needed them for his wife. They had to bind his wife’s hands securely and tie her to a kapok tree thinking she was possessed by a demon. To lighten his mood I said in jest that Japanese words would work better on her than Latin. He laughed when I offered him the Japanese-sounding word: “Badbari!” (Cebuano for “Untie her!”).

Against the power of evil what we need is God’s grace, not Latin words. The Gospels show us how powerful Jesus was in addressing demonic possessions. In today’s Gospel, evil spirits cried out “You are the son of God”. It was the belief in those days that addressing a powerful spirit by name was an effective way of controlling that spirit. More than confessing the name of Jesus these evil spirits attempted to cast a spell on him. But they failed. Jesus was more powerful than them.

Is the devil still at work in our midst today? Yes. We are just so blessed that Baptism sealed us with an indelible mark as children of God as early as childhood. We have heard of cases of demonic possessions but most of them turned out to be cases of mass hysteria. We cannot rule out the possibility of real demonic possessions though. But it is settled that unless a person freely sells his soul to the devil, the devil cannot possess him to a level requiring exorcism.

But while we need not worry about demonic possessions requiring exorcism, we need to address the current tendency to control God. This happens when at prayer we seek to manipulate God into submitting to our demands. This is worse than demonic possession where no Latin or Japanese words can cast out. To be safe, let us always end our prayers with “Not my will but yours be done” so that our prayers may become real acts of submission to God’s Will.— Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: [email protected]. Website: www.frdan.org.

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