| Get lost demon! Out. |
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| escrito por Fr. Juan Quevedo-Bosch | |||||||
| Saturday, 31 de January de 2009 | |||||||
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The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
The bad economic news does not seem to stop, they come at us at furious speed. Most of us from time to time become worried about the future. There is great collective anxiety seeping through society nowadays. It is hard to resist, it is hard not to be swept away with the economic tsunami the world is experiencing. Because this crisis is also global, and when America economic health catches a cold the world gets leprosy. Demonology evolved in Judaism under the influence of Zoroastrianism, which gain ascendance in what is today Iran about 500 years before Christ. Through the conquest of Alexander The Great it made its way into Western thought, so it is found in Plato although without the evil connotation, through Greek philosophy and culture spread it all over the known world. There is a number of interesting elements in the passage today. The impure spirit, was on sacred space, namely the synagogue, normally a person like that will not be welcome. It leaves to speculation to consider that the possession was not apparent until Jesus came in. There is a plurality of spiritual entities present to which the spirit refers to as “us”. The spirit recognizes Jesus divine nature by referring to him as The Holy One of God, and tries to gain control over Him. The pleading of the spirit with Jesus could be read in today’s English, as leave us alone, there is nothing common between you and me, or we do not owe you anything. The possessed lived on the border of the village social life, being a symbiote, deprived of agency for change, with the power to infect his affliction on others, host to a power that seems to defeats him/her every attempt at freedom, every attempt to crawl out of the pit of his/her own alienation. It is a power that renders its victim powerless and invades his/her soul. When we talked about cognitive or intellectual conversion, we discussed that our apprehension of reality and objective reality itself are not the same thing, yet one does not exist without the other. Critical realism is fully aware of the necessary interplay of this objective reality and our own perception of such reality. Consequently, myths are not to be taken literally nor discounted as non-sense, they are apprehension of reality that need to be considered critically. Looking at the passage with critical eyes then: In whose behalf is the impure spirit pleading?. Keep in mind that the synagogue was the center of the application of Law to daily life in a village and that Jesus has just called the fishermen to ministry and this is their village synagogue, where most likely they, the fishermen, will judge as deserters of tradition and dishonor to their parents. Scholar Ched Myers (Binding the Strong Man) offers the following response:. The impure spirit sitting in the synagogue represent the scribes, the lawyers of the Divine Law and its very complex and intricate, at least for an agricultural society, application. Jesus redemptive call to purity and wholeness then it is important not because it challenged the laws of nature, but because it challenged the very structures of social existence. His healing and exorcism functioned to "elaborate" the dominant symbolic order, unmasking the way in which it functioned to legitimize concrete social relationships, giving to it the blessing of religion. Insofar as this order dehumanized life, Jesus challenged it and defied its strictures: that is why his "miracles" were not universally embraced. Depending upon one's status in the dominant order, one either perceived them as socially deviant (worse, heretical) or liberating. This is a miracle not unlike his calling of fishermen to be preachers, or many other of his healing stories. The condemned are not any more. To the woman with a flood of blood he pronounces “daughter” receiving her back into the Israel of God. To him millennial hatred baptized with legalistic interpretation of the Jewish law is destroyed in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Uncompromising, whenever religion has become obstacle to God rather than bridge, he destroys it and liberates its slaves. We are often trapped, sometimes paralyzed by the enfolding events, stunted, bound by ropes of bondage that only seems to be multiplying. All seems coming from outside, from a power greater that ourselves, an active principle let loose on the world that seems to have become fixated with us, and like a invisible predator sucks our life-energy, our capacities to be creative, our God given abilities to love and receive love. But fundamentally it deprives us of our freedom to chose. To that entity we say with Mark resounding word: Schizo, rip apart, out you demon, out of here and out of our world. Out to our sins, Out to our self-complacency, out to our depraved dross, banality and indifference, out to our selfishness, out to this power stronger than us, that keeps us down, stepping on our collective heads, like the streaming of bad news of the economy, relentless, speedy and dramatic. We are not afraid of you, because in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God we tell you: Schizo, rip apart, out you demon, out of here and out of our world, that is God’s world. I have no doubts in mind that Evil powers are real, but they are not contenders for God’s power, they are contenders for the control of our feeble souls. They live hidden in the crack of the celestial order created by God’s intense and all-pervasive love for his creatures. It is in this vulnerability of God that we call free will where they live, because without evil we could not love God by choice. Instead of an oriental satrap, authoritarian and abusive ruler, we have a loving Father, who with open arms in Jesus to all of us, invites to join Him. Those whose eternal life is guaranteed by the blessed words of the Savior, are not afraid of the recession, are not afraid of their addictions, their proclivities, their own enslavement, because they know that our Redeemer [c] lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. [d] 26 And after my skin has been destroyed, yet [e] in [f] my flesh I will see God; 27 I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!
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