And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit of an unclean devil, and cried out with a loud voice, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God.—St. Luke iv. 33, 34.
The superstition which connects demons with wilderness has been used, as I told you last Sunday, to explain our Lord’s temptation. I shewed you that the explanation had nothing to do with the story which is given us by the Evangelists. They speak of no demons in the desert. They describe the encounter of the spirit of Christ with the spirit of evil; the test of their veracity lies in the experience of human beings in cities as much as deserts, in one period as much as another.
But the subject of demons is, as I intimated, one which comes before us in the Gospels, as soon as our Lord enters upon His ministry. Not in deserts, but in places of concourse, in the synagogues, we hear of them. We cannot evade them. Casting out the demons is connected with all our Lord’s acts of power. It takes precedence of all His other acts. If we follow the order of the Evangelists, we must not first inquire into the nature of His signs generally and then treat of these as having a peculiar and exceptional character. We must begin with them. If we can arrive at any light respecting them, we may hope that that light will guide us in the investigation of the purpose and character of His ordinary work.
Certainly there is no title which Christians so habitually claim for Jesus, as that of Redeemer. When we cease to acknowledge Him as a Redeemer, we cease to care for Him at all: His Gospel becomes no Gospel. We listen to any other tidings with more interest and more hope.
But if the New Testament is the history of a Redeemer and a redemption, how shall the Redeemer manifest Himself; what is there to be redeemed? The Evangelist assumes that the spirit of man has fallen into bondage; that if this be not delivered from bondage, he himself will remain in it; that if this is delivered from bondage, then highest of all must be the Deliverer. One who is above the man must speak to him, must awaken him, must stretch out help to him; he must answer the voice, he must obey the signal, he must grasp the help. It must be unseen aid, spiritual aid, through whatever audible voice or visible hands it is afforded. Such is the principle of the whole book. In every different stage of the revelation it is the same. A Divine Ruler discovers Himself to the creature which is formed to know and recognise its ruler; trust in that ruler is the act of recognition, is the mightiest, and yet the humblest, exercise of the subject’s energy.
But is this a general abstract doctrine? Are we to talk of a redemption—a human redemption—and not to see any individual instances of it, any illustrations of the principle and the power? If Jesus was, as modern critics say, an idealist, one who had a certain dream of benefiting his countrymen and the human race, but had not power to benefit them, it is reasonable to be content with fine words, with what is described as a “delicious morality.” His acts we must account for as those writers account for them. He must have been subject to accesses of gross delusion; when He had deluded Himself, He will have practised on the credulity of those who surrounded Him. That is one view of His life; supposing we do not adopt it, we ought to be consistent in maintaining the other. Supposing we call Jesus a Redeemer, we are bound to expect that He would give some tokens of redeeming power. We are bound severely to question those who record His acts, whether He did, and if He did what those tokens were. If the Evangelists can tell us of no such tokens, they are mocking us: if the tokens are not such as concern human beings, they are not tokens for us.
The Evangelists at least make a distinct answer to these demands, whether it is a satisfactory one or not. They fix our minds upon people who, like this man at Capernaum, had a spirit of an unclean demon. What kind of person can this have been? I can only gather what he was from the hints which are given me here and in corresponding passages of the Gospels. He had evidently no command of himself. His words were not his own; his thoughts were not his own. His words were foul and fierce; his thoughts were foul and fierce. You ask if these were phenomena peculiar to Galilee, peculiar to that age? I cannot imagine that they were. I think we all know that they were not. The language which I have used is that which we should naturally adopt to describe cases which most of us have seen. They may take various shapes, but surely they are to be found everywhere; the report of them is to be heard in every time. And in every place and in every time this calamity has been felt as in the deepest sense the subversion of the human being; the most awful, the most unutterable fall which any creature can suffer—a fall which no involuntary creature can suffer. If there could be a deliverance of a spirit from this abyss, that would be a sign, indeed, of the presence of One who was above the man, and who knew what was in the man; that would be a pledge of the overthrow of man’s oppressors, such as could not be afforded in any other way conceivable by us.
The form of speech which I have used at once brings us to the part of the subject from which we often shrink. Has man oppressors? That is not a question which we ask the Evangelist: we ask facts; we ask the experience and language of every people under heaven. The beautiful things which God has given a man oppress him. All the powers of nature oppress him. He is oppressed by his fellows; he is oppressed by himself. Is that the last word we have to speak? How then do you account for those cases to which I have just referred? How do you account for that desire in men to shake off a power which they declare that they cannot shake off? Does this power dwell in some visible thing? Is it not an invisible influence? Does it address itself to the senses? or to the reason, to the will—to that which the senses and all the energies of the body should obey? You know that this influence, this power—call it by any name you like—is actually felt and confessed. Well, this, from which the man needs to be delivered that he may be a rational, willing being, and may do the behests of his Creator, is here called ‘an unclean spirit.’ Is that a vague term? Certainly not more vague than our term ‘power’ or ‘influence.’ On the whole, rather more definite; perhaps more nearly representing the facts of the case. For that which speaks to the spirit of man must, one would suppose, be spiritual; that which controls him must have some affinity with him. But was not the old world tormented by superstitions about demons? Was not the sense of their dominion a main cause of some of its coarsest, most material, superstitions? I cannot doubt it for a moment; and therefore I require this as a necessary token of the true King of Men, that He should reclaim men from the service of such demons, that He should assert His own fellowship with the victims, that He should adopt them as children of His Father. I can think of no redemption which is more wonderful than this—and also more practical—more completely overthrowing the charms and enchantments by which human creatures, in that day, tried to buy off what they felt a real, however inexplicable, tyranny; more fatal to the pretensions of all who should play and trifle with the great diseases of humanity in the times to come.
It is exactly in this form that St. Luke represents the deliverance which was effected for the man in the synagogue. I cannot change his words without weakening them. The unclean spirit confesses One who is mightier than itself; the Holy One, the Son of God. That Holy One, that Son of God vindicates the poor helpless slave as His; bids his tyrant depart. The words sound strange, I know. I am coward enough to cast about for some way of avoiding the strangeness. I cannot find it. Let us fly from superstitions, says the critic. I long to do so. For I am in the midst of them. We do not hear less of spirits, less of spiritual communications, in this day than in former days. They do not assume less vulgar or less frivolous shapes. I do not perceive that cultivated men, even that scientific men, can point out a deliverance from such superstitions to their fellows; not a few succumb to the superstitions themselves. This language is very prevalent, ‘How little we know! there may be some communications with the unseen world; who can tell? if there are, why not these as well as any others.’ My friends, an old Hebrew said 3000 years ago, ‘I have hated them which hold of superstitious vanities, but my trust is in the Lord God.’ He held no parley with superstitions; he loathed them; they were all connected in his mind with visible idolatry, with a religion of distrust. He believed in the invisible God. He trusted in the righteous and unchangeable God: so he rose out of them. I believe we shall rise out of our delusions, if we can say to every man, ‘There is a communication with the unseen world. The Son of God has established it for ever in Himself. Therefore thou art not the servant of demons or spirits of the air. Therefore thou art not to play tricks with that which should be to thee awful, wonderful, blessed. Seek fellowship with the unseen in Him who is the Head of both worlds. Leave other roads to those who do not own the glory of man, his relation to God.’
It seems to me, then, most reasonable, not only for the sake of anything which may have been peculiar to that time, but for the sake of every time, that the Evangelist should give these victories over demons a prominent place in the history of Redemption. The impression produced in the synagogue of Capernaum is the simplest testimony to the nature of such a sign. ‘What a word is this,’ they said. There was the sense of One who did not charm away evils by a look or a touch. The calm divine energy with which He declared that the Kingdom of God was indeed among men—that God’s power was manifesting itself as of old, in breaking fetters, in setting the captives free—this came forth in the command that the unclean spirit should depart. The evil spirit was not the man’s lord. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them were not his. Holiness was mightier.
II. The emancipation of man’s spirit from these tyrants is then the first and highest manifestation of the Divine King. Were their bodies indifferent to Him? Did He care nothing for the plagues and torments which vexed them? ‘And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into Simon’s house. And Simon’s wife’s mother was taken with a great fever; and they besought him for her. And he stood over her, and rebuked the fever: and it left her; and immediately she arose and ministered unto them.’
The accomplished author of that ‘Life of Jesus’ to which I have referred before, made a curious mistake in associating the Gospel exorcism with the wilderness. That is said to have been performed in public places, in the synagogues to which the Jews most resorted. But this writer draws our attention to an important point in the history of our Lord’s acts of healing. He says that they are, strangely enough, said to have taken place in private, when there were very few to examine or report them. Very strange indeed that circumstance must seem both to him and to those who most differ with him—the collectors of Christian evidences who suppose that these wonders were chiefly done to confute deniers, and convince the crowd. But if Jesus was indeed a Redeemer—if these acts were acts of Redemption—we may understand that they were done for the sake of those who had need of the Redemption. We may believe that the King cared for His subjects, for the lowest and meanest of them, and did not care to use certain of them as examples of what He was not doing for the rest. Which kind of proceeding would be most like Him whom we read of in these books? The narrative of such manifestations of secret grace, known chiefly to those who were blessed by them, has little force as an argument. But it has told all generations of a King reigning then and ever. Such evidence would have been wanting if these acts had been devised to make an impression upon bystanders.
This subject will come before us again next Sunday; but there is in this chapter a linking together of incidents which I cannot overlook. The passage from the synagogue to the house of Simon, illustrates the change from the public to the private revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven; as the cure of the fever succeeds the casting out of the spirit. Finally, that we may not fancy any partiality to have been shewn to a disciple, that we may not suppose the King ever to lose sight of the people, we read these words:— ‘Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. And devils also came out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art Christ, the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ. And when it was day he departed and went into a desert place: and the people sought him, and came unto him, and stayed him, that he should not depart from them. And he said unto them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent. And he preached in the synagogues of Galilee.’
You may have asked yourselves sometimes in the course of this sermon, ‘But if this is so, may there not have been exorcisms in later days?’ I trust so indeed. If the King who was declared then lives now, I cannot conceive how He can ever cease to put forth this power, or we to be the better for it. ‘But were not exorcisms in the middle ages—are they not now, associated with fraud and priestcraft?’ Then certainly there is the mightiest need that that spirit should be cast out. The spirit of religious trickery, of priestly imposture, is the most unclean, the most devilish of all. And it is a spirit which the force of laws, the sanctions of civil judges, cannot reach. It goes beneath laws; it makes the judges impotent, or corrupts them. It flourishes wherever the belief of a present Spirit of Truth has lost its power. It never can be shattered by a scepticism which supposes anything to be possible because it holds nothing to be true. In the presence of a testimony to a real Kingdom of Heaven, it trembles and grows pale. When Christ baptises the nations with His fire, every mask which the spirit of lies has put on must be consumed. That will be the great final exorcism. But let each for himself long and pray that the evil spirits which have had dominion over him may be cast out now. Let us ask that we may become exorcists ourselves. For is not every true and loving man and woman an exorcist? Is not every one who will yield himself to be Christ’s servant, permitted to deliver his brother from some spirit which has enslaved him? Have not the weakest compelled dark spirits to cry out that there is a Holy One of God from whose light they must fly?