Home
Meet Father KempThe Third Sunday of Lent
In Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, Pip, an orphan boy raised by his older sister and her husband, had great expectations, he wanted to become an English Gentleman and marry Estella Havisham, a wealthy young woman. These great expectations consumed Pip and sadly, he treated his friends and family with distain, a distain that causes him to feel a bit guilty. One day, Pip unexpectedly inherited a large sum of money and his great expectations started to become actualized. However, before he could become a gentleman, he lost his great inheritance and Estella married another man. Great expectations are common to man and commonly ruin men. There are few people who had greater expectations than Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries and many of these expectations concerned their long awaited Messiah. The prophets of old fueled their expectations when they foretold of the time when Israel’s Messiah would come and establish Jerusalem as the capitol of the world, Israelites would live in their promised land in peace, Gentiles would make pilgrimage to Jerusalem bringing the wealth of the nations, the lion would lay down with the lamb and children would play innocently by the vipers nest, the Dead Sea would become a sea of life, an enormous temple would be built and God would write his laws on the hearts of his people. The Israelites approached Jesus, as they approached all who claimed to be their messiah, with these expectations. There is one thing, however, they did not expect, they did not expect their Messiah to be an exorcist, they did not expect him to cast out devils. This was not because exorcisms were strange and out of place. To the contrary, they were common for Jesus’ question; “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?” implies that many Israelites performed exorcisms. I do not know why the Israelites did not have this great expectation, perhaps it was to common for their great Messiah and there are no explicit Old Testament prophecies speaking of Messiah acting in this manner, but never-the-less Jesus made exorcisms a definitive sign of his Messiahship as he said, “But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.” Because of their great expectations and because they did not expect their Messiah to be an exorcist, the Israelites interpreted Jesus’ exorcisms in three ways: they discredited this sign, they demanded another sign and they accepted the sign.
St. Luke tells us that “some [Israelites] said, ‘He casteth out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils.” Jesus responded to this criticism with a parable about a strong man being bound up and his house plundered by a stronger man. Jesus used this parable to explain that he as inaugurated the Kingdom of God and that he was their long expected Messiah because through him the power of God had bound up the devil. Jesus was the stronger man in the parable who had bound up the devil and brought about the Kingdom of God by releasing those whom devil had imprisoned. I and others suspect that Jesus told this parable to strike a blow at one of the most common messianic expectations, perhaps the greatest expectation that kept the Israelites from accepting Jesus as their king: the expectation that messiah would fight and defeat Rome and inaugurate the Kingdom of God by binding up Caesar. However, the people’s expectations were too weak, the people expected the messiah to fight against Caesar a puny temporal emperor rather than fight against the devil their greatest and most powerful enemy. We, however, are not different from the Israelites. We often reject Jesus because we expect him to make our life easy even though he said, “All who come after me must take up their cross.” We expect Jesus perform to perform miraculous signs on our behalf like wiping away our debt to the bank, even though Jesus has already performed a greater miraculous sign be wiping away our debt of sin. Jesus has so much more to offer than we expect, but too often, as C.S. Lewis says, we prefer our simple expectations rather than the great actualities Jesus offers.
St. Luke also records that other Israelites tempted Jesus by demanding that Jesus perform another sign for them, perhaps a sign that met their great expectations. Jesus responded to his tempters by saying “He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.” He then explained this statement with another parable about a demon going into the wilderness and returning with seven more demons. This is an odd parable, but when we see it as an explanation for Jesus’ preceding statement, it makes sense. Jesus is saying that he is Israel’s true messiah and those who are against him are against the God they claim to worship. Furthermore, all those who are against Jesus and try to bring about the Kingdom of God by any other way will only make things worse. The Israelites had been trying to bring about the kingdom of God for hundreds of years, very often through the means of violent rebellions. They were like the man in the parable who kicked out one demon and cleaned up his house; they zealously kept the external requirements of law or as St. Paul said “the letter of the law.” However, they did not fill their house with anything good, they did not keep the spirit of the law, they did not love justice and mercy, they did not love, and they were not patient, kind, joyful, peaceful, and temperate. This only made the problem worse, for the demon returned with seven friends and found the house ready to be occupied again. All their work, all their expectations only made their problem worse because as a result of their great expectations, they rejected Jesus or to reference last Sunday’s sermon, they suffered from severe pathogenic ocular dissonance. We are too often like the Israelites for our expectations make the worst out of us. We are like Pip whose great expectations drive us to mistreat our friends and family. If we expect Jesus to be a Cosmic Police Officer just waiting for us to screw-up so that he can give us a ticket, we will so timid and fearful of messing up that we will not go forth and love God and our neighbors. If we expect Jesus to be like the elderly King David, who turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to his miscreant children, then our lives will be like the lives of David’s children, full of uncleanness, covetousness, filthiness, foolish talk and jest, those very things that discredit us from our inheritance in the kingdom of heaven as St. Paul said in our Epistle. We all have problems that need to be dealt with and we all need be changed and true change is certainly and only found in Jesus, but if we reject Jesus because he deals with our problems in the ways we do not expect and then try to solve our problems on our own, we will only make our lives worse.
St. Luke records one more group of Israelites, these people saw Jesus’ exorcism and they wondered. They wondered at what this meant. They were willing to change their expectations in light of who Jesus was and what Jesus was doing. Rather than conform Jesus to their expectations they conformed their expectations to Jesus. Indeed, Jesus’ unexpected exorcism were pregnant with theological significance, they were actual and symbolic cleansings of a person’s soul. Those who were and are possessed suffer from pathogenic biological mortification: there is an agent destroying their life and obliterating their souls. Therefore, Jesus’ exorcisms are vitally important for as J.C. Ryle said, “The loss of the soul is the heaviest loss that can befall a man. The worst and most painful of diseases – the most distressing bankruptcy of fortune – the most disastrous shipwrecks – are a mere scratch of a pin compared to the loss of a soul. All other losses are bearable, or but for a short time, but the loss of the soul is for evermore. It is to lose God, and Christ, and heaven, and glory, and happiness, to all eternity.” Therefore, much like Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, Jesus’ exorcisms were a sign that true soul cleansing was and is found through him. There are a sign that Jesus was the true Messiah because through him God was acting to cleanse and redeem his people.
Jesus will never conform to all our expectations. This is not Jesus’ fault, it is our fault . Our expectations are often too small, trifling and more often than not, based on our own selfish desires. There is one expectation, however, that is a valid, true, good, and beautiful: we should expect that Jesus will drive our demons away. We should expect him to spiritually cleanse us. We should expect him to restore our life and our soul to health. This expectation is vital for the Christian life because if we do not expect Jesus to cleanse us and restore us we will attempt these deeds on our own and we will fail, we will merely sweep our house clean and rent it out to more numerous demons. So let us have a great expectation, let us expect Jesus to be our Messiah.
