Mtr Kelli Joyce

They were all amazed and kept saying to one another, ‘What kind of utterance is this? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and out they come!’

Friends in Christ,

Did you know that Jesus spends more time in the Gospels casting out unclean spirits than he does healing the paralyzed, deaf, blind, and sick combined? This part of his ministry amazed those who saw it, and was important to those who wrote down the accounts of his life.

Contemporary reader like us don’t know exactly what to make of these stories. Some speculate about natural causes for the symptoms Jesus cured - maybe it was epilepsy, or some sort of profound mental illness. Others choose to gloss over these passages altogether. I find both of these approaches extremely sympathetic, since I myself have no idea what to make of the evangelists’ stories about Christ intervening to free people from the power of unclean spirits. But I don’t think either of these approaches is quite sufficient to deal with what we actually see in the text.

I’m not going to launch into a long speculation about demons, don’t worry. All I want to say is this - these stories tell us that there are powers in this world that want to harm God’s children. And they don’t just afflict us from without - they can find their way into our very selves, and torment us from within. And Jesus of Nazareth has absolute authority over such powers. When we are afflicted in body or mind, Christ can work to heal us through the care of physicians and mental health professionals. There is no affliction of body, mind, or spirit we can face that Jesus is unconcerned with. When we suffer, Christ seeks our healing and our wholeness. And these stories show us that he cares about the stigmatized and the “dangerous” as much as he does the sympathetic and the safe.

And if that is how Jesus cares, we must too.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli