Restoring the World - September 25
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 88; PM Psalm 91, 92; Esther 8:1-8,15-17 or Judith 13:1-20; Acts 19:21-41; Luke 4:31-37
I sometimes struggle with the stories about demons and evil spirits in the New Testament. Today’s passage from Luke is one of those stories: Jesus commands the unclean spirits to come out of a man.
This week, however, I came across an idea that gave me a new way of understanding passages like this one. In Practicing the Way, the book I referenced in last week’s reflection, John Mark Comer quotes the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann argues that miracles are not intrusions into the natural order but acts that heal and restore it:
When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness restores creation to health. Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly “natural” thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.
Comer’s point is that we are so accustomed to death, injustice, and chaos that we begin to accept brokenness as a natural part of the world. Moltmann invites us to see things differently: it is the brokenness that is the intrusion into God’s good creation.
Perhaps this gives us another way to understand these difficult stories. We may not always know what to make of the language of demons and unclean spirits, but we can recognize the work of Jesus. He confronts whatever wounds and diminishes life. Jesus is not disrupting a world that is otherwise functioning as it should; he is restoring a wounded world to wholeness.
Maybe the invitation in today’s passage is to stop accepting brokenness as inevitable. The cruelty, fear, injustice, and suffering around us are not the way things are meant to be. Every act of healing, liberation, mercy, and reconciliation offers us a glimpse of the world being made right which is the world as God intends it to be.
Faithfully,
John+
Reflection question: Where have you become accustomed to brokenness, and how might Jesus be inviting you to participate in his work of healing and restoration?