Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Today's Scripture
Today's scripture readings are fitting for the month of October, I think. They are full of demons, bad omens, and doomsday events - exactly the stuff of popular scary movies and Halloween haunted houses.
The first reading is from the prophet Joel (1:13-15, 2:1-2) and like many other prophets, Joel is proclaiming the day that the Lord will come to the earth, bringing justice. We often like to think of God as friendly, warm and and perhaps even a bit like a favorite teddy bear, but readings like this one from Joel remind us that while God does desire a relationship with us, God is utterly strange, alien, not human like us. Many scriptures speak of God's love, but God's love for his people does not always look like what we expect. The psalm for today (9:2-3, 6, 16, 8-9) helps remind us how love can and must go hand in hand with justice. God does wondrous deeds, God protects his people - but sometimes for justice to be done and for God to be able to protect the people, there is some kind of punishment for those who have done wrong. God's love and God's actions sometimes look and feel scary because God is not human. In the passage from Joel, he proclaims that God wants his people to return to him, to love him too. And importantly, Joel gives the people a way to follow God - declare a day of fasting, gather together with the elders - the Israelites only have to do as Joel says.
Then in the gospel reading (Luke 11:15-26), Jesus is shown casting out demons and talking about how to deal with evil. He tells scary stories of people who thought they were safe and then find that the very protection they had, the very armor they wore is now used against them by their enemies. He tells stories of demons multiplying into too many to deal with. Demons are not things we think about in the 21st century much - we relegate them to times and places when people were less reasonable. But as with the demons in the story, we, too, know well how evil things can multiply beyond our control if we let them. For myself, I think of how my disappointments or problems at work can easily come home with me and affect how my family feels too. My husband and daughter could have had fabulous days on the days I come home from work upset, but those days are ruined if I turn my hurt and anger toward them. And then, we all grump around the house feeling out of sorts, lonely, angry and afraid. If we are unable to stop the snowballing anger and resentment, it can even spread out to other days, and leak out onto our friends and other family members.
The point of scary stories is exactly to show the problems with evil: it drives us apart from each other, it isolates us, it makes us selfish and angry, and so on. That is why both the Old Testament and Gospel readings from today admonish people to counter evil WITH other people. "Gather together," proclaims Joel. "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters," says Jesus.
After all, isn't it the case that the best way to hear a scary story and deal with it is to gather together around the campfire, make s'mores, and hold each other? Yes, the world really can be a scary place sometimes. Evil happens. But facing it together is a remedy against evil, and more than that - begin together is what God calls us to do.
- Jana M. Bennett