Adapted from Gerhard Lohfink’s The Most Important Words of Jesus
It is not with the help of the head of all demons that Jesus drives out demons, but with the aid of God. “In my exorcisms,” Jesus says, “the reign of God has already come to you.”
How did [people] get into these [Gospel] situations of unfreedom and compulsion? Sometimes it was their own fault, but much more often it was the result of the egoism, thoughtlessness, lies, heartlessness, and mechanisms of oppression that characterized the societies in which they lived. And it is precisely the weak, the marginalized, the sensitive people within society who are handed over to those powers.
Jesus must have possessed a profound power to bring such need to light, to employ a vocabulary that took the misery of affected persons seriously, to stand up against the underlying evil, and to heal the disempowered. He thus demonstrated that he was the stronger one who could not be deterred by the wounds that evil can inflict.
It would be naïve to think that we can simply leave Jesus’ exorcisms behind us as a time-conditioned phenomenon. After all, they are his confrontations with the power of evil and everything in the world that is inimical to God. It is true that we ourselves have to confront the demons of society in a different way, but the measure of what we do must remain Jesus himself: he who could not allow God’s good creation, and above all the human beings within it, to be spoiled and destroyed by the power of evil.
