Posts Tagged ‘Exorcism’

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Luke 4:31-37

So what do you make of the story we’ve just read from the Gospel of Luke?  Do you believe in ‘demons’ or ‘unclean spirits’ that ‘possess’ people and cause physical and mental illness?  Do you believe that these ‘demons’ can be ‘cast out’ and that Jesus had power over them, as this story testifies?  Or do you suspect that this story so heavily reflects first-century beliefs about human behavior and illness that it has little relevance to us who live in the modern era?  Is it difficult for you to make sense of “Jesus, the exorcist”?

Our ability to hear, to comprehend and to profit from accounts like this one from Luke’s gospel is certainly shaped by our modern context.  On the one hand, we are enlightened people, with access to vast amounts of information about human psychology, human behavior, and human illnesses that simply did not exist in Jesus’ day.  So we might naturally be skeptical about first-century assumptions about demons and demon-possession.  It’s likely that we could come up with a number of other plausible explanations for what might have happened that day in the synagogue at Capernaum that would make more sense to our modern minds. Read More