On demons and exorcism (Part 3): Creation as exorcism

“To this end the Son of God was revealed: to destroy the works of the devil” (εἰς τοῦτο ἐφανερώθη ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, ἵνα λύσῃ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ διαβόλου). This claim, made in the First Letter of John (3:8), isn’t a sidebar to what the original tradition meant when it spoke of “salvation” and “redemption”; it expresses succinctly what constituted its most fundamental conviction. It wasn’t meant as a metaphor; “the devil” wasn’t “symbolic” of “evil” as a generality; it wasn’t merely an abstraction personified. The Gospels make clear that Jesus presented his mission in precisely such terms (see, for example, Mark 3:23-27; Luke 10:18-20; John 12:31-32). In a very real sense – assuming we take the Gospel texts seriously and don’t lard them with modern-day eisegetical cleverness (which usually entails smuggling in materialist and sometimes political assumptions) – the mission of Jesus might be described as a divine universal act of “exorcism” (as that word is employed popularly). The kosmos – translated “world” in our English Bibles – had a terrible problem: it was possessed. It needed to be set free. What possessed it went under many names, but the text in 1 John names it “devil”; elsewhere, it is called “Satan,” “Beelzebul” or “Beelzebub,” “Belial,” “Dragon,” and so on. It is inseparably linked to what John calls “the Sin of the World” in the singular. As I noted in the last post, this singular “Sin” is “the demon at the door” in Genesis 4:6-7, which brings about the first murder; and this is what lies behind Jesus’ words about the devil in John 8:44: “He was a murderer from the beginning.” The devil – again, not a metaphor – has the power of death. He is the old “Serpent,” driven from Eden and condemned to “eat dust” – that is to say, he feeds on death, “dust” being a euphemism for death; human beings, destined to “return to dust” in the grave, are his prey (see Genesis 3:14, 19). And so, congruent with 1 John 3:8 above, the Letter to the Hebrews gives this as the explanation for the Lord’s Incarnation: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). What may not be obvious in all this is that, through the “destruction” of the devil and his “works” in this mightiest of “exorcisms,” the earthly creation is brought to its destined completion. I will come back to this.