3rd Sunday of Lent 7.3.21 Demons
How did demons come into being? They were created as angels, and they subsequently chose to rebel against God's authority. This meant they had to be cast out of heaven, now in a deformed state.
From then on, full of malevolence they do everything possible to prevent humans from reaching Heaven.
They put every possible obstacle before Our Lord’s ministry, ironically defeating themselves when their orchestration of the crucifixion led to the salvation of the human race.
Our Lord combatted the demons in His time, and now helps His disciples to do the same.
The devil is likened to a roaring lion seeking whom he can devour (1P 5,8).
But much of his work will be done through appearing to be harmless, and even helpful, as when he tricked Adam and Eve; assuring them that it would be fine to eat the forbidden fruit (Gen 3,4-5).
He remains malevolent. His rage does not diminish. He is far more dangerous than any known beast, lion, or dragon etc.
We are consoled that we are also loved by spiritual beings (God, Our Lady, angels, saints) but it pays to remember that there is someone trying to destroy us.
We need to have a healthy awareness of the devil, not to be preoccupied with him, but at least aware. He cannot harm us if we stay in our domain.
One timely warning for this age is not to expose ourselves to practices where he is likely to be encountered - such as any occult practice, fortune tellers, ouija boards, tarot cards, etc.
We entrust matters beyond us to God, trusting that He will reveal to us what we need to know, at the right time.
Many people no longer take the devil seriously, seeing him more as a figure of fun.
This goes with a general permissiveness through our society, a sense that nothing is really off-limits anymore.
The Church used to say one could go to hell for a mortal sin, but somehow we
never hear that anymore (almost never).
Hell has not gone away. We may nuance things a bit more than in the past, for example, that not every suicide necessarily goes straight to hell (if they did not have full power of reason).
But the magnitude of difference between choosing Christ or the devil remains. Every one of us faces a choice to spend eternity in Heaven or in Hell.
All our moral choices should be made with this reference point in mind.
We avoid complacency, such as that referred to in today’s Gospel, that with one devil gone I must be home and hosed. Not necessarily.
The devil will attack as long as he can. And if we are still alive we are still potentially vulnerable. The man who thinks he cannot fall (1 Co 10,12) had better make sure he does not.
There are so many types of sins and traps. While we are vigilant about one thing, another might get through.
What is needed overall is a greater love for God on our part, so that we do not want to offend Him in any way.
We try to know the rules, and we keep them as well as we can, but our desire to please God is always the main point.
We do not become perfect all at once; it takes pruning and cutting, and learning from past sins and mistakes. We are all progressing through this.
We build up our strength, to become impervious to temptation, to present a stronger face to the world.
The world laughs at us for our faults. We must go from amusing them to startling them by the purity of our lives; awakening them to the true state of play. Every person, each person, faces eternity in heaven or hell.
Deliver us from evil.
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