Possession of Human Souls by Demons
23rd Sunday after Pentecost
Ephesians 2:4-10; Luke 8:26-39
We should firstly make this clarification: demons or evil spirits are malevolent entities which are mentioned more than once in The Gospels, which possessed people and which Jesus Christ expelled from human souls, thereby making people healthy. Similarly, in the present Gospel account, such healing is mentioned when Christ drove demons out of a man's soul, a man who had been running about “for many years” like someone insane and possessed, and, as testified in The Gospel, lived not “in a house but in the tombs.” (Luke 8:27)
The Gospel also states that although Christ healed this man possessed by demons -- he became normal, “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind” -- yet the inhabitants of the Gadarenes “were afraid”. (Luke 8:35) Furthermore, The Gospel notes that “the whole multitude of the surrounding region of the Gadarenes asked Him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear”. (Luke 8:37)
What could the Gadarenes have been afraid of: that Jesus might bring to their senses all maddened, insane people? - Obviously, that could not have been the case. We will not guess why, but it is quite certain that the Gadarenes suffered material losses when Jesus commanded the demons to enter a herd of swine and, as a result, “the herd ran violently down the steep place into the lake and drowned”. The material losses for Gadarene residents were obvious. But it is also clear that the Gadarenes did not rejoice at the return of the demoniac to humanity, to God. And from that we can conclude that demon-evil spirits were nested not only in the soul of that deranged man – in whom it was, certainly an acute form of spiritual illness.
Demons of profit, acquisition of material wealth and estates by any means, overwhelm the souls of many people. They silence the virtues and Christian consciousness of the members of the Church of Christ; they wreak havoc in the souls of the members of our Orthodox Church.
Let us take such a concrete, real-life example:
A complaint was received by the Consistory from one of our Congregations about the priest, the rector. He was accused by the parish administration of breaking up the church community and neglecting paying the congregation's financial obligations or debts. For this reason, they were asking to remove this priest and send them one who would do the opposite when it comes to finances...
Yet, the essence of the matter is this:
The priest was against having parties under the church before Sundays. There was a passage from the basement to the church, and although the door was kept closed during the parties, when people came to the church in the morning, it was filled with the stench of vodka and beer. Naturally, that alcoholic smell did not put either the priest or the believers in the mood for prayer or conducting the service. The administration, on the other hand, was mostly concerned with profits, so they felt the hall had to be rented out at all costs in order to pay off the debts faster.
The Consistory and the Metropolitan, having investigated the case, pointed out that the rector (priest) setting requirements or demands within the framework of the Church's statute and the administration must obey -- parties with alcoholic beverages under the church on the eve of the services there must be cancelled.
It would seem that the matter was settled and the priest would have peace of mind, but the parish council created such impossible conditions for the priest that he himself filed a request to move.
After some time, under another priest, state liquor controllers revealed major fraud by a couple of members of the council: much of the profits from those parties went into private pockets, people were given receipts for donations they never made, etc. Thus, those members of the council, out of a greed for profit, defamed the priest and made it impossible for him to fulfill his pastoral duties.
Those members of the board demanded the removal of the priest for the same reasons as the Gadarenes asked Jesus Christ to leave their Gadarene region.
But evil establishes its nest not only in some communities of our Church. Many church communities of different faiths have established a tradition and understanding that they cannot exist without bingo, raffles, entertainments and bazaars. In fact, that is a false understanding, because the Church can support itself through donations and the beneficial work of the faithful who profess that faith. Insistence on bingo, lotteries is submission to those spirits of malice that the devil instills among us. Let us have a correct understanding: there may be nothing wrong with those games themselves, if we use them, practise them occasionally for fun, but when we put almost all our hopes for the existence of Christ's Community on those games and lotteries, then we resemble that person who bases all his material support on lotteries.
The possession of a person by evil spirits, when they are obsessed with gain at any cost, inevitably leads them to commit increasingly severe crimes. When demons take up residence in a person's soul, they become a slave to sin, as if hypnotized, and commit acts that could horrify all normal people who adhere to Christian morality. Here are a few real-life examples:
1. In Ontario and Quebec, there was a group of so-called businessmen who sold meat from dead animals, or slaughtered livestock that was suffering from contagious diseases. These people considered themselves innocent because they were merely seeking to make a good profit...
2. In Ontario, a minister of the Provincial Government publicly stated that rumours claiming the mafia had organized crime in this province were false. A few years later, police investigations provided undeniable evidence of organized criminal organizations. The minister, being an intelligent person, must have known this himself, but he spoke with the intent to deceive, evidently deriving some benefit from it.
3. And yet, in another instance, a 25-year-old man became so proficient in killing, that he kills simply - for pleasure. For pleasure, he quarters a person (cuts off arms, legs, head)... It’s a horror, truly a horror - such people are worse, more demon-possessed, than the demoniac whom Christ healed in the Gadarene region.
And we are once again convinced that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so in a like manner, there is no emptiness or void in the human soul: if the human soul is not filled with goodness, virtues from God, if it does not abide in the observance of God's commandments, then it inevitably becomes filled with evil, with an evil spirit that comes from the devil – from the eternal enemy of God. (John 8:44)
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
