I have long been fascinated by the figure of the satan. All that follows is largely the insight of Rene Girard whom I met personally now many years ago. Girard teaches that the satan is not an objective entity but the process of accusation that exists between people. According to the testimony of the new testament the Holy Spirit is the counter part of satan or the spirit of defense in the sense of us as brothers and sisters defending each other from accusation. In today’s lesson we get a presentation of Beelzebub.

The gospels present to us the figure of the satan rather than the presentation of an impersonal principle. I think that is because people as individuals are not aware of the circular process in which we are all trapped. The real manipulator is the process where we all try to take being from each other. Jesus calls the satan the prince of this world. The satan is the absence of being. The opposite the Holy Spirit is Jesus’ presence among us.

The satan has no transcendence. But the satan is real in the religious sense. Between us its presence is undeniable and formidable. Satan is at the heart of all disorder which stem from rivalrous relations among people. These rivalries both order and disorganize human relations.

The way in which the satan works is largely veiled. In Mark 3 consider that what Jesus was accused of was upsetting the status quo. I do not think that the satan has any existence outside our human relations. The satan is objectified because people clearly recognize satan’s work but no that we are ourselves the satan. When we moderns declare the gods of ancient peoles to be unreal we throw out the all too human experience that they illustrate. Jesus in Mark 3 clearly shows us that he understood the anthropological reality of the satan.

If we don’t see satan’s power anthropologically then satan remains hidden, satan casting out satan because then we can offload our complicity to cosmology. Satan is not God’s rival people are God’s rival.

That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God” is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but only fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross.

The Jews of Jesus day thought that Rome was the enemy but Rome was not the real enemy. the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. All humans have indeed worshiped what is not divine and so have failed to reflect God’s image into the world. They, and creation, are therefore subject to corruption and death.

The only way this great anti-creation power could be stopped and defeated was for Jesus, anointed with God’s Spirit to fight the real battle against the real enemy, to take the full power of evil and accusation upon himself and thereby unveil it.

The way to avoid giving this evil an ontological status is to give it an anthropological status. The powers and principalities are embedded in our DNA. It is embedded in the way we have always organized ourselves into community that is based on rivalry. That is reason why Jesus identifies the satan as the accuser. But it is also the reason he has no ontology. Satan disappears if people organize themselves another way. For example as in this new thing Jesus called the kingdom of God and Paul called the body of Christ.

Jesus rescues us from the deadly and sinful powers of the old anthropology and offers us a new way to be human, a new anthropology, a life lived in the Spirit instead of in the flesh.

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