At a Manufacturer of War Weapons
(The Kingdom of God and the Casting Out of Devils)
our host: Protest Rally
We continue our search for the meaning of the Kingdom of God. From the irenic pair of mother and child, our roadmap takes us to three sets of protesters. They are waving flags and banners. One group is at the headquarters of the IMF-World Bank. The second group has formed a human barricade to stop trucks and chainsaws from hacking away at the few remaining forests of the world. The third group is massing outside the biggest manufacturer of war weapons in the world. Any of these three would be the next appropriate stop.
We opt for the third group, gathered outside a weapons assembly plant. It is relatively easy to see the obvious insanity that the arms industry is. In a planet inhabited by humans, there exists a business designed for humans to exterminate humans. And make a living in the process! We need to be exorcised from such madness.
A Militarized World. Centuries ago, Isaiah dreamt of a world in which the items of war—soldier’s boots and clothing soaked in blood—would be thrown as fuel into the fire, to be erased from human memory and experience (Isa 9:5). How near is humanity to such a world after centuries of technological pole-vaulting? Goons and guns sow terror in otherwise quiet villages of peace-loving peasants. Super-powers and aspiring superpowers flex nuclear muscles. A highly militarized world is one of the materializations of the forces of darkness.
The Kingdom of God and the Defeat of Satanic Forces
Reign of God Defeats Reign of Satan. In Jesus’ time, it was a belief that the earth was under the reign of Satan. This was the outlook of people who belonged to what is called the apocalyptic tradition. Evil was not just an impersonal force. It was a ‘someone.’ Satan was one of the names given to this personalized evil force in the world. He and his army worked evil in the world, causing sin, sickness, suffering, oppression, war, and death. The expected salvation would take the form of the destruction of the reign of Satan by the coming Reign of God. The coming of the Kingdom of God meant the defeat of the evil one and his rule.
Jesus Casts Out Satan. Our hosts have copies of the Bible. As we sit around in a circle, they open to these passages:
That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.’ (Mt 8:16-17)
Jesus Vanquishes Satan. Satan was thought to exercise his sway over individuals, causing physical or mental affliction; over nature, causing calamities; or over history and the world, engineering the inhumanity of the Roman Empire. In the gospels, Jesus is portrayed as vanquishing the power of Satan in individual people’s lives.37 Satan is the strong man who is now being bound and whose house is being plundered by Jesus (see Mk 3:22-26).
Today
To Be Exorcised Today. We come back to our hosts, staging a protest outside an assembly plant. The Kingdom of God is far from our reach, our hosts say, as long as there exist people who produce guns, warplanes, tanks and chemical weapons of mass destruction. The production of these instruments of war is itself a big multi-billion business. It is in the service of other multi-billion dollar businesses that create the family of the super-rich existing in the same planet as their destitute brothers and sisters do. The mentality of war peddling is one of the evils that needs to be cast out of our system.
A Kingdom-Blessing. In the gospels, the destruction of satanic powers then is one of the Kingdom-blessings. It remains so today.
Outside the barricades and fences of this arms factory, we form a circle with our protesting friends. We move into silence. We meditate. These friends of ours are old hands at activism. They have realized for some time that the price of non-silence is burn-out. They also have realized that energy comes, yes, from the poor, but also from silence. So we sit now, silent shoulder to silent shoulder. We feel that we are receiving from and sending healing energies to the universe, similar to those that radiated from Jesus when he dethroned the forces of Satan.
Be Still and Know …