Friday of the Twenty-SeventhWeek in Ordinary Time
The demon, king of the idols
… For you say that it is by Beelzebul that I drive out demons. If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that (I) drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. When a strong man fully armed guards his palace, his possessions are safe. But when one stronger than he attacks and overcomes him … “When an unclean spirit goes out of someone, it roams through arid regions searching for rest but, finding none, it says, ‘I shall return to my home from which I came.’ But upon returning, it finds it swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and brings back seven other spirits more wicked than itself who move in and dwell there, and the last condition of that person is worse than the first.” Lk 11,18-26
Jesus as the first had to fight against the devil, the whose sole aim is to spoil what is beautiful, great and good, to make it ugly, small and bad. The strategy of the devil, in this activity of degradation, is to transform the human realities in idols. Occasionally, however, these are shown for what they are and the truth goes to the light. We have just witnessed the collapse of the world economic and financial system, built on the basis of banking virtual operations, if not just false. We can explain it in a nutshell. The money, which is a great invention because it allows the exchange of products and services, being free from the spatial-temporal limits of the barter, became the greatest idol of the men. In the last decades, every day, huge sums of money were and are still moving through the electronic communication, across the globe, without the use of banknotes and with full independence from the market of the products. It is the game of the speculation, which has converted the money from a “mean” for the exchange of products and services to be “self-end” and as such it has become an idol, more than what it was already. It was enough that a number of people have requested the banknotes corresponding to the financial transactions in place to unmask the fact that numbers inflated by only virtual operations existed. Those banknotes did not exist. The money, however, is not the only idol, there are others. Just think of ‘sex’, now almost completely untied from the ‘married love’; to the “power” being a purpose in itself and not as an opportunity to make an higher social “ service”; or to the “glory” pursued as such and not as the result of the human excellence. These are all manifestations of the incessant activities of the devil who, without pause, is working to transform what could help the man to rise in instruments of degradation and brutalization. Some have called the devil as the ape of God, which tries to make the same things, but in a negative and in a degraded mode. We thank the Lord who sometimes allows that the idols and the human machinations are unmasked and that the truth returns to the light.