Saturday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 3, 2020

Luke 10:17-24

The seventy-two disciples returned rejoicing and said to Jesus, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.” Jesus said, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky. Behold, I have given you the power ‘to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”  At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” 

The seventy-two disciples had been sent out in pairs to various villages and towns.  Some planning must have gone into this enterprise so that a village or town was not neglected because another one had been visited twice.  The disciples had gone out to the towns as though fugitives from a sacked city,  with nothing beyond the clothes they wore.  But rather than returning to the Lord Jesus exhausted and dispirited, they arrive excited and joyful.  Many miracles and exorcisms had occurred through their hands: “Lord, even the demons are subject to us.”  The fearsome, snarling, sneering demons who had taken up residence within a person as though in a nest, were subject to these followers of Jesus who, up until a very short time before, had little to recommend them.  But they know their own mortality and that they had not accomplished these deeds on their own.  In fact, no one knows better than the miracle worker that it is the Lord who actually heals.  The healer feels no power running through him and may not even be aware that the person for whom he is praying has recovered.  There are no flashes or thunders, there is no music to announce the fact of the completed healing or successful exorcism.  It is clearly God, and him alone: “because of your name.”

The Lord then makes an extraordinary statement: “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.”  The Greek is better translated, I beheld Satan, as a flash of lightning, fall from heaven.  The verb tense of “I beheld” is in the aorist tense, not the perfect, indicating a completed action in the past that was done once.  Here, Jesus speaks of an event so distant in the past that neither the universe nor time existed yet.  It is in an instant following the creation of the angels in which they were offered a choice as to their eternity.  We read of Lucifer’s choice: “How are you fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who did rise in the morning? How are you fallen to the earth, that did wound the nations? And you said in thy heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High’ ” Isaiah 14, 12-14).  And to this, the Archangel Michael cried out, “Who is like God?”  They fought and the devil fell from heaven “down to hell, into the depth of the pit” (Isaiah 14, 15).  He fell as “a flash of lightning”, that is, instantaneously and shedding his brilliance in his plunge, for he went from being the brightest of the angels to the darkest.  This statement the Lord Jesus made told his disciples why his name had such power: because he was God.  Only God could have made such a comment.  “Behold, I have given you the power ‘to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you.”  The “serpents and scorpions” of which the Lord Jesus speaks are the demons, so here he confirms the power he has given them.  “Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”  That is, written in the Book of Life in heaven: “There shall not enter into [heaven] any thing defiled or that works abominations or makes a lie: but they that are written in the book of life of the Lamb” (Revelation 21, 27).  

The Lord gave his disciples no chance to react to this because “at that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.”  That is, the Lord and the Holy Spirit rejoiced together, Jesus rejoicing through the Holy Spirit, the Embrace of Love that bound the Father and Son together.  He prays aloud, and in so doing reveals the mystery of his Divine Sonship: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”  This reads very much like something we might expect to find in the Gospel of St. John.  Jesus reveals the mystery here in order to show his disciples that they are cooperating in the work of grace, and that they are the ones “the Son wishes to reveal” the mystery of God as his divine Father.  The Son does not tell them this before they go to the villages and towns because it would have been too much for them then.  But now, seeing his power work through them, they are ready.