Saturday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 5, 2024

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.”

“Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.”  The disciples whom the Lord had sent out to preach the Gospel have returned, rejoicing.  They are overwhelmed by the power of the Lord’s name.  In ancient times, to invoke the name of a ruler had the effect of making the ruler present In terms of his earthly power.  But the Lord Jesus possesses actual power, and so to invoke his name does not merely compel obedience through the threat of punishment, as in the case of a king’s name, but actually causes actions.  Thus, when the Lord Jesus teaches us to ask the Father for our needs in his name, it is as though the Son himself is speaking to the Father on his own behalf (cf. John 16, 23).  

The mention of the defeat of the demons brings these words from the Lord: “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.”  The Greek main verb is in the imperfect tense, not in the perfect.  More literally: I was watching Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.  That is, he saw the action of the fall from its beginning, when Satan was expelled from heaven, to its end, when Satan plummeted into hell.  This very dramatic statement is found only in St. Luke’s Gospel and serves to reconfirm that the Lord Jesus is greater than the powers of darkness.  The Lord almost sounds as though he were reminiscing of an event that occurred before the creation of the physical universe, but he is also making clear that the defeat of the evil one began long before and is reaching a conclusion now.

The story of the fall of Satan is found in Isaiah 14:12-15, and is best read in the traditional Douay Rheims translation: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? how art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? And thou saidst 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. But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit.”  Originally, Isaiah was foretelling the end of the king of Babylon and of his empire because of his excessive pride.  The Hebrew הילל [hey-lel] is the name of the morning star, which the Romans called “Lucifer”, and so the Church Fathers, seeing in these verses the fall of Satan, identified Lucifer with Satan.

“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 Lord Jesus gives them this power in order for them to carry out their mission of proclaiming the Gospel. The “serpents” and “scorpions” are inner temptations and outer persecution.  “Your names are written in heaven.”  That is, in the Book of Life: “He who shall overcome shall thus be clothed in white garments: and I will not blot out his name out of the Book of Life. And I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3, 5). 

“He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.”  Luke is telling us of the Son’s joyous marveling at the Father’s most marvelous and mysterious Providence by which he uses the least likely tools to build his most glorious Church, the New Jerusalem.  And his praise of the Father for revealing the Gospel to “the child-like” and “hiding” it from “the wise and the learned”, who reject it due to their pride, reminds us of how the Lord explained himself to the Pharisees as “the stone rejected by the builders” (Matthew 21, 42).

The Gospel has been revealed to each of us to treasure and to reveal, in turn, to others, and the Lord Jesus has given us also power over serpents and scorpions so that we might defeat Satan in our lives and carry out the will of God.