Gods and Dragons

Scripture: The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 10), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The angels were first. That’s usually how the story goes. When God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, that was the creation of the angels—according to St. Augustine, anyway.

We tend to think of angels as fairies, or as lovely women with feathery wings, but in the Bible they are so much more. They can be monstrous, they can be beautiful, but above all they are powerful, vastly so. Scripture often calls them “gods.” The Church teaches that angels are creatures of pure mind, unhindered by any physical form, able to be anywhere, to be anything that they imagine, out there in the starry vastness of space, down here in the mud and the blood, even standing before the eternal glory of God’s own blinding throne. They are brobdingnagian.

The most powerful of all, the highest and mightiest of the angels, was called Lucifer, “the light-bearer.” He was a seraph, the highest order of angel, sometimes described as flaming heavenly dragons. Imagine that—the dragons of God! Lucifer was the finest thing God had ever created, second only to God Himself. But something happened. Something went wrong. What made the angels so special, so beloved in the eyes of God, was not their power—for what is power to God?—but their free will, their ability to choose, their freedom to love. Or to hate.

Legend has it that God showed them His intentions to continue the glorious work of Creation, the heavenly bodies, sun and moon, earth and sea, the wonders of life and the last, odd little linchpin: a hybrid creature, half ape and half angel, who would stand as the steward of it all, the keystone and crown of Creation. And then God would deliver the coup de grace. He would finish His masterpiece by entering it Himself, the Author becoming a character in His own drama. God would take on flesh and become Man, that the Creator might dwell within His beloved Creation.

This, however, proved too much for Lucifer—Lucifer, who stood closer to God, who knew better the glory of God, than any being in Creation. Surely, he demanded, if God were to enter Creation, it could not be through this mud-creature, this Man. How much more appropriate, more fitting, that God should descend through a creature of light, a creature of pure and flawless mind. If God were to be born into the world, then surely it was Lucifer who deserved to be the Theotokos, the bearer of God, the Mother of God. But this was not to be.

And so the angels raged, and there was war in Heaven, war before the throne of God. A third of them rallied behind Lucifer in all his terrible magnificence, demanding their inheritance as the firstborn of Creation. Yet the faithful rallied to a smaller angel, a lesser and weaker angel, assigned to deal more with earthly than with heavenly things. And it was this Michael who cast Lucifer out of Heaven—Lucifer, whose pride would insist upon being his own god—down into the Abyss, where he became the devil, the tempter, the accuser of mankind. He was no longer the bearer of God’s light. Now he was only the Satan. Thus did God separate the light from the darkness. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And so it was this serpent, this fallen heavenly dragon, who wormed his way into the Garden of Eden and put into the minds of Adam and Eve the same thought that had corrupted the angels themselves: be your own gods. A lie so seductive, so tempting, so delicious, that we just had to take a bite. And so mankind, male and female, whose immortal souls were endowed with the same free will given unto the angels of God, made the same choice and suffered the same Fall. Together we broke the world—Adam and Eve and the devil, together.

“Because you have done this,” pronounced God unto the devil, “cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” This is rather remarkable, when you think about it. We have no record of God cursing Satan for waging war before His throne—in fact, you might say that the devil got just what he wanted, a domain where he could reign far from the light of God. The curse comes when Satan takes out his fury on the newborns, the lesser creatures of mud and clay. Yet more remarkable is the promise that follows this curse.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” This, brothers and sisters, is a prophecy, and has been hailed as such from the beginning of the Church. The offspring of the woman—literally the seed of the woman—will crush the devil’s head, even as the devil strikes Him in the heel. So the moment of the devil’s seeming triumph will in fact be Satan’s ultimate defeat.

Stranger than this, mind you, is this phrase “the seed of the woman.” In the Bible, seed refers to the male lineage. Men have seed, not women. To prophesy the seed of a woman would be to imply a descendant with no father—at least no earthly father. This simple verse, Genesis 3:15, is known as the protoevangelium, “the first good news.” In it, God takes Satan’s greatest fear, that God would enter the world through humanity rather than through him, and makes it the downfall of the devil’s rebel kingdom.

For indeed, brothers and sisters, who do we know who came into the world as the seed of a woman with no earthly father? Who do we know who crushed the devil even as He was Himself lethally pierced? Who do we know whose very birth makes God and Man into one? This is none other than Jesus Christ, promised from the beginning of human history, promised to our first parents in the Garden of Eden, promised to crush the serpent’s head and heal the chasm caused by the spirit of rebellion and pride.

Keep all this in mind as we turn to our Gospel reading this morning, in which men of great power and learning, frightened by Jesus’ miraculous deeds and the threat that He so clearly poses to their authority, come down from Jerusalem to accuse Him of devil worship. “By the ruler of demons He casts out demons!” they cry. But Jesus rebukes them firmly. “You have it all backwards,” He says. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If the spirit of pride were at war with himself, then his kingdom could not stand—but stand indeed it does.

“We are at war!” Jesus proclaims. “Not at war with our fellow Jews, or at war with the Romans, or at war with any branch of humankind. But we are at war with spiritual forces, with spirits of rebellion and self-worship and darkness, who worm their way inside you, who corrupt your heart and mind and soul.” This is frightening stuff, real end-of-the-world preaching, but now that Jesus has made the stakes clear, He lays out His battle plan. “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property, without first tying up the strong man. Then indeed the house can be plundered.” What sort of parable is this?

In the Gospel of Mark, the world is occupied territory. It is the kingdom of the devil, the kingdom of sin and accusation. Christ has come to plunder this kingdom, to ransack the devil in his own home! The strong man will be bound and his treasures carried off by the invasion of the true and victorious King. And what treasures are those? Why none other than our very souls, my brothers and sisters. Satan claimed them in the garden. The spirit of rebellion and idolatry seized us from the loving-kindness of our God. But now in Christ Jesus, God has come in the flesh, come to crush the serpent’s head, come to reclaim His own.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus proclaims, “people will be forgiven for all their sins, and for all the blasphemies that they have uttered!” My God, what a promise we have here! “But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” What does this mean? It means, dear Christians, that Christ has come to forgive us, to seal up the chasm separating us from God, to wash away our very real sins and wickedness and cruelties. The slate shall be wiped clean, the balance set to zero! And the only sin that shall not be forgiven is the steadfast refusal to be forgiven!

In Christ the door is open, in Christ the Kingdom is ours, in Christ forgiveness has been bought in blood for all of humankind. “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters?” asks the Lord. Then He turns to us: “Here are my mother and brothers and sisters!”

In Christ the ancient promise, the first good news, is now fulfilled. The strong man is bound, the serpent is crushed, and his house has been plundered. The Kingdom is ours and the King Himself has claimed us as His very own! Go forth from this place and let it be known that in Christ we have conquered the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.