Who is the Devil?

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

The devil is by no means an attractive subject for reflection. He is best avoided and, if possible, ignored, but I fear we have neither of these options. Satan forces himself upon us all the time and pretending this is not the case is like having a conversation, with an elephant in the room that we carefully ignore.  We all know it is there but are too embarrassed, afraid or polite to draw attention to it.  Well, today’s lesson compels us to take him into account, and so, what shall we say?

The first thing to say is that Christ has conquered Satan and therefore there is no reason to be afraid or to give Satan more importance than is due a condemned man who from death row still makes himself a nuisance. We speak from a position of strength not weakness, triumph not defeat, confidence not fear. For that reason I do not favor emphasizing what in some Christian circles they call spiritual warfare. I prefer a serene confidence in the power of the victorious Holy Spirit to lead and defend us, a bedrock assumption that wherever the name of Jesus is invoked the power of Satan is broken. However, experience of so-called Christian fellowship suggests that Satan still works a lot of mischief – probably because not all who invoke the name of Jesus really believe in that name - and so we should not be careless about him, but rather try to know as much as we can about him and his ways so that we might be wise as serpents and harmless as doves in protecting ourselves, our congregation and those we love. Who then is the devil?

The Biblical evidence is that the figure of one supremely evil being arrives very late in the chronology of the tradition, sometime in the third century BC, and as a result of the influence from Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persians that the Jews became aware of during their exile in Babylon (586-536 BC). The most extended reference to the Satan in the OT is in the book of Job where he is like the inspector general of the Persian king, going about the kingdom spying on and accusing corrupt officials. There are only two other references in the OT, Zechariah 3:1-2 and I Chronicles 21:1, and both of them are chronologically late. Through the six hundred years covered by the prior OT literature, evil was caused not by a mythic figure but by our own human wickedness and perversity. So as far as most of the OT is concerned we not the devil are responsible for our sins and transgressions. This is an important clue to the real nature of Satan. In the NT Satan (Hebrew) or the devil (Greek: diabolos) is a well-defined figure, and with him come the demons, who possess people and whom Jesus drives before him in panic. In this regard the NT is an integral part of the Jewish and Greek literature of its time, in which these evil spiritual beings are part of the dramatis personae of life. Who do the writers of the NT think this figure Satan/devil is? Here I want to refer you to a book that answers this question clearly and convincingly. It is Rene Girard’s, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001). I shall make available in the church office, alongside the hard copies of this sermon, copies of the Foreword to that book, by the translator James Williams, which gives a succinct account of the theory of Satan.

According to Girard, whom I believe to be correct in this reading of the Bible, Satan is a sociological phenomenon rather than a metaphysical being. This emphatically does not make Satan any less “there” or less operative. It merely provides an explanation of who he is, that is accurate to the data and relieves us of the burden of having to believe in the devils of the New Yorker cartoons. And in any case the metaphysical category of being is only one way of saying that someone or something is there. Indeed, many languages, like Hebrew for instance, do not use the verb “to be” in the average sentence, so that if we Christians had stuck to our Hebrew heritage and not become involved with Greek and its philosophy we might not have worried so much about the meaning of being and existence. (You realize of course that the question whether God exists is already begged because it assumes that God can be included in the category of existence, when God is beyond all categories). In so many ways we have been confused in our faith by the use of obsolete categories of thought, and thus deprived of the most precious thing in life, our relationship with God. We thought mistakenly that because metaphysics means nothing to us any longer there is no God, and thus the death of a certain kind of language has become for us the death of God.

How shall I in such brief compass make plain to you the vivid and powerful sociological reality of Satan? His name means the slanderer, the false accuser, the backbiter, the corrupt district attorney, the adversary. Satan is the false accuser and the Holy Spirit is the defender of the falsely accused. That’s what his name Paraclete means. So in the wilderness we must imagine Satan falsely accusing Jesus. Matthew and Luke tell us in detail what the devil said to Jesus, Mark leaves it unspoken. All Mark tells us is that the interrogation took place immediately after the baptism, that is, immediately after Jesus claimed his vocation as Son of God.

Do we recognize any of this? Do we remember any occasions here in our own little congregation when we have accused each other falsely, when we have slandered each other, when we have been driven by envy and pride to gossip cruelly about each other? Do we recognize in our congregation groups of grumblers whose chief satisfaction is to agree that somebody is worthless and should be driven away, so that we good, innocent and blameless folk can enjoy our group once again? All that, precisely that, is what the NT calls Satan. Who is the devil? We are the devil! For the sociology behind this I must refer you to Girard. Here let me attempt a thumbnail sketch that alas might do more harm than good, but I feel I must. 

The tenth commandment of the Decalogue prohibits desire, desire of the neighbor’s house, wife, slaves, live stock, “anything that is your neighbors.” This gives us the clue that desire is the root of sin, as Paul confirms in Romans 7:7ff. Desiring what the neighbor desires is the root cause of rivalry and competition, which in turn causes estrangement and even violence. This estrangement is weird because it consumes us. Fred Luskin, the “forgiveness man” (remember him?) told us when he was here, what we all already know, that the people you do not forgive rule your life. You are in bondage to them, they dominate your moods and defeat your trust, and lock you into the prison of your own resentment.

How does this dynamic of desire work? Well here you have to cut me some slack and refer to the Foreword in the office for more information, or better still, read the book. Desire imitates the desire of the neighbor. We learn from the neighbor what is desirable and thus we come into conflict with the neighbor, and eventually the neighbor becomes a constant obstacle to the fulfillment of our desires (a scandal or stumbling block) until there are so many of these little conflicts going on that the community must deal with them or dissolve. The community deals with them by finding a scapegoat, one person to blame for all the stress and strain, killing or expelling him, and then starting again, after a brief period of peace, to build towards the next scapegoating.

You realize that I have just described the Passion of Jesus and the Cross of Christ as the work and sign of Satan. For Satan is the name the NT gives to this mechanism of rivalrous desire, which it also calls by the name scandal, (cf. Jesus to Peter: “Get thee behind me Satan, you are a scandal to me because you do not think the things of God but rather the things of men - Matthew 16:23). The suffering and death of Christ was the work of a group or crowd, excited by its internal feuds and scandals and gossips and backbiting to cry for a single victim whom it might devour and thus for a moment have a modicum of peace.       

Amen.