Evil, Restoration, and the Return to Community
“What an Excellent Day For an Exorcism.”
One of the reasons gospel stories about exorcisms are captivating is because we tend to view them through a cinematic lens. Decades of Hollywood horror flicks – from The Exorcist to modern sequels, books and films condition our imaginations. We expect convulsing bodies, dramatic screams, and high-stakes spiritual battles. Even stories in the Bible can sound like a movie script to our media-saturated minds. But if we pause to look closely at the actual ink on the page, we find a massive mismatch between our modern, horror film assumptions and what Jesus actually confronted.
The truth is, readers today approach these texts with a totally different set of questions than the Gospel writers were interested in answering. We want an operating manual; they paint a narrative portrait. Most of us want explanations where they tell stories. We want to know the nuts and bolts of how evil works but instead, the writers repeatedly show us how Jesus responds to evil.
Ultimately, when we look at the reality of what Jesus actually did on the ground, the controlling argument of the Gospels becomes clear. They always redirect our attention away from explaining evil and toward participating in God’s restoration of what evil breaks.
What the Gospels Don’t Say
When you look at current day spiritual imagination, it’s often marked by a fervent, fearful fascination with all things demonic. We’ve built frameworks that map invisible hierarchies, decoding territorial spirits, and analyzing the precise mechanisms of spiritual warfare.
Yet when you step into the Gospels, you encounter a posture from Jesus that comes across more like, “nothing to see here.”
Consider the account in Mark 1:21-28. A man with an unclean spirit disrupts a synagogue service, throwing a theological fit and screaming out Jesus’ identity. Jesus doesn’t get into a conversation. He doesn’t ask for the spirit’s ancestry. He doesn’t demand to know its rank in the cosmic chain of command. Neither does Jesus use this as a teachable moment to instruct the disciples about demonology. He essentially says, “Be quiet, and come out of him.” Just a short, crisp command.
Additionally, we see the same dynamic in Luke 8:26–39 with the Gerasene demoniac. Even when facing a literal “Legion” of fractured identity, Jesus doesn’t escalate into a complicated cosmic campaign. He orders the identity to shift with an authority as easy as A, B, C that leaves the local onlookers terrified. Not so much by the frantic chaos of the demons, but by the quiet, grounded majesty of the Man standing right in front of them. They’re so afraid, they ask Jesus to leave town!
The Gospel writers purposely refuse to play to our curiosity about the systems of the unseen world. They don’t explain how a spirit attaches to a nervous system or what the invisible world looked like mid-exorcism. They leave those blank spaces empty. Why? Because the truth about explanations is, they only require we engage the intellect. Stories, on the other hand, require us to engage in relationships. By focusing on Jesus’ response rather than evil’s mechanics, the text forces us out of the lab of speculation and onto the road of discipleship.
Evil Revealed Through Its Effects
It seems to me, when we leave evil as abstract wickedness and harm, we play right into the hands of the “cosmic attic.” Evil keeps floating around as an intellectual theory. But the Gospels refuse to be abstract. They show us that evil always shows itself through visible, and devastating effects.
In the New Testament, evil is a thief of human flourishing. These biblical scenes show evil as a series of fractures we can see:
- A Fractured Mind: A human mind shattered into a “Legion” or “Regiment” of screaming, self-destructive impulses.
- A Fractured Body: Total isolation, nakedness, physical bleeding, and the loss of baseline human dignity.
- A Fractured Community: A seat left empty at the family table; a neighbor exiled to live among the dead in the tombs because the village no longer tolerates their trauma. Evil wins when it drives us into lonely, hidden, un-human spaces where we’re completely cut off from shared life.
Notice how Jesus enters these scenes. He doesn’t offer a long lecture of spectacular semantic spin on these conditions or draw charts mapping out the spiritual atmosphere. He meets the tangible brokenness with an equal and opposite tangible wholeness.
I think the true climax of the Gerasene story isn’t the dramatic eviction (although that sort of thing makes for spectacular movies, television and videos); instead, it’s what happens after. The text doesn’t leave us staring down the steep hill where the pigs ran down into the sea. It leaves us staring at a man who was once naked and screaming among the tombs, now sitting at the feet of Jesus, fully clothed, and in his right mind. The ultimate proof of the Kingdom’s arrival isn’t a display of raw, spectacular power, but a restored person handed a ticket to walk right back into the town square to again share community with others.
The Messiah Many Weren’t Looking For
To understand why Jesus’ posture was so revolutionary, we need to look at the massive mismatch of imaginations happening in the first century. I should pause. Perhaps you’ve noticed in this series that I use the word “imagination.” No, I don’t mean make believe, fantasy, something untrue, or something you imagine. I mean inherited assumptions, our frame of reference, our way of seeing things. Or, as I have also said, an interpretative lens. So here’s the water the first century Jews swam in.
God’s people groaned under the very real, systemic, crushing weight of Roman occupation. They looked up into their own version of the cosmic attic, crying out for a Messiah who would solve the problem of evil through massive, immediate destruction. They wanted a Messiah who would look like Rome, but under a holy banner.
Many rejected Jesus but it wasn’t only because they failed to recognize who He was. It was mostly because He refused to participate in their intense desire for mastery and domination.
- Many expected God to confront evil through destruction, but Jesus confronts evil through restoration.
- Many expected victory through domination, but Jesus demonstrates victory through faithfulness. Instead of bringing a bigger blade, Jesus brought a cross to a sword fight
- Many expected evil to be dealt with by eliminating enemies, but Jesus deals with evil by forming a reconciled community.
History shows us, when the later church handed off these narratives to Western legal and philosophical frameworks, we lost the textured Jewish context of covenant and community. This is the ancient seed I seek to plant as I cultivate modern soil through my weekly writing. Because, we traded an unexpected, upside-down Messiah for a faith fixated on control, explanation, and the mechanisms of power.
Coming Down from the Attic
This isn’t just a historical footnote. It continues to indict and challenge the Christian imagination (interpretive lens😁) today. When we get pre-occupied over spiritual mapping, strategic-level spiritual warfare, and creating boundaries for territorial spirits, we misdirect our attention. Rather than forming a faith that gives us a technique to control our anxieties, Jesus invites us out of the tiring work of cosmic threat-assessment. May we do the slow, sometimes painful but ordinary work of building a reconciled, non-anxious Christian community.
I suggest the ultimate act of spiritual warfare is the quiet, radical defiance of pulling someone out of isolation. Clothe them in dignity, and invite them back into a caring and compassionate Christ-like community. We don’t need to become experts of the darkness; we’re simply called to participate in the life of the Sovereign Lord who already disarmed the darkness.