It may not feel or seem as if much yields to the name of Jesus these days.  It’s as if the name Jesus has sort of become an empty but pretty vessel into which people pour whatever they want.  Jesus tends to be just as accommodating as your or I want him to be.  To know what the name Jesus really means, beloved, we’ve got to read the Bible, and not just some parts of Matthew, or Luke.  As we read, the sense will begin to become stronger and clearer that Jesus, though he means love for sure and always, also means a little more.  God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways are not our ways, and love as He comprehensively reveals it can sometimes seem very unlike love as we’ve become accustomed to being re-educated about it these days.  That marked difference between His way and today’s way can feel hard and unhappy, but seeing it and responding faithfully really is for our own good, our salvation and sanctification—our purification—because it is holiness.  Many times, God says to His people, “Be holy, for I am holy.”  In other words, keep ourselves, by God’s grace, from allowing ourselves to become corrupted.  So, we must steer clear of corruption, and seek healing from God.

Jesus sends a group of seventy-two (or seventy, depending on who you’re reading).  He sends them out for mission, appoints them, which means he has hand-picked them.  They were going to be like heralds, announcing that Jesus was on his way, would be coming by, coming through, soon.  Any volunteers?  The seventy-two are to go out not as casual wanderers but as those sent with an urgent message, such that they were not even to “greet anyone on the road” (10:4): “no time to say hello, goodbye!”  I don’t think many of us live with much sense of Christian, Gospel urgency anymore; I don’t suppose I do, really.  We don’t get more time.  But who likes feeling pressured?

The seventy-two are to go, announcing the coming of Jesus, healing the sick.  The healing was the power of Jesus.  Jesus is healing power, power for wholeness.  The seventy-two were also going out to find out what sort of welcome they and this Jesus power would receive: who would welcome them?  Door to door salesmen are not really so welcome, as we know.  Over in Columbia Lakes, the HOA passed a rule forbidding it.  Just call the HOA and report it.  I guess they’ll call the deputy or constable?  I wonder if that ban extends to door-to-door evangelism?  People knocking on our door, wanting to talk to us about Jesus . . . well, thanks but no thanks.  But don’t you ever even at least feel sorry for them, knowing so many just close the door in their faces?  Serves them right!

Well, “The seventy-two returned with joy and said, ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name’” (10:17). Maybe the seventy-two weren’t expecting that?  Healing a flow of blood, or cataracts, healing a bad limp or a crippled hand—that’s one thing, but demons?  Haven’t you ever encountered a demon, what maybe even felt like a legion of them?  But demons, you know—these aren’t susceptible to medical healing.  Healers can set bones, perform life-changing surgeries, but they can’t purify people.  Demons are unclean, which is not a medical term but a spiritual term.  All the healings of Jesus are to point people toward one question: if God in Christ can heal the afflictions and ailments of these bodies, what can he do for our souls?  Beloved, our bodies will fail us; let’s commit ourselves not to fail our souls.

The seventy-two come back excited, elated—just the way anyone should, after they’ve shared the good news with someone—have you ever thought about how much joy you are depriving yourself of, by shying away from sharing the good news?  Or are you, like me, overwhelmed by anticipations of rejection and ridicule, of doing damage to relationships?  O, what peace we often forfeit.  And we wonder and worry how the church will ever grow.

But the seventy-two are also feeling a rush of power: maybe even they, hand-picked by Jesus as they were, maybe even they weren’t really sure just what was going to happen when they came up against the demons, the embedded ugliness, gnawing upon human souls.  But they took the name of Jesus with them, growing in confidence—as they applied the name—that the healing power, the wholeness power of Jesus really could do more than they had imagined.  All that was needed was for them to apply it.  And the demons?  They yielded to the power of the name, knowing their doom was sure.  But we wonder; maybe we aren’t so sure.  Those demons, you know, the darkness: it looks and feels really deeply entrenched, down in the bunker.

Now, I’m not talking about demons as though these were envy, or pride, or lust, greed, or anger issues—those are sins.  It’s demons—addictions, more than ordinary soul sickness, what twists and keeps twisting people; it’s what we feel when something else is holding the reins and spurring us hard.  These are the forces the Tempter sends to torture our temptability.  The end is the same: to pull people away from God, away from a meaningful relationship, away from Scripture, away from prayer, away from being present with the congregation.  Now, not being able to be at church one Sunday or another is no sign of demon-possession!  The demons are what no unaided human ability can overcome, as Scripture shows us many times.  The demons magnify the sin already festering in our hearts, to make an idol of it in conscious defiance of God.  Sin is the enemy’s weapon, already lodged in us, already in the enemy’s grasp, until we are grasped by God in Jesus Christ.  Christ’s arms are open to disarm the enemy.  Each of us is a ravaged battlefield, in this life, but the grass and flowers have a way of growing there, still.  Let grace amaze you, and cry out for it, always.

The seventy-two come back to Jesus, then, to make their amazed report.  We went out, trusting, and worried.  More convinced we’d be dismissed than received, we went to tell people.  We went to those who were sick, to offer them healing, if they wanted healing.  We healed many.  Yes, but who did the healing, really?  Well, we know it’s Jesus and can only be Jesus, but he wants to use us to take him there.  Now, in our experience, how does healing happen, what promotes it?  Healing needs knowledge of injury.  Oh, we have that.  Healing needs the skill of proper wound care, of setting properly what has been broken.  Healing needs regular follow-ups.  Healing is a work of time; healing needs patience.

In all this, healing, clearly, is a matter of relationship, committed relationship.  Jesus is the invitation into committed relationship; he is the power of committed relationship.  For us, evangelism, sharing the gospel, sharing Jesus, inviting people into healing, cannot be a one-and-done deal.  Keep at it, don’t be discouraged.  But I don’t know anybody who isn’t Christian!  Where are they going to church, and when is the last time they went?  But all my friends are Christian.  Beloved, the Lord will provide.  Do we avoid those who aren’t Christian?  Certain we could never reach them and afraid they might taint us?  The Lord will provide.

Hearing the excited, astounded report of his hand-picked mission team, Jesus responds, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (10:18).  Period.  Full stop.  Don’t you want to hear more?  Yeah, Jesus?  Then what?  Think with me here.  Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Whenever Satan fell, certainly it was not after Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  So, when did Jesus see this?  How was he present there, then?  One of the big problems in the early centuries of the church, a problem that still makes its way into Christian circles, was the notion that Jesus was a supremely blessed man, born of human parents like everyone else, but then set apart in a very special sense for God at baptism.  As the notion goes, what Jesus was not was divine, at least not like God, not in the same way as God, not equal with God.  Yet what Jesus tells us, several times in several ways, is that he has always been and is with the Father and is the Father, in a way we can’t understand.  We either accept what he says or we reject it: crazy talk.  God’s foolishness and man’s wisdom.

The Son witnessed the long plummet because he was there, with the Father, with the angels at war against one another in the heavens—what God already knew would be but permitted for His own purposes and ultimate, undeniable, complete glory.  God does not send temptation our way: we stumble along into that soon enough all by ourselves.  What God does is to provide us with a way out, each time, a way of return when we’re too stubborn to go the way God calls us, and the assurance that the final victory will be His victory, and we will benefit from it eternally.  Though it benefits us, His victory is not for our sake but for His, so that all will testify truly that He is the Lord.

Who is Satan, plummeting from the heavens, a jagged, one hundred million volt sear arcing the sky?  He is the Tempter, the Enemy.  As for just when Satan fell as Jesus describes, it must have been before ages began.  As for why, Scripture does not say explicitly, but we can learn, as we read Scripture, that, over and over, every fall is caused by the sinful conviction that one knows better than God, that one has gotten victory, power, wealth, prestige by one’s own efforts and not alone at the good pleasure of God for God’s own purposes according to God’s plan.  Vanity, hybris, and resentment—all the ingredients necessary for idolatry; all the ingredients needed for Cain to slay Abel: the summation of human history cutting itself loose from God.  Satan is opposition to God, opposition to Christ, opposition to salvation, opposition to holiness, opposition, above all, to obedience.  And what is the opposite of obedience?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each include the temptation in the wilderness.  Luke, looking into everything carefully, probably drew upon Matthew’s telling, although Luke changes the order of the temptations and includes some words not found in Matthew’s telling.  Luke tells us, for example, there in the wilderness, the Tempter showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world—their power, glory, riches—“I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to” (Lk 4:6).  Either he’s lying—which is certainly a strong possibility, or, worse, he’s telling the truth.  Again, it is only Luke who tells us that, at the conclusion of the temptations in the wilderness, Jesus having passed that time of trial, “the devil [. . .] left [Jesus] until an opportune time” (4:13).  When do you think that was?

Jesus turned from every temptation, all corruption, unique among those born of women.  All authority, then, has been granted to Jesus, and Jesus provides his faithful with this same authority, the authority to “trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy” (10:19), just as the seventy-two had seen, experienced, and told, astounded.  Now, we know there are brothers and sisters who, taking this quite literally, to celebrate the teaching, go around dancing with snakes.  My take is that Jesus is asking us to understand symbolically what he is saying.  Snakes and scorpions induce fear; they are venomous and cause a very painful if not necessarily lethal wound.  These are poisonous animals that transmit poison.  Jesus gives us the power, in this life, to be safe from all such poison, corruption—as we keep our eyes and hearts fixed upon Jesus.  He tells them—he’s telling us, too—“nothing will harm you” (10:19).  We are safe in the arms of Jesus: he saves us through his open arms, receives us in his open arms, lifts us by his open arms.  Jesus is the power to overcome.

In Christ, we are safe no matter what happens, but the poison of the Tempter intends to make what happens hard, so that we become discouraged, so that we falter, stop, and curl up within ourselves, to gnaw upon our bitter disappointments and failures.  Jesus gives us the power to overcome.  Realizing this power even now at work in us, among us, and through us for others, too, takes time, a lot of time, a lifetime; it takes patience, perseverance, persistence, and prayer.  It takes passion.  No Christian should ever be afraid of passion, so long as it is first and always, deeply, passion for the Lord.

Jesus tells them, awash in the joy of this newfound power for living in Christ, “do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (10:20).  The power to overcome is incidental to salvation.  Those whose names are written in heaven exercise salvation power, by grace, in their own lives and in the life around them.  This wholeness power, holiness power, comes in and only in confidence of salvation in Christ, through obedience—trust and obey.  Our obedience is made possible in and only in Christ’s sacrificial, saving obedience: in him, that power is now ours, too.  Yes, there is a secure place for us, near to the heart of God.  None of us make the place.  It is made, for us.  We will come to that place only as we submit ourselves to God.  Anything less is once again to set our power in place of God’s power.  The only way actively to cast away that fiction is by actively submitting ourselves to God in obedience, a word that means listening.  Listen to Jesus; listen to God; heed the Spirit, urging us all on to the wholeness of holiness—belonging to God.