Satan’s a Goner

As a kid, I loved Mis­sion Sun­days, when mis­sion­ar­ies on fur­lough brought spe­cial reports in place of a ser­mon. Some­times they wore exot­ic, for­eign cloth­ing; they almost always showed a tray of slides doc­u­ment­ing their adven­tures. If they were from a dan­ger­ous enough land, the youth in our con­gre­ga­tion would emerge from our Sun­day stu­por and lis­ten intently.

There is one vis­it I’ve nev­er for­got­ten. The mis­sion­ar­ies were a mar­ried cou­ple sta­tioned in what appeared to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly steamy jun­gle. I’m sure they gave a full report on church­es plant­ed or com­mit­ments made or trans­la­tions begun. I don’t remem­ber much of that. What has always stayed with me is the sto­ry they shared about a snake.

One day, they told us, an enor­mous snake — much longer than a man — slith­ered its way right through their front door and into the kitchen of their sim­ple home. Ter­ri­fied, they ran out­side and searched fran­ti­cal­ly for a local who might know what to do. A machete-wield­ing neigh­bor came to the res­cue, calm­ly march­ing into their house and decap­i­tat­ing the snake with one clean chop.

The neigh­bor reemerged tri­umphant and assured the mis­sion­ar­ies that the rep­tile had been defeat­ed. But there was a catch, he warned: It was going to take a while for the snake to real­ize it was dead.

A snake’s neu­rol­o­gy and blood flow are such that it can take con­sid­er­able time for it to stop mov­ing even after decap­i­ta­tion. For the next sev­er­al hours, the mis­sion­ar­ies were forced to wait out­side while the snake thrashed about, smash­ing fur­ni­ture and flail­ing against walls and win­dows, wreak­ing hav­oc until its body final­ly under­stood that it no longer had a head.

Sweat­ing in the heat, they had felt frus­trat­ed and a lit­tle sick­ened but also grate­ful that the snake’s ram­page would­n’t last for­ev­er. And at some point in their wait­ing, they told us, they had a mutu­al epiphany.

I leaned in with the rest of the con­gre­ga­tion, queasy and fas­ci­nat­ed. ​“Do you see it?” asked the hus­band. ​“Satan is a lot like that big old snake. He’s already been defeat­ed. He just does­n’t know it yet. In the mean­time, he’s going to do some dam­age. But nev­er for­get that he’s a goner.”

The sto­ry cap­tured our imag­i­na­tions then because it was graph­ic and gory — a stark con­trast to the nor­mal­ly gen­teel ser­mo­niz­ing we were used to receiv­ing. But the sto­ry haunts me because I have come to believe it is an accu­rate pic­ture of the uni­verse. We are in the thrash­ing time, a sea­son char­ac­ter­ized by our per­va­sive capac­i­ty to do vio­lence to each oth­er and our­selves. The temp­ta­tion is to despair. We have to remem­ber, though, that it won’t last for­ev­er. Jesus has already crushed the ser­pen­t’s head.

Recent­ly I heard a mes­sage from the­olo­gian Gary Ded­do that got me think­ing about that snake. Ded­do chal­lenges the ten­den­cy many of us have to be dual­ists — imag­in­ing God and Satan as equal foes dead­locked in mor­tal com­bat. To be cer­tain, Ded­do acknowl­edges, there is an immea­sur­able amount of evil in our world. But com­pared with God’s love and pow­er, all the evil in the uni­verse does­n’t cov­er the head of a pin. Love wins. Satan does­n’t stand a chance.

Thus, though we wres­tle with the bro­ken­ness that plagues the world, and our­selves, we do so not with grim res­ig­na­tion but with hope­ful defi­ance. We face both our addic­tions and afflic­tions not with a faint, white-knuck­led hope that some­day we will be healed, but rather with an assur­ance that we are liv­ing slow­ly but sure­ly into the heal­ing already obtained on the Cross. There is still a wait­ing. In some cas­es the heal­ing may not come in full­ness until we are face-to-face with our Vic­tor — but come it will. Guaranteed.

I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what all of this means with respect to the way we deal with evil and injus­tice in our world. In lin­ear, human time, per­haps the safest thing to do is bat­ten down the hatch­es and wait some­where secure till the thrash­ing is over. But one of the mys­ter­ies of liv­ing in God’s time rather than our own is that, although the end of the sto­ry has already been deter­mined, some­how he is still using us to write it. Because Jesus lives in us through his Spir­it, we are called not just to antic­i­pate the over­com­ing but also to be part of bring­ing it to fruition.

And so we are called to fight pover­ty, oppres­sion, greed, and mal­ice — in the world and in our own spir­its. We are invit­ed to live in light of the real­i­ty that greater by far is the liv­ing God who is with­in us than the dead snake thrash­ing about in this world.