I Saw Satan Fall

The seventy returned with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!  And he said to them, 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.’ 

—Luke 10:1–21

In the last congregation I served, a small group within the church set aside every Monday evening for witnessing in the community.  Since we were Lutherans, we gave this practice an innovative, cutting-edge-kind of name.  We called it Evangelism Night.  It worked something like this. Around 7 P. M. the callers would come into the church kitchen, drink coffee, pray, and go out in teams to visit people who were unchurched, new to the church, or mad at the church.  Long about 9:15 the teams would start dribbling back for more coffee and the sharing of stories.  There were stories of families still "shopping" for a church home, stories of lonely people, angry people who had forgotten why they were angry, stories of sad and searching people.  Nothing spectacular.

I miss Evangelism Night, not so much for the stunning success stories, since “success” was not a prominent part of our vocabulary, but for our growing sense that we were participating in a pattern of ministry that was older and larger than ourselves and not of our own devising.

Luke has uncovered such a pattern in this Gospel lesson.  It is the pattern of calling→ sending→witnessing→returning.  Luke didn't invent the pattern. Jesus didn't invent the pattern either.   It begins with God, who tells Moses early on, "Go tell them 'I Am' has sent you.  I will be with you." It's as old as God's conversation with Isaiah:  "Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?"  And the prophet's reply: "Here am I, send me."  It was God's way with Jesus who was sent on a dangerous mission, murdered in the course of it, and who returned to the Father in triumph.  It is Jesus' way with the church: "As my Father has sent me, even so send I you."  Calling→sending→witnessing→returning.  The pattern persists.

It's the return-part of the pattern that interests me the most: “The seventy returned with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.’  And he said to them: ‘I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.’"

This is a powerful mission text, known as the Sending of the Seventy, which is found only in the Gospel of Luke.  It must have been a galvanizing text for the surging Christian movement.  It’s reflected in Jesus’s parting message to his disciples in the Book of Acts: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”   But even the most cursory comparison of the early church’s mission to the Gentiles and our own evangelism efforts reveals a significant difference.  They were poised like commandos about to make a raid on a pagan society. A mission situation like theirs can be diagrammed on a blackboard, with the x’s standing for the missionaries and the o’s representing the objectives. 

I was once a member of a mission congregation, and I must admit our program was not that clear cut.  In retrospect, it seems we were susceptible to what might be called "beachhead theology.” We had as our objective the establishment of a base camp in our own neighborhood from which we would launch reconnaissance patrols into other neighborhoods further afield.  In these various operations, however, we met few genuine pagans.  Rarely, if ever, did we encounter one of our neighbors bowing before a statue or sacrificing a chicken. Even those who didn’t go to church claimed to be "born again" or at least had the odor of affiliation about them.   Our little church was making an assault on a society that already considered itself Christian, whose public schools observed the Christian holidays, whose judges opened court with prayer, and whose leading politicians regularly accused one another of (gasp!) “not being a Christian.” 

We had grown fond of describing the church as a counter-cultural community, but that seemed more a wish than a reality. Instead of a diagram of separation, our situation resembled an amoeba-like circle in which we were included rather than excluded.  The amoeba was called religion, and almost everyone we met had their share of it.  

We had trouble seeing clear-cut lines, but without them, it was hard to get ready for battle.  And with no battle, no victory.  And with no victory, no joy. 

In the Sending of the Seventy, what looks like a modest evangelism program provokes in Jesus a stunning non-sequitur.  The returning apostles say, in effect, "We did well." He says, "I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven!" 

I am thinking of a street preacher in our town. I can see him.   He stands in the median of a four-lane road, bull horning his vision as motorists hurriedly raise their windows and turn up their music.   “I saw Satan fall" is his cry. This preacher is not interested in the survival of the church.  He’s not a man for pews, pulpits, or committee reports.  He’s not about strategies, objectives, or ten-year plans.  He is watching something taking place on the rim of eternity.  He sees souls attempting to escape the burning pit of hell; he sees the glow of paradise beckoning to everyone on that highway. God has entrusted him with a vision that will change us forever.  

In our text, the gentle Galilean storyteller named Jesus has been replaced by an apocalyptic preacher whose eyes are on fire with eternity.  He sees things no one else sees.  It’s as if he has infrared vision.  He sees the birth of a new age in which people who were excluded from the original plan of salvation are now being embraced. 

In the book of Genesis, 70 is the number of the earth’s nations after the flood.  “Seventy” is all of us. Jesus not only understands the symbolism of 70, he is practicing it in new ways. In Jesus’s ministry the kingdom is breaking out of the circle, outside the amoeba, and moving toward tax-collectors, prostitutes, sinners, and “foreigners.” “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” say his short-sighted critics.   The church’s move into Gentile territory does not simply represent the extension of the organization, like adding a few more Starbucks franchises.  It signals a change of age in which the Lord is claiming us all as beloved children.    That's where Satan is being defeated—not in the comfort zones of our world but on its margins. 

We see something small: He sees something big:

We see churches struggling for solvency:  He sees a larger and more exciting arena in which God’s power is at work.

We see improvements here and there:  He sees a transformation under way fueled by the Holy Spirit.

We see the church at its most fragile:  He sees the church at its most majestic.

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis gives us a series of unforgettable messages from a senior devil named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood.  Wormwood, as many of you know, is down on earth (or up on earth, if you will) trying to tempt people away from the Enemy—God.  Screwtape tells his nephew, “You want your patient to quit God?  Show him the church.”  He continues, "I do not mean the church as we see her, spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.  That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy." No, he says, take him to a local church . . . “Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like 'the body of Christ' and the actual faces in the next pew."

Look at the church.  Jesus sees things we don't see, makes connections we don't make, except perhaps on those occasions like Evangelism Night, or in a moment of reconciliation between old enemies, or in a Eucharist in a hospital room.  At such moments the pattern of what God is really doing in our life together becomes blessedly clear.

When Jesus says "I saw Satan Fall" he's playing a game of “I Spy” with his followers, challenging us to see something hidden in plain sight. He's seeing a reality that is far thicker than anything our own senses or sciences can measure.  It has become a part of our national ritual that whenever a particularly heinous crime is committed—a mild-mannered clerk opens fire at a Walmart, a husband and wife systematically abuse their children, three white men chain a black man to his car and drag him to death—someone on the panel will admit that despite all our advances in psychology we can't quite get a handle on this kind of evil: “We may have to call on religion to explain this one.” 

When Jesus says, "I saw Satan fall," even people who don't believe in anything remotely like Satan, will pause and say, “Really? Where? When?”

The school where I teach offers classes at several North Carolina prisons.  By definition, a prison is a restrictive place and a warden must run a tight ship.  At the entrance to Women’s Prison in Raleigh, a long list of rules is posted on the wall.  They are absolutes.  Many of the rules forbid what we would consider normal human behavior, such as friendship, small favors, or personal conversations.  As our course was concluding, one of the students who had served ten years was about to be released.  Her crime had been considerable. She was a Christian.  We requested that she be allowed to attend the closing communion service in the Divinity School chapel.  Since she was soon to be released anyway, the request was granted.  The warden was good enough to accompany her in the prison van.  This was a generous gesture, but most surprisingly, she was permitted to participate in the Eucharist as a server.  With three hundred people singing “Just as I Am, Without One Plea,” and with tears in her eyes, she helped distribute the bread. 

And the warden received the body of Christ from an inmate.

Nothing spectacular, you might say.  Only a slight wrinkle in the order of things. Just another excursion into God’s kingdom.  But I saw a possibility I had never seen in a church or in a prison or anywhere else.  It’s something our beloved Lord, the Street Preacher, sees every day—and celebrates.  It is the ultimate triumph of God over the forces that hold our planet in bondage.

Let’s ask him again to tell us what he sees, and maybe if we’re lucky we’ll see it too: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven!”