“So if your friend betrays you, if your marriage falls apart, if you receive a fatal diagnosis, that does not mean that you have done something wrong. It means that evil has drawn near...But the good news is that in every place, the One in whom we believe is with us. Jesus is there to save us.”

“How many of us, though we know full well who Jesus is, live as though that knowledge made little difference to us”

“God and goodness are not in some cosmic battle with evil spirits where we eagerly await unknowable outcome. Evil spirits are subject to divine authority. In the Gospel, the evil spirit ‘went out’ of the man at Jesus’s command.”

“We can sometimes fail to recognise love because is all too easy to limit our understanding of love to what is comforting, mild, gentle and warm. But this is a narrow understanding of love, an understanding of love that has not grown into adulthood.”

“The good news of this Gospel is that for individuals with their personal demons, and for societies with their collective addictions, Christ can still exorcise these demons”

“For me, these readings are reassuring. God pays attention. God lives and works in and through history. God responds to the signs of the times and finds ways to reveal himself to us as times change. When times change, God adjusts his methods (not his message.)”

“let us approach Jesus with trusting Faith so that he may free us from the evil spirits that keep us from praying and prevent us from loving and sharing our blessings with others, as well as from all the “evil spirits” of fear, compulsions, selfishness, anger, resentment and hostility.”

“God began to speak to us through those among us, and still today we can hear his voice. Are we able to listen to one another as if hearing God’s voice? Do we hear God’s voice within us? Can we discern God’s voice in the prophets among us, so that we can indeed listen to God’s word?”

“The only heart we can change by our will is our own, and we need to make an examination to see whether, and in what ways, we have been blind to evil and even participated in it”

“Attention to the will of God is the whole purpose of life and we all fail to do this well”

“Christ has arisen to cast out all the darkness and anger, those barriers in our lives. He is here to cast out those demons that inflict so much turmoil, and yet we continue to place barriers before Him. What are your barriers?”

“All of us who are baptized as Christians are called to be disciples of Jesus, which means that we have a personal relationship with Jesus, and are called to participate in the mission of Jesus. It is important to ask the question: what does it mean to be in mission?”

“When Jesus shows that he has an authority greater than the scribes and the unclean spirits he is bringing forth the mercy of his Father from whom his authority comes”

“It is significant that immediately before this passage Jesus calls local, ordinary men and women to join him in his mission. By the end of the Gospel, he will pass on the mission to them...we see how God raises up prophets like us, from among our kinsmen to speak God’s word of love.”

“God’s power is most visibly displayed in his bringing us to life. I mean that first of all in the way he brings us to life by Creation, but even more beautifully in his calling us to that specially-rich kind of life that we call the life of grace, our own sharing in God’s own life.”

“Today’s gospel encourages us to believe that estrangement does not have to be final, that apologies work, and that humility has traction. God can heal what is broken.”

“So when Christ, for whom none of these difficulties present difficulties...he easily cast it out and what we find on the other side is a whole new life that we wouldn't have even imagined before”

“Sometimes we need to recognize that so often we have multiple voices going on within us and as we progress in prayer we hope to see these multiplicities fly out to make room for us to become more ourselves, more simple, more filled with the pure voice of Jesus”

“It's the divinity of Jesus revealed in the exousia, the authority by which he speaks and acts, that we are meant to see. Because embracing this Jesus, the prophet greater than Moses himself, is what Christianity is finally all about.”

“We're all like this demoniac, we're not demon-possessed thank God, but we have disordered lives. What's the voice that calls them back to order? The voice of Christ.”

“listen today as you hear this gospel, listen to Jesus' own voice echoing in your own heart bringing you back to harmony”

“this is what Jesus Christ does in us when we allow his authoritative voice to ring in us, he gathers the whole self so that we are like saints”