Taking Things Out of Context
One
Silencing the Demons
One of Jesus’ signature works during his life on earth was the casting out of demons. He went about for three years, casting out demons, and empowered the apostles to do the same thing. But a lot of the time Jesus didn’t just cast out demons, He told them to shut up. And what’s interesting, is He always tells them to be silent when they’re saying the truth about Him.
When a demon says, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God!” Jesus says, “Silence! Come out of him!” (Luke 4:34-35). And Mark’s gospel actually says that Jesus would not allow the demons to speak because they knew him. (Mark 1:34).
Why would Jesus not allow the demons to speak the truth about Him? It makes sense that He would stop them from lying, but why would He stop them from saying the truth? The answer is that the truth taken out of context is a very powerful weapon in the hands of the demons. And it’s a weapon we have to be on our guard against.
Two
Taking Christ out of context
The demons knew that Christ was the Messiah, but they also knew that proclaiming this truth would give the people who heard them the wrong idea. Because of course most of the chosen people thought that the Messiah would be a great political and military leader, making Jerusalem a powerful, world-dominating Kingdom They thought the Messiah would go out and execute terrible vengeance on all the nations who had pushed the Jews around in the past.
In other words, they didn’t understand at all who the Messiah was. Jesus had to give them context. He had to give them the context of the Beatitudes, the Church, mercy and forgiveness, and the universal offer of salvation to Jew and Gentile alike. Most of all He had to give them to context of the cross.
Until they had that context, they would completely misunderstood what was meant by calling Jesus the Messiah. People are constantly trying to present one aspect of Jesus’ character out of context. They present His mercy and non-judgmentalness while forgetting to mention His severe condemnations of sin and his warnings about Hell. Or they talk about His moral teachings and ignore His miracles and His divine claims. They highlight his criticism of religious leaders and don’t talk about the way he established an organized Church with authoritative leadership.
When you take one aspect of Christ out of context and neglect the rest, you distort the Lord. That’s a danger for all aspects of the Christian life.
Three
Scripture out of context
The demons are especially adept at quoting Scripture out of context. We know this from the way Satan quotes Scripture at Jesus, trying to get Him to do what’s incompatible with Jesus’ mission.
In fact, there’s one flagrant case, where Satan quotes Psalm 91 to Jesus but Satan stops quoting the verse at verse 12 “Lest you dash your foot against a stone.” And actually, that’s a very convenient place for Satan to stop quoting. Do you know why? Because the very next verse, verse 13, says, “You will tread on the serpent and the viper, trample on the lion and the dragon.” And serpent, lion, and dragon are all images Scripture uses to talk about Satan. In other words, Satan clips the Scripture, to avoid the verse where it says that Jesus is going to trample all over him. He stops quoting Scripture right when Scripture gets uncomfortable for Him.
How much Church division is based on quoting Scripture selectively, honing in on the passages that confirm our bias, and skipping over the passages that would show us a fuller, and more uncomfortable truth?
The fact that Christianity is divided, that Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants don’t worship together, don’t believe together, it’s all the result of taking Scripture out of context. Out of context with the rest of Scripture and out of the context of the Church that gave us Scripture in the first place.
Taking things out of context isn’t just Satan’s way of dividing Christians one from another, it’s also his way of dividing Catholics who are all part of the same Church.
Four
Church statements out of context
All the partisan politics within the Catholic Church, all of them, they’re all based on taking things out of context.
The progressive Catholics who want to change all the Church’s sexual teaching and all its sacramental practice. They justify themselves by selectively taking certain things from Vatican II or Pope Francis completely out of context. The traditionalist Catholics who spend all their time complaining about problems in the Church, calling people heretics, and revolting against the hierarchy. They do the same thing. They selectively take certain things from Vatican II or Pope Francis and act as though that justifies their constant divisiveness.
Listen, we can only understand Christ, we can only understand Scripture, and we can only understand the Church’s tradition, by submitting ourselves to the fullness that has been revealed by God. By looking at the lives and examples of the saints, past and present. By deeper love and reading of the Holy Scriptures, all of it. By appreciating the full picture of the Church’s life and magisterial history.
When we do that, we will see the true timelessness of the Church and her official teaching, and we will also see the variety of policies, some prudent and some not-so-prudent, that the Church has survived throughout the last two millennia.
We will see the larger context of the Church, and we will be at peace.
Five
Judgmentalism – Out of Context
Perhaps the greatest form of Satan’s temptation to take things out of context is when we’re tempted to look down on other people for their failings. This is the division the devil really loves. It’s precisely what Christ condemns, “Judge not, that you not be judged.”
What do we do when we judge?
We look at a person’s vice, maybe their laziness, their lack of punctuality, or the failure of their marriage, or maybe an addiction, or the fact that they can be rude, or self-promoting, or that they talk too much, or that they’re too opinionated. Whatever it is, we take some defect in the other person, and we take it out of context. Because, after all, only God knows the context of that person’s life. Only God knows the full background that person is coming from. Only God knows the future to which He’s leading that person. Only God knows the workings of grace and temptation in his or her soul.
So resist the demonic temptation to judge, to take someone else’s failings out of context. Remember that the only context we know is that this is someone made in God’s image, destined for glory, and someone Jesus died for.
That’s the context we have. That’s the context for seeing a child of God and seeing them whole.