The prophet Joel, living in desperate times, started looking for divine intervention. Let all who dwell in the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming. In the Christian tradition we too wait for the second coming of Christ to heal all wounds. However, Jesus warns us in the gospel that even if God does intervene and the demon is expelled the story does not end. Unless some basic change is made the demon returns “and the last condition of that man is worse than the first.” We need to expel not only the demons of violence and racism and greed. We also need to look at what underlies those behaviors: fear, woundedness, self-loathing, etc. Addressing the underlying causes keeps the demons away.
