There is a moment in Jesus' life when he is accused of being possessed by the devil.

This is disturbing. It means that it is possible for people to look the incarnated Holy One in the face and be so far off the mark that they see Satan instead of God.

I don't really think janitors or construction workers make that kind of mistake. What I mean is, it takes a special kind of mindset to be able to identify pure Good as Evil, and vice versa. It was the religious scribes from Jerusalem who came to this erroneous conclusion. It always seems to be people who ought to know better, people who are consumed with the life of the mind and the spirit, people who have been set up as leaders of others, who get these things so far wrong.

(Earlier in the story Jesus' own family think he has lost his mind, but perhaps they can be a little forgiven here. There's was not a discernment based in theory, but in practical observation. Jesus was acting in a way that was going to - and did - get him killed. From a certain point of view, this suggests that one has lost one's mind).

What do we do with this? What do we do when the intelligentsia of our culture seem to be promoting as good that which seems to be evil, and decrying as evil that which seems to be good? It can be awfully tempting to agree, not least because an honest humility should lead us to accept that we might be wrong about this stuff.

Prayer seems like such a prosaic answer. But it really is the...I was going to say "the safeguard", but I don't believe it is at all safe. Maybe we really do have to risk it all with the following of Jesus. His own family thought he was nuts! The religious authorities thought he was demonic! His actions led him to a horrible death, and most of his followers followed suit!

Maybe the scribes from Jerusalem were onto something. This guy represented such a jarring departure from the way of their world that the only category they had for it was "demonic". Maybe if we were actually living the life Jesus prescribes we would be more often subject to the same type of accusation. Maybe this is all a little bit more radical than we originally thought.