The Exorcist's Bestiary

“My dog was attacked by another dog a while back, and now he has some serious trauma. The other day, he saw the other dog’s owner approaching my door, started barking like crazy, and peed himself. It’s pathetic,” I said to my participant.

Their expression was one of sadness and empathy for my dog until I made that last statement. Now they looked at me wide-eyed and appalled. “Did you just say his reaction was pathetic?” they asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “Which I obviously don’t believe at all. It makes sense that he’s scared. He’s trying to process his pain and protect himself. When he sees a reminder of the moment he was nearly killed, he loses control of his senses. There’s nothing pathetic about that whatsoever. I have nothing but empathy for him. But you keep calling your own trauma responses pathetic, so I’m just applying your logic to my dog.”

The trick worked. By brashly applying their thinking to another real-life situation, they saw the faults of their beliefs. The demon had worked hard to get them to equate their trauma to patheticness, but now the lie was breaking.

I’d like to take this story and make a theological proposal of interpretation for Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21-28; Mark 7:24-30). Being a demon story in which the woman longs for her daughter to be exorcised, might it be possible to read this story in an inner healing way?

Though she is an outsider, she believes Jesus to be “Lord” and “son of David.” Though Jesus doesn’t seem to be listening, still she persists, thinking that he should or will. She fully believes Jesus can remove her child’s demon, and she longs for his help. Perhaps Jesus’ words to her, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” is the societal lie that Jesus knows she’s been told. Is it possible that he’s baiting her to break it in this moment? For when she persists despite this statement, Jesus applauds her and rewards her.

Of course, it’s the child that needs to be exorcised, not the mom. So if we are to believe that it is the overcoming of this lie that removed the demon, we might wonder if the demon had more of a stake in the family as a whole. While Jesus may have removed it out of a sovereign act, I suggest the possibility that Jesus was doing a sly form of inner healing in this moment to remove a demon, and teach something not only to the woman, but to his disciples too.