Why do you think the Curé d’Ars was so vigilant about his relationships with others, especially his brother priests? ” What would we say about two priests who don’t get along?” he used to say, perceiving how the witness of life is at least as important as that of the Word, and how it corroborates it. ” Let’s not be fooled… by Satan “, said Saint Paul to his interlocutors. He is the “divider” (‘diabolos’), he is the “accuser” (‘Satan’)… and we remember that the Greek name for “tares” is “zizania”!

It‘s easy to see why Christ wanted to ” call twelve of them, to ‘be with Him’ (as friends) and ‘send them out to preach ‘”, says St Mark in his Gospel. Everyone knows the man and his human burdens. So much so that it’s unthinkable that human beings like any others could live a lifetime in the same community without it exploding, or with the same spouse without the two of them splitting up after a sufficiently long period of time – you just have to wait. But the opposite is true! Couples last and learn to last, celibacy ‘for the sake of the Kingdom’ does exist, communities ‘put everything in common, share, follow Christ’s teaching and implement new customs’, signs of a new life.

So let’s not be fooled by the hiccups, the various animosities, the various conflicts : the stakes are much higher than simply creating discord, zizanie or even war. There’s something more serious: undermining God and his work… in other words, undermining Christians and the life they receive from God and try to live by. This is why Satan will be ever more incisive and relentless within Christian communities, and even Christian couples or religious or priestly vocations: destroying the most fragile and sensitive leads to even greater damage, and even more widespread repercussions.

Christ, in today’s Gospel, bears witness to this, by exposing the work of the devil, Beelzebub, with whom he accuses himself in a formidable reversal, in which the bad faith of his interlocutors becomes patently obvious. Unlike Adam, who blames Eve… and herself, who blames Satan for tempting her. (Why give more credence to the devil’s word than to God’s?) Christ accuses no one. It reveals the source of the problem: evil, which does evil, does evil and takes every means to camouflage its action by blaming someone else. And so much the better if this other could be God himself, whom we’d end up having the audacity to accuse of doing nothing about evil, when he gives himself up in his Son to reveal his love for mankind.

So let’s not be fooled. Let’s not be fooled by the devil. Let’s keep trusting in God, who is a true Father and loves us far more than the best of all the fathers on earth and all the mothers put together! Let’s not allow ourselves to be hurt, especially when it comes to attacks on fraternity and discourse towards the other… that’s the easiest thing to falsify. And if we need a word from the Gospel to remind us that it’s better to keep quiet than to say anything at all, let’s remember: ” We will have to give an account for all these words … that are useless ” (Mt 12:36).