When I was a student at King’s College, London, I had the privilege of being lectured by Professor Ulrich Simon.

Professor Simon was, in some ways, an eccentric figure and I vividly remember seeing him one day on the Strand when his car was caught up in a traffic jam. Surprised bystanders were treated to him leaping from the car and shaking his fist as he shouted, ‘It’s the Demonic!”

His pre-occupation with the demonic was demonstrated on another occasion, when he stood in the pulpit of Westminster Abbey to deliver a sermon. As sometimes happens, as we know only too well, the microphone refused to co-operate and the good Professor snatched it from around his neck and flung it towards the unwitting verger with the words “It is the demonic!” before proceeding with the utmost clarity to deliver a spell-binding sermon.

Dr. Simon’s outbursts were all the more thrilling because they were uttered with more than a trace of the German accent.

To understand his pre-occupation with the demonic it was important to know more about his German roots.

He was born in Berlin as a member of a Jewish family and in 1933 he escaped the rising dictatorship of Hitler by coming to England. Here he became a Christian and was ordained priest just before the 2nd World war.

During that conflict he had to endure the intense pain of losing most of his family who died in the concentration camps. His father was gassed in Auschwitz and it was this which was later to compel him to write his most famous book, ‘The Theology of Auschwitz’.

The combining of the name of the most atrocious death camp with theology was an irony that Ulrich Simon quickly recognised. Theology, he said, articulates a joyful tradition  whereas Auschwitz evokes the memory of untold suffering. Theology speaks of eternal light, Auschwitz perpetuates the horror of darkness.

It is from his own life experience that Ulrich Simon could speak of the demonic – not manifested as an inconvenient traffic jam or an incompetent microphone, but rather by the Nazi death camps which swept away the nearest and dearest of his relatives.

Auschwitz has come to symbolise not only what went on in Hitler’s death camps and not only the holocaust but the continued acts of barbaric horror that human beings seem inescapably bound up with whether it be in Iraq, the Lebanon or in the murder of a family in Manchester.

Those who try to make sense of things so nonsensical and horrific come up against a dilemma.

This dilemma is whether  these things happen because we humans are intrinsically bad or whether we are the battleground for forces outside our control.

To opt for the former is to suggest that human beings are not just imperfect but downright evil and it is hard to square that with the Genesis image of God making us in his own image or of Christ dying for us so that we can be free to live a life of love and goodness.

We all know, however, how difficult that can be at times and there are situations when seemingly good people, even Christian people, enter a spiral of destructiveness which begins with a small misunderstanding and ends up destroying a whole community or church. How easy it is to allow a self-righteous attitude to grow until some actually think it is their right to sit in judgement of others. How easy for the tongue or the pen to become a weapon of mass destruction, all the more insidious when it is supposedly, though almost always mistakenly, done in the name of Christ.

Is this the work of human beings or is it because we are the battleground for the cosmic battle between good and evil? This is the dilemma.

If we take the latter view we have to be careful, of course that we are not somehow excused for all our unloving actions. Not just a case of retreating into that old excuse, ‘Oh well, we’re only human’ but the rather more dangerous excuse, “Oh well, you know, it’s all the devil’s fault.”

And indeed, this is often the case, though the devil’s work is helped immeasurably by the fact that few these days believe that there is such an evil force abroad. Ulrich Simon’s cry of ‘demonic’ sounds quaint and other-worldly to many.

But not, it seems, to St. Paul who in today’s extract from the letter to the Ephesians drives home the point that our struggles are not against enemies of blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Paul leaves us in no doubt where he stands. There is an ongoing battle  and the battleground is the human heart.

This is a conflict which Jesus knows only too intimately. On the surface it is the  so called religious people who attack him and who deliberately misunderstand him. They do their worst as only religious people bent on a crusade can do. But for Jesus these are only the bit players in a far greater drama – the battle being waged between good and evil which, though played out on the human stage, has a cosmic background.

And yet it is important to recognise that we are none of us passive bystanders watching the battle from a safe distance. It is a battle waged within each one of us long before it is waged in communities, or even churches.

So Paul recognizes - and the final verses from Ephesians is a clarion call – a battle hymn which takes its imagery from soldiering.

In the battle against evil and for good, there is an armoury for our protection.

The famous passage – often subtitled The whole armour of God – is a description of what is available to the Christian in the struggle for good and for mastery over those inclinations within ourselves that might, unchecked, choose evil rather than good or, if not deliberately choose, then, by default fall into.

The list is stirring:

The belt of truth; the breastplate of righteousness; for shoes whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace; the shield of faith; the helmet of salvation; the sword of the Spirit.

And undergirding all this – Prayer.

Pray in the Spirit at all times. Keep alert. Pray for each other.

These are the weapons by which we withstand the assault of the evil one – the demonic forces which attack our world and ourselves.

And they are weapons of defence. We are to stand not attack. This is not a battle where we are called to win new ground but rather to defend territory that has already been won and which is in danger of being lost.

The battle has already been fought and the territory gained by Jesus himself who, on the cross drew all the enemy fire – all the demonic forces abroad in the world, and defeated them by love.

What we are called to defend is all that Jesus won for us and what he won for us was the freedom to accept his love, to become his love and to spread his love in the world.

If Auschwitz and all that it symbolises is to be defeated, it must first be defeated in our own hearts. None of us can escape this battle if we are to be true to the faith we proclaim Jesus Christ to be the lord of our life.

All this reminds us that being a Christian is no soft option. Those who come to our religion hoping that it will offer a painless and magical way of immunising us against the ills that beset us, the world and others are in for a rude awakening. Christianity is not about being comfortable. It’s about struggling to make sure that good prevails in an often bad world, that light will indeed conquer darkness and that love will defeat hate; that our Lord’s victory on the Cross is real for us.

These are hard things and the squeamish shouldn’t apply.

As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus spoke hard things not soft options. Indeed, so hard that many turned away from following him and this caused him pain too.

That plaintive, heartfelt question to his disciples is – “Will you also go away?”  He had no idea what they would reply and perhaps he was fearful that so early in his ministry he was facing the defeat of his mission because his mission depended on those he had chosen – amongst whom we also stand.

There is a story which tells of Jesus returning to heaven at his ascension. He is met by the Archangel Gabriel who asked him, respectfully of course, what plans he had made for carrying on his work on earth. “I have chosen twelve men and some women” Jesus replied, ‘they will pass my message on until it reaches the end of the world.’   ‘But’ said Gabriel, ‘supposing those few people fail you – what other plans have you made?’

Jesus smiled. ‘I have no other plan. I’m counting on them’

For ‘them’, read ‘us’. Jesus is counting on us – not to be super heroes in this great battle for the human heart, but to be faithful friends who will refuse to be thwarted by devil or human in the quest to love those whom he has given to us to save for his eternal kingdom.

Like Peter we might say that we have nowhere else to go except to Him because He has the secret of eternal life and because that secret has been given to us not to keep but to share.

That is the measure of the task we have been set which is why Paul’s spiritual armour and his insight into the real battle are essential to us. We must go into this work with our eyes open, our minds clear and our hearts faithful with all the defences of the Gospel fully charged.

Jesus is counting on us. This world with all its darkness is counting on us. We must not fail him because if we do, the demonic wins both the world and our hearts too and those are prizes we must deny him because there is a greater prize and it is eternal life.