230 Serpents, and Poison, and Demons, Oh My!
Transcript
Speaker 1: Jesus appeared to the 11 and said to them, go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes in is baptized will be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe in my name. They will drive out demons. They will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands. And if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. Welcome back to Scripture for your inner outcasts. It's Saturday, April 25th, 2026, the feast of Saint Mark the evangelist. I'll be providing the reflection for today's episode. My name is Elizabeth and I'm the producer and host of Scripture for your inner outcast. Hello. It is good to be back with you. Happy Saturday and happy feast of Saint Mark the evangelist, because it's the feast of Saint Mark, Our gospel today appropriately comes from the very last chapter of Saint Mark where we hear the Great Commission. It reads, Jesus appeared to the 11 and said to them, go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes in is baptized will be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe in my name. They will drive out demons. They will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands. And if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. What strikes me about this passage in Scripture is how it's kind of scary. It's kind of scary if you're a little one. The inner outcasts who are listening, or the exiled parts, we would say in internal family systems, you're probably very young.
Speaker 1: And to hear things like, whoever does not believe in Jesus will be condemned. First off, what is condemned mean? Second off, that doesn't sound good. It sounds like a punishment in Jesus's name. The apostles will drive out demons. They'll pick up snakes with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. This is crazy. We're talking about poison. We're talking about snakes. We're talking about scary things like demons. This is all really hard to comprehend if you are so little and words like this, when they come up in church, when they come up in the Bible, sometimes they're really confusing to you exiles. If you were exiled at a super young age where you didn't yet know the meanings of these words, where you couldn't quite comprehend what demons are, but maybe you've heard that word before and you know it's something bad. This can be scary, and I want to affirm that. But then at the same time, you might have some manager parts that take on a role of being a Catholic or a Christian standard bearer, and that want you to be a perfect Catholic or a perfect Christian. And perhaps those manager parts don't want to hear about your fear or your confusion when you hear things in the gospel. So right now, I just want to validate your experience. If you enter outcasts have ever had the experience of just feeling confused or scared by something related to religion, but you also haven't felt the freedom to express that confusion or that fear because of how your manager parts might shut you down, or because of how people external to yourself might shut you down, then that's difficult.
Speaker 1: I want to validate that that is difficult. It's very real to not understand sacred Scripture at any age, for any part. But it's especially very real to you inner outcasts. It's you little, little ones who need help. You need help to understand. You need someone to hold your hand to catechize you and to explain what some verses in Scripture mean. And some of you have that help in other parts of you, in your innermost self, or in people in your life. But others of you don't have that help. Others of you inner outcasts have been left to yourselves, left to figure out life, love to figure out human formation and spiritual formation all by yourselves. And you can't do it. You can't do it because you're so little. You're so vulnerable. And that's not how God designed the natural order. God, in his omnipotence and his all powerfulness. He could choose to infuse knowledge into you directly, but more often than not, he chooses to allow other instruments to work on his behalf. And that's why we're a church. We're a huge family. We're a huge community because we need each other. Because that's how God designed it in the natural order. And so I want to give you this idea. You little ones who might be listening, that if you ever don't understand something, you have a church community who is here for a purpose to catechize you. And that community includes the saints in heaven. Perhaps pray to the saints. Pray to the church triumphant because they are a part of the community that is here for God to use to love you.
Speaker 2: This podcast is all about reaching out to your exiled parts, your inner outcasts. But you might be wondering what are parts in the first place? So to learn more about what we mean by parts, I'd recommend you check out the Being Human Podcast episode 35, which is linked in the description below. Thanks for joining us and we hope to see you again tomorrow. With that, we'll end with our invocations. Our Lady, our mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist pray for us.
