“Smells Like Old Scratch”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, November 7, 2026
Reading: Ezekiel 28:11-19
We do Remembrance Day well here, don’t we? I’ve loved hearing your family’s stories. Elizabeth Edmison’s father Bill McCormick was one of the few Allied soldiers to reach their objective on D-Day (his grandson Alex is here today). His tank rolled into the French town of Creully where an 8-year-old boy named Rene hadn’t slept all night. His father and every other able-bodied adult in the village was being sent to a work camp by the Nazis on June 6th, 1944. Rene heard commotion outside that morning but instead of the Germans, he saw a Canadian tank come over the hill. McCormick’s. Rene ran and got the bottle of wine his family had been saving till liberation and presented it to the young Lieutenant. Nearly 60 years later Colonel McCormick came back to commemorate D-Day and Rene had become mayor. They renamed the town square after Bill McCormick. I imagine a wine glass or two was tipped back again. But it probably didn’t taste as sweet as the bottle on liberation day.
Not sure they make ‘em like that anymore, do they?
Those who freed Europe learned about the world, about good and evil, in ways that still affect us. The Bible explores the same themes. We’re in a series on the book of Ezekiel. And no one screeches louder at the sins of Israel than Israel’s own prophets. Ezekiel is 48 chapters. Half of them are prophesies against Israel. The last quarter of the book shows a vision of hope. The third quarter of the book? Prophesies against Israel’s neighbours.
Now this is confusing. On what grounds do Israel’s prophets criticize Israel’s neighbours? Beyond the obvious: Egypt is denounced for slavery. Babylon for destroying the temple and exiling the Jews. But what did poor Tyre ever do wrong? Israel’s neighbour to the north is not chosen or elect by God. Tyre does not have the ten commandments or any others. The Tyrians have their own religion, their god Melqart, they didn’t join in Babylon’s destruction of Judah. So why does Ezekiel pile on? And how does the prophet expect them to know any better?
This is one key difference between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism does not expect non-Jews to convert to Judaism. We Christians have always spoken of a mission to the nations. We can’t keep Jesus to ourselves; we have to share him. If you don’t feel the force of that, think of how you feel about democracy, or capitalism, or human rights. You can’t imagine not wanting other nations to have those gifts, right? That’s how our forebears felt about the gospel. How dare you keep that locked up to yourself. Judaism’s mission is different. You can convert to Judaism if you really want to, but you don’t have to, to go to heaven. In Jewish imagination we all descend not just from Adam but from Noah. Every person besides Noah’s family was wiped out in the flood. We were all on that boat. And as we got off two-by-two we got some laws. Now remember these are before Abraham, so there is no elect chosen people yet. No Moses yet so there’s no divine law. Just these seven: don’t have any idols, don’t murder, don’t commit sexual immorality, don’t blaspheme, don’t steal, and confusingly, don’t eat the limb of a living animal. I think we’re probably all good on that one (it’s really against animal cruelty). The one positive Noachide law is to establish courts of justice. That’s the minimum expected of all people. If even a really traditionalist Jew is asked if we gentiles have to convert for a share in the world to come, they’d say no, just ‘do the seven go to heaven.’ The laws of Noah are enough.
The church has various ways of accounting for morality and wisdom outside our midst. Plato and Aristotle knew some stuff, right? Israel’s neighbours have stories so good the Bible borrows them and puts them in the Bible (with some changes). Indigenous peoples in North America often acted and thought more Christian than their colonizers. But how, without revelation from God? Well, all humans are made in the image of God and have the gift of reason, so we’re not surprised when people get something right. Karl Barth speaks of Jesus Christ as the sun in the sky, illumining all. At night we have lesser lights like the moon and the stars. Those lesser lights give off genuine light. It seems every people and culture have a sense of moral responsibility, or conscience. Bump someone by accident on the TTC and everybody apologizes. Bump someone on purpose and we got problems. The God of Israel seems to expect the king of Tyre to be morally accountable even without the laws of Moses. That’s interesting. He’s at least accountable enough to get condemned.
Tyre was a trading people, sailing the Mediterranean with goods, and prosperous as a result. You get a hint of that here: “In the abundance of your trade you were willed with violence, and you sinned.” Which sounds like humanity in the days of Noah: the earth filled with violence that God cannot stand. Another critique: “Your heart was proud because of your beauty.” Folks sometimes ask me to compare living in Vancouver, as we did for seven years, with living in Toronto, now into our fifth. And I say Vancouver is like the beautiful teenager who is obnoxious about it, look how gorgeous I am. Toronto is more like “everyone in this country hates us. And we kinda hate us too.” More gritty and self-aware. The main thing Tyre did wrong was that it didn’t fall to the Babylonians. Just kept on trading, while the Jews wallowed in misery in exile. Eventually the Tyrians would get theirs. Alexander the Great conquered them a couple of centuries later.
But something else seems to be going on in this oracle against Tyre. This is more than one neighbour grousing about another. “You were in Eden,” Ezekiel says, “the garden of God.” Woah. The King of Tyre is ... Adam. Our forebear? That’s strange. This is stranger: our first parents, Adam and Eve, were naked and unashamed, then pitifully tried to cover themselves with fig leaves. The King of Tyre in Eden is covered not with leaves but majestically with jewels. Imagine being dressed in carnelian, chrysolite, moonstone (not moonshine—that’s a different thing), beryl onyx jasper sapphire, turquoise and emerald. The Sun King Louis XIV in France, Solomon in Jerusalem, had nothing on this Tyrian king in Eden covered in gemstones. It seems like we’re talking both about the prince of Tyre and about some other sort of prince altogether.
I’m told my title is not transparent to Canadians— “smells like old scratch.” Several of you searched google and came to the conclusion I was talking about money. No, this sermon is about humanity’s old adversary. Satan is not much mentioned by name in the Old Testament. But a passage like this seems to be describing something like the ancient foe of God and humanity. Jews and Christians alike, then Muslims after us, take passages like this, plus more from the New Testament and elsewhere, and construct an elaborate story about the devil and his angels. It goes like this: God creates the host of angels first. The word angelos in Greek means messenger, and we get to know angels when they turn up with news, like Gabriel to Mary. But a previous message came from God to the angels: I’m going to become human. Angels you should bow to Adam, for I am taking his flesh. The greatest angel, Lucifer, objects. So do a third of the angelic host. Humans are weak and pitiful. They’re going to ruin everything. No, don’t become human, become an angel. We are strong and beautiful. And that’s their fall. They can’t stand the idea of a humble God and won’t bow to weaker creatures like us humans. Now that’s way more than we see in Ezekiel! It’s elaborated in writers like Dante and Milton. Find me a decent Hollywood storyline that’s not dependent on demons or the devil. Ushers when you pass the plates today, please go on down to Hollywood north, they owe us. Jesus spends a lot of his ministry jousting with the devil, casting out demons. That’s the world he lives in.
Us? Not so much. In mainline and liberal churches that all seems like superstitious nonsense. Quite a contrast from more fundamentalist Christians. Frank Peretti wrote a series of bestsellers in the 90s all with “darkness” in the title, about how the devil is around every corner. Meant to inspire prayer. But they also inspired ridicule. This is the 20th century man; we got electricity and space shuttles and stuff. But look what else happened in the 20th century. Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge. The cover of Time after the Rwandan genocide adapted Shakespeare: there are no devils here, they are all in Rwanda. The century when intellectuals thought we were done with demons made us coin a new term we never needed before: “genocide.” Meanwhile cultures outside the west are much quicker to talk about forces beyond our rational power. The most watched Netflix movie in history is called K Pop Demon Hunter, about a Korean girl band whose music doesn’t just make them stars, it slays demons. Not a hint of Judaism or Christianity in the movie, but of course there are demons. The only question is how to defeat them. If K pop can do it, then turn it up.
A few church rules for talking about the devil or demons. One, they are not created evil. Nothing is. They are created good. This is why we have the stories of fallen angels. Everything God makes is good. If a thing had no goodness in it, it would case to exist. Evil is always a lack, an absence. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not serious! Just ask anyone with an absent parent or child. The point is that you can’t go pick up a handful of evil. Evil is always a good thing that’s been corrupted. I like this teaching. Evil is absurd. Don’t try to explain it or rationalize it. And never say God caused it. If God did evil, God wouldn’t be God, he’d be the devil.
Evil is also not more interesting or cooler than good. You get a sense that it is in our pop culture. Every actor wants to play the villain: they’re more textured and nuanced in our stories, whereas good comes off as vanilla and boring and terribly unsexy. This is all wrong. Good is actually what’s layered and nuanced and interesting. The Lord of the Rings books and movies show this beautifully. The hobbits are good. So are the elves: really differently good. So are the dwarves, really differently good again. The ents too. In fact, what’s evil, like the orcs and Ringwraiths, are just fallen elves and men. In the early church, the demons are depicted as bumbling and stupid. Best strategy is to make fun of them. They can’t stand it. They want to be taken very seriously. G.K. Chesterton said that angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly.
Final rule for now: the devil is not some polar opposite to God. There can be no opposite to God. Teacher of mine used to say this: if you grab the devil by the scruff of the neck and look at the name on the tag of the uniform, it says, “property of the triune God.” Luther put it this way: er ist Gottes Teufel. He’s God’s devil. Sometimes people speak of God and the devil like it’s not clear who’ll win. Well, in Jesus Christ God has already won. The devil is still active, doing harm, but his days are numbered. He’s like a great fish already caught, flailing around in the boat, injuring people. He is dying. But he’s still dangerous. It’s like D-Day in fact: after that successful invasion by Lt. McCormick and his fellow liberators, both sides knew the war was over. It was just a matter of time. Many more would die, whole cities be leveled, whole populations displaced, but the outcome was settled militarily. So, it is after the resurrection. Christ’s kingdom is here and will be victorious. But not without casualties.
Now that’s all very well theologically, but who cares? One reason liberal mainline churches stopped talking about the devil was that it didn’t seem to add anything. Even if it were true, so what? Well, let me add some practical wisdom, mostly by way of the black church. Apparently if you face slavery and Jim Crow for 400 years you don’t get bored speaking of evil. So, one saying from the black church: when God gets busy, the devil gets busy too. I’ve coached other pastors and churches on this, so I owe it to you as well: ministry gets harder before it gets easier. Try anything, anything at all, and it’ll be frustrating. This is why churches and other institutions so often just coast. Less resistance. Here’s another one that you can find in Shakespeare and Dayle Barrett’s Jamaican granny used to say it too, God rest her: tell the truth and shame the devil. The devil, scripture says, is the father of lies. So, tell the truth, even when it’s hard. I’ve told you before the story from my mentor in ministry about going on no dates. His roommate went on many dates. He asked his secret. Simple. I tell them whatever they want to hear. Works in politics too. Anybody else smell . . . sulfur?
Our best stories about this are of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. The devil and the Lord are in a little tete a tete, and Satan has some suggestions. Hey I know, you’re hungry, you’ve fasted 40 days, so turn these stones into bread. Hey, you want all the kingdoms of the world? They’re mine, I’ll give em to you, all you have to do is worship me. Hey look at that precipice. Throw yourself off and the angels will protect you. The temptations are one and the same: use your power for gain and to impress others. That’s the devil’s way. None of the things are bad: bread, power, protection. Pray for those things for my kids every day. The danger is pursuing them the wrong way. The devil’s way. Peter is the first disciple to get something right. Who am I? Jesus asks. You are the messiah of Israel? Yep, gold star. And I’m going to be crucified. No, you can’t. And Jesus says get behind me Satan. Satan’s temptation is to take power and use it to aggrandize himself. But God’s way is to shed power, serve like a slave, and die. That’s the power that shames the devil. I’ll tack on a story here from the desert fathers, monks who copied Jesus’ combat with devils. A demon asked a monk who are the sheep and who are the goats? That is, who’s going to heaven? Surely a great, learned monk will know. A friend here in town got a compliment on a sermon. Instead of saying “thanks,” as I’d have done, he said, “yeah the devil already told me that.” We professional religious types love having the answers. This monk said “the goats are people like me. Who the sheep are? God alone knows.” And the devil screamed and fled. Demons are allergic to humility.
Let’s look again at this king of Tyre. The Jews are sitting landless and kingless in Babylon. Meanwhile the king of Tyre is still printing his own money. Ezekiel says his fate is grim. He’ll be thrown out of paradise. Driven out by a cherub. Remember the cherubim from earlier in Ezekiel? Scary right? The King of Tyre will come to an appalling end and turn to ash. That’s all of our fate in Adam. The serpent said to Adam hey, wanna be like God? Yeah! Eat this fruit. And we do. The man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, each implicitly blaming God. Being like God is a great thing. But not the devil’s way. Not via shortcut or competing for it. Instead, we’re to wait to receive it from Jesus as a gift. Milton’s Satan figures it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. We strain for glory and then stumble. But if we yield, serve, bend the knee, God will give us all we want and more. The king of Tyre is like Adam only more so. He is covered not just with leaves but with jewels. Starting out higher, he falls harder. But God has a soft spot for the fallen. He goes out and gets those who’ve strayed. He raises up from the dust and makes alive. Listen to St. Paul:
As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. Just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.
We’re all in Adam. Jews as well as gentiles. The people of Tyre not less than the people of Toronto. And what does God do with Adam? Remakes all over again in Jesus Christ. Because God can’t stand to see his beloved creation go to waste. Make it so Lord for us, for all of Adam, for Tyre, and for this whole blooming creation. Amen