“We have a participator here,” Daniel said. “Good, wonderful. I like that. And yeah, Santa Claus, God, Satan, it’s really all the same.”
“If they’re so equal, why does God always win?” Bess asked.
Daniel laughed. “Win? What, you mean in here?” He held up his Bible and waved it next to his head. “In this book, why does the Devil always lose? Hmm. I wonder.” He smiled and cut his eyes around the room. The other people in the group giggled. “You see, you have to consider the source. What we have here, my friends, is an unreliable narrator.” Daniel thumped the Bible on his leg and the room filled with laughter like Bess had walked into the middle of a good inside joke. “You all know what I’m saying. This is a narrator with an agenda. He keeps us so close to his narrative that we can’t see beyond it, we can’t see that there’s more to the story. Two sides.
“For every life God saves, the Devil claims one for himself. And we know it’s true. We know it is. Look at this world. Does Good always win? We say it’s all part of the plan, but what if that plan is balance? What if the point of all this pain and suffering is to keep all the joy and happiness in check?
“The Devil is eternal and eternity has one hell of a long memory. What eluded him once will not elude him again. When Jesus drives a demon from one man, his great-great-great-great-grandchildren may one day wake up with that very demon tormenting them. And now we call it something like DNA or heredity. Alcoholism runs in his family. Violence. Mental illness. We must always remember, maybe God won a battle, but never the war.”
The room was quiet now, no more inside jokes. She could see it all over their faces—the demons they all thought they harbored. The suffering they endured. Daniel’s words sunk down around them like a weight.
“We see it right here in Antioch!” he said. “The Devil is winning now, isn’t he? Oh yes, the Devil is winning. Those women… six women, lost to the Devil right here in our own town. And can we say it was God that murdered them? No, God did not win on that day.”
He looked at Bess, his eyebrow cocked, asking if she had any questions. If she wanted to add anything else to his lesson.
After a long pause he smiled again and took a deep breath. “Okay, so let’s get into the scripture. We’re going to be reading from the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, starting with verse seven. ‘Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon. The dragon and its angels fought back, but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it.’”
Bess let the words settle down over her. The Dragon. He was playing with her. Her eyes were riveted to his face as he spoke.
“That’s a lot, isn’t it?” he asked the room. A few people nodded in agreement. “The Dragon is thrown down to earth. That sounds like a win, doesn’t it, Bess? That’s the win we expect. But then it goes on, doesn’t it? If we keep reading, let’s see, here at verse seventeen, ‘Then the dragon became angry with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring, those who keep God’s commandments and bear witness to Jesus.’ The story tells us of a woman. And God protects this woman. The whole earth rises up and protects this one woman. So to her way of thinking, yeah, God must have won. But that’s not the end of the story. He may have missed that woman, but the Devil’s going to wage war on her offspring. She may have evaded him once, but she can’t forever.”
After the lesson, Bess stayed behind, refilling her coffee cup and taking one of the donuts at Andy’s insistence. Daniel came over and filled a cup for himself.
“I don’t normally drink coffee so late. It keeps me up,” he said, his voice pleasant and even.
“I don’t sleep much either way,” Bess said.
“So, what did you think?”
“It was different. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sermon that glorified the Devil quite like that.”
He laughed. “Glorified? Me? No, it’s not like that. We’re realists here.”
“And what’s real?”
“The Devil. The Devil is real, Bess. And the little stories they tell us in the Bible are only the half of it. Some old men decided these are the stories we should know, but there’s so much more. So many other perspectives. I want these guys to see that. To understand.”
“What’s that? You want them to understand that sometimes the Devil wins?”
“About half the time.” He grinned, another joke. “But come on, think about it. The Devil put one over on us a long time ago and everybody’s still living in the dark.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus. The Son of God. I mean, come on. It doesn’t really make any sense.”
“You mean you think he was just a man? Some kind of con man that duped us? That’s not something I expect to hear from a Bible study leader.”
“No, you misunderstand me. You see, scholars pretty much agree these days, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was probably raped by Roman soldiers. Immaculate? Not so much. She was a thirteen-year-old girl who got raped. And in those days she’d be stoned for something like that. So to save her life, they came up with a story. And it’s, well, it’s quite a story. I mean, it’s a doozy. But riddle me this, Bess… Does a horrible rape sound like the way God would bring his son into the world? Or does that sound more like the way demons are spawned?” Daniel’s eyes were far away, seeing something beyond the walls of the church.
“What are you even implying? That Jesus is the Devil?”
“Not at all. No. That’s not how these things work. And I’d never say that. But the antichrist we’ve come to fear, what if he already came? What if he came and tricked us all?”
“That’s ridiculous. Jesus preached about love.” Bess was becoming frustrated. She wasn’t sure she even believed in God, but here she was defending the ideals of Christianity.
“Maybe he did. But how many wars have been fought in his name? How many murders? I think Jesus’s name has inspired more death and destruction than the Devil’s.”
“The Devil is a liar.”
“Or is he a realist?” Daniel sipped his coffee.
“You weren’t raised around here, were you?”
“No.” Daniel’s grin widened. “No, I wasn’t raised in Antioch. I was raised… somewhere else.”
“Did you know Margot Cooper? You had to have. She attended here, didn’t she?” The question jumped from Bess’s mouth before she could stop it. It hung there, an accusation.
“I knew Margot as she was. I do not know her anymore.” Daniel’s face looked different suddenly. It was less assured and confident, even his clean and even skin tone seemed to grey slightly, look oilier than before.
“Is that a yes?” Bess asked.
“Of course I knew her.”
“It’s awful what happened to her,” Bess said, her eyes locked on his face.
“It was awful,” he agreed, “at first. It’s gotten easier over time.”
And then Andy was beside them, nudging his way in between. “Looks like you two have become besties already! And Bess was worried she wouldn’t fit in.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink.
“I’d say she fits right in,” Daniel said, regaining his composure.
The change in his appearance had been brief, but Bess was shaken by it. Talking about Margot had brought something out in him. Something smaller and weaker.
“I’d love to stay and talk more, but I really have to be getting home. Things to tend to. You know how it is.” He eased out of the room, smiling to people as he passed. Once he was gone, everyone else seemed to take it as their cue to go as well.