Mark 1:21-28
January 28, 2018
I.
It is the sabbath. Jesus takes his disciples to worship at the synagogue in the seaside town of Capernaum. Jesus always relates to and participates in the religious institutions and life of his people. Even though he knows better than anyone the failings, flaws, corruption, and hypocrisy of conventional religion, he still keeps the Torah, he celebrates the holidays, and he shows up at worship.
In the synagogue he finds a man possessed by an unclean spirit. The man asks Jesus the challenging question: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God.”
It is a question that I suspect many people may feel like asking when Jesus shows up, even those who diligently and dutifully attend church. Religious institutions — even Christian churches — can function for years, decades, even centuries, without Jesus making his Presence known at all. Over the last 1500 years we have managed to construct a Christianity that makes a big deal out of worshiping Jesus… but has almost completely forgotten about following him. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if we don’t worship Jesus instead of following him.
Then, every once in a while, someone will have an encounter with God’s Word and actually listen to what Jesus says in the gospels, words we hear regularly but which usually go in one ear and out the other, gaining little or no purchase in our consciousness. And they will realize what Jesus is actually saying, what he really requires and demands of us, and it will grab them and scare the living daylights out of them.
It is then that they may ask for themselves this question: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God.”
Churches, and many Christians, simply do not want to know about Jesus, let alone follow him. In our Bible Study on the Sermon on the Mount it is becoming clear to me how much of a threat Jesus really is to our normal, conventional, socially-acceptable, profitable way of doing things. How much of Christianity just serves to inoculate us against Jesus… just gives us a small, inert dose of him in order to protect us from catching the real thing?
When we hear him say something like “Woe to you who are rich, you have received your reward,” or “Love your enemies and bless those who curse you,” or “Whatever you do for the least of these you do for me,” we could easily respond with “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” Mind your own business! Don’t mix religion and politics! Stop trying to change things! We just want it to be like we remember it.
The man with the unclean spirit speaks for the tired, locked-down religious institution that Jesus finds him in. He speaks for everyone who wants to prop it up, keep it on life-support, preserve and maintain that old time religion when everyone knew their place and stayed in it, no one rocked the boat. Church was about nationalism and preserving the status quo, no matter how contrary to Jesus’ teachings it may have been.
II.
The fact is that when Jesus shows up in your life it is a royal pain in the neck! There’s lots of stuff that Jesus don’t put up with. If we pay attention to what he’s saying and doing, business as usual is over. We can’t keep listening to the unclean spirits in our hearts. We can’t keep hating people who are not like us. We can’t blame the poor for their poverty. We can’t put one nation above all others. We can’t get rich at others’ expense. We can’t continue to degrade and debase God’s creation. We can’t live on self-serving lies.
Who does Jesus deport? Who does he incarcerate? Who does he refuse to serve? Who does he torture? Who does he allow to starve? To whom does he deny healthcare? What wall does he advocate building? Against whom does he make war? No one… except the unclean spirits. Those he casts away into the outer darkness.
Sometimes it certainly seems like this guy from Nazareth has only shown up to disrupt and destroy every assumption, prejudice, allegiance, habit, addiction, tradition, and delusion we hold… and he has. The unclean spirit gets Jesus absolutely right. He has come to destroy them. He has come to destroy every institution that maintains and feeds on the fear, hatred, and anger that has throttled the human heart. He has come to destroy every manifestation of bigotry, exclusion, superiority, division, and selfishness.
The unclean spirit finally, and also correctly, identified Jesus as “the Holy One of God.” It realizes that all this overturning of the tables of our self-serving complacency is actually God’s work. As Jesus has said a few verses earlier, he has come to proclaim the nearness of God’s Kingdom, which neutralizes and negates all our sordid and pitiful earthly kingdoms, invented and kept in business by a whole sorry host of unclean spirits.
The unclean spirit realizes that its time, its broken and fearful, oppressive and violent outlook, its heyday of leaching off the energy of this human, is over. The fulfilled time of the Lord is made present in Jesus. True humanity has emerged at last; now a humanity enslaved to unclean spirits is to be shown their true nature with and in God. In Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God, our original blessing is being revealed to us.
The unclean spirit attempts to defame Jesus with the usual dismissive criticism: which is that he is from the sleepy, nowhere village of Nazareth and therefore, according to the Bible, can’t be the Messiah. But it also can’t help but recognize the truth that Jesus is nevertheless the Holy One of God.
III.
Jesus immediately tells the unclean spirit to “be silent, and come out of him!” In doing this he separates the human being from the alien, unclean spirit possessing the human being. Because no matter how depraved and unjust and violent our systems may be, they are not a product of our true and blessed humanity. We are made in the Image of God!
But we allowed our true selves to be corrupted and forgotten. Instead we concocted an ego-centric false self. And we chronically mistook this unclean spirit for the true Holy Spirit Good places in our hearts. Rather than connecting with integrity to the One God, we each made of ourselves alienated, isolated, and sinful little gods, motivated by fear, and inflicting violence on the world. We listen instead to these little voices in our head that divide the supposedly clean from the supposedly unclean.
In instructing the unclean spirit to “be silent” he shuts down the interior narrative that divides the world into clean and unclean. He foreshadows what God will tell Peter in Acts: “What God has made clean, you must not call [unclean].” It is uncleanness itself, the very idea that anyone is inherently bad and worthy of eradication, or at least exclusion, that Jesus drives out of the man. That is what the demon is about: pretending that this soul is somehow alone and vulnerable, in danger of being harmed or killed if it doesn’t build defenses and strategize attack.
I wonder if Jesus doesn’t say the same thing to us, requiring that our unclean spirits, the narrow, small-minded, paranoid voices that chatter in our heads about what we don’t have and what we didn’t get, and what we lost, who got more… be exposed and sent away. Those voices lie. They feed our fears with falsehoods. They stoke our resentments. They fund our suspicions. They tell us we are small, weak, sick, needing to pay someone to heal and protect us.
Jesus Christ comes along with the opposite message: You are made in God’s Image and God loves you all! And he does it with such integrity and authority that just an encounter with him causes the unclean spirits to be revealed. In his Light we see him, and we see our true selves, our true humanity; in him we see the very Image of God, we see who we can be, who we are essentially made to be, who we really are: children of Light, engineered for love.
The demon shrieks in convulsions on its way out of the man because all it knows is what it is losing. That is all unclean spirits ever know. That is all they tell us about. But when the unclean sprit departs, the man must have realized, even if for only an instant, his true Self in direct connection with God, who stands before him, hearing the words that came from his own mouth just a few seconds before: “I know who you are: the Holy One of God.”
IV.
Yes. Jesus has come to destroy us. He has come to destroy all that we have allowed to accrue to us that separates us from our true selves, from each other, and from God. He has come to liberate us from every foul breath in our minds teaching us to hate and fear. He has come to free us from every idea that seeks and finds uncleanness in the creation that God declares very good. He has come to reveal our essential oneness with each other, the whole creation, and even in a sense God.
He has come to tell us that the future in him, the Holy One of God, while it may look dangerous and unfamiliar, is really infinitely better than even the rosiest delusion we cherish about the past. His future is about oneness and compassion, healing and wholeness, freedom and peace. In his future, now present, perfect love drives out all fear. The slimy ghosts who wrap us in their web of lies dissolve into the nothing they are, and we emerge with him in goodness and joy.
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