A
few years ago, my brother and his wife gave me a Stephen King book on tape for
Christmas. It was an early Stephen
King book, so it’s got all the subtlety of a freight train; he goes straight
for the throat with blood, guts, nightmares and boogeymen. One of the stories involves a machine
at a commercial laundry that is possessed. The main characters try to drive out the demon in “The
Mangler” without success, mostly because they don’t know the kind of demon
they’ve got on their hands.
The thought occurs to me that the
people of Capernaum might have felt the same way. “A man with an unclean spirit” could have meant a lot of
things, and many of them are things we explain in medical terms today. Perhaps he suffered from paranoid
schizophrenia. Perhaps he was
autistic. Perhaps he suffered from
bipolar disorder. Whatever the
root cause may have been, it left this man on the outside of his community,
cast out because his community could not understand what it was that had taken
dominion over him.
Understand that in Jesus’ time,
unclean spirits were not a medical problem with a medical solution. The only way to heal a man with an
unclean spirit was by exorcism – and very few people had the authority to cast
out demons. If you knew the
unclean spirits for what they were, you could do battle with them – but if you
didn’t know the unclean spirits, you had no authority over them. Knowledge and authority – these are the
keys to our gospel reading today.
Let us pray:
Father in heaven, You gave Your
authority to Jesus of Nazareth, Your Son, to cast out the unclean spirits in
our lives; to create clean hearts in us and renew right spirits within us. Let us hear His voice calling us out of
darkness into light this day.
Amen.
In
Jesus’ day, rabbis and scribes taught by quoting the rabbis and scribes that
had come before them. A rabbi was
considered wise when he could cite numerous other rabbis in his teaching on
scripture. A reading from
scripture would be heard, then the rabbi would expand on it by saying, “Rabbi
So-and-so says this about this scripture, and Rabbi So-and-so says this.” Thus a rabbi taught about God’s
word.
But
Jesus didn’t teach like this. In
Mark’s gospel the people are amazed because Jesus teaches with authority. In Matthew’s gospel, we get a picture of how Jesus
taught. In the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus says,
“You have heard
that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder.’…But I say
to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment…
You have heard
that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with
lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart…
you have heard
that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an
evildoer. But if anyone strikes
you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
This is what caused the people of Capernaum to be so amazed
– Jesus taught out of His own heart.
Jesus made no appeal to precedent in His teaching. Jesus’ word stood on its own power. He speaks ex ousia – out of his own being. His Word IS the authority. And thus the people are amazed – because carpenters from
Nazareth don’t have the authority to teach as Jesus teaches. To teach like this, a man must be
possessed – the question is, is it a Spirit of God or an unclean spirit that
has done the possessing? We have
the luxury of reading that the Spirit descended on Jesus at His baptism, that
Jesus was indeed possessed by the Holy Spirit and thus teaching with His
Father’s knowledge and authority – the people around Jesus, on the other hand,
had to wait for revelation, to see what manner of authority Jesus really possessed.
The
unclean spirit asks Jesus one question:
what do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? We often read this as if Jesus had nothing
to do with the unclean spirit, as if they had nothing in common. But they did have one thing in common: the man in whom the unclean spirit
lived.
The unclean spirit was determined
to keep its prized possession for itself – to hold on to its host as long as it
could, no matter what the consequences might be for the host. This is how unclean spirits operate: their drive for consumption, possession
and destruction lead them to use and corrupt and destroy their hosts. Unclean spirits may tempt their hosts
with benefits, but that temptation is nothing more than bait laid in a trap;
once the unclean spirit possesses the host, the destructive power of the
unclean spirit takes over and the host begins to die – which drives the unclean
spirit to look for a new host even as it is consuming the old. There’s a reason that Satan is also
known as the “Lord of the Flies:”
it is because flies come from maggots, who are only found consuming the
bodies of the dead. Unclean
spirits and demonic powers gorge themselves on death and destruction, filled
with a never-ending hunger for fresh hosts to consume.
Perhaps this never-ending hunger
drove the unclean spirit into the synagogue that day in Capernaum. A synagogue full of fresh, innocent
souls might have pulled the unclean spirit like prime rib pulls a starving man. Instead of gnawing the bones of those
who had already become spiritual corpses, this unclean spirit is looking for a
meal with more substance, and so it heads off to the synagogue in search of
fresh meat.
Jesus, on the other hand, was
determined to free the man with the unclean spirit. Why? For the man’s
well-being; because the man needed to be freed from his possession by the
unclean spirit. Jesus is not like
the unclean spirits – they only want to consume and destroy, while Jesus wants
only to create and build up. Jesus
is possessed by the Spirit of God and has the authority of His Father in
heaven; He is filled with anger at the ways unclean spirits possess people, and
he has come to cast out the demons that hold men and women under their
power. Mark’s gospel gives us a
picture of Jesus that is neither safe nor predictable, and that’s a good thing,
because the demons we fight aren’t safe or predictable, either. If a man with an unclean spirit can
enter the synagogue in Jesus’ day, then we who gather in this modern-day
synagogue aren’t safe, either.
So the people stand in amazement as
Jesus calls out the unclean spirit with a word and frees the man from his
possession. Jesus’ own words are
all the authority He needs –
“Be silent, and come out of him!”
No need for “In the name of the Father…” or “by all that is
holy:” Jesus IS the Holy One of
God, and the unclean spirits are the only ones who know exactly who Jesus is
and what Jesus came to do.
It
is the authority of the Father that Jesus holds within Himself. Deuteronomy tells us that this authority
and power of the Father is a great and powerful thing. Moses asks God not to reveal Himself in
power again, because it will kill the people to see God the Father in all His
glory. And God agrees with Moses,
because God loves His people. As
James Healy puts it, “[God] kept his word. Inviting obedience to his plan, he
expressed his authority through [the prophets]. At last he sent Jesus, not in
thunder and lightning, but in our fragile flesh. And Jesus used authority to
liberate and lift up, not to put down; to empower and encourage, not to
intimidate and oppress. Forever his rightful claim to authority would be his
utter surrender as servant of God's people and his challenge to oppressors. And
his perfect act of obedience to God's will would be the ultimate act of
freedom.”[1]
Jesus
holds God’s authority within Himself, and yet Jesus, being possessed by the
Spirit of God, uses that authority to free people from the unclean spirits that
hold them captive. Jesus’
authority is a creative, life-giving authority that lifts up the oppressed and
welcomes the outcast back into the community. It’s no wonder the people of Capernaum were so amazed at
Jesus’ authority: for centuries,
any authority they had was used to protect the people by driving out the different,
the unclean, the sinners – now Jesus was welcoming them back into the
community, freeing them from their burdens and calling all of them to live new
lives filled with the clean spirits of forgiveness and repentance.
Jesus is still calling out the
unclean spirits. But do we realize
today that we are the ones for whom Jesus is fighting? Jesus is still calling with His voice
of authority to cleanse us from our evil and to make us clean. He is still fighting the battle for us,
still confronting the demons that surround us, rebuking them and casting them
from us. Most of us read this
story from Mark as if Jesus were a meek, gentle shepherd who had pity on a poor
man with schizophrenia or some other mental disorder. It’s time we realized that Jesus drove out more than one
demon that day, and that Jesus drives out demons in ways we can’t even imagine.
In
Capernaum, Jesus taught with His own authority about the Scriptures.
Today,
Jesus reminds us that God’s Word is not something to be taken for granted.
In Capernaum, the unclean spirits
knew that they had no place in Jesus’ kingdom.
Today, we continue to discover
that the ministry of Christ’s church is damaged whenever its members are held
captive by unclean thoughts and impure actions.
In Capernaum, Jesus drove an
unclean spirit out of a man who couldn’t ask for help.
Today, Jesus is attacking the
demons that hold us in their possession:
materialism
apathy
neglect
prejudice
gossip
fear
addiction
hyper-sexuality
self-doubt
self-pity
and every other demon that prowls and threatens and fights
to hold us captive in sin.
Don Juel wrote a commentary on Mark for Augsburg Fortress in
1990. His title for these verses
is “The Battle is Joined.” The
Gospel of Mark begins with a fight, and it is a fight for the rest of the
way. Only Jesus has the authority
to drive out unclean spirits with His word. But only Jesus has the authority to create new hearts in
that word also. God has called us
to listen for that voice, calling the unclean spirits out of us, calling us out
of the darkness of sin and into the light of Christ’s presence. Hear His Word and rest your hearts in
His authority, for the unclean spirits know that in His kingdom, their power is
ended – while we are set free to live in freedom and His righteousness, now and
forever.
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