We are still in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel today, right after Jesus has called his first disciples. They have started to follow him and they arrive together in Capernaum, which his the place where Jesus had his home, at least for a while. Now the passage we have today is quite dramatic. Jesus teaches (synagogues had guest preachers) and everybody acknowledges that he is like no one else. There is something about him that is quite astonishing and amazing (The “They were astounded”/ “They were amazed” comments frame our text, at the beginning and in the end). It seems that actually Jesus has such charisma that demons also wake up to challenge him. But even those, Jesus overcome: With a few words, Jesus cast out the spirit and it disappears: “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him” observe the assembly. This is not your typical Sabbath service for sure.
So what’s important here to notice? Again, remember we are at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, in the first chapter: The reader, as the disciples, has just met Jesus and all eyes are on him to understand who is this teacher who is like no other. Interestingly, in this passage, this is the unclean spirit that helps us learn something about Jesus: He is the Holy One of God, who has come to destroy them (them “unclean spirits”). That’s something important, central, that we will see again and again in Mark’s Gospel: Jesus has come to defeat sin and evil and all the forces of death (isolation, alienation, possession). Yet Jesus prevents the Spirit from talking because Jesus’s mission isn’t a mission of destruction. It is a mission of restoration. The exorcism we hear about to day is better understood as a healing. Jesus cast out the demon / the unclean spirit to set the man free. If you look closer at our passage, you will see how there is a confusion between the man and the spirit. We cannot tell who is who when we read the text. Mark says: There was a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out…But we don’t know who is crying. Is it the man, is it the spirit? Is it the spirit possessing the man?
Now we often roll our eyes when we hear about possession, but when you think about it, it’s not very different from when we speak about addiction. Addiction is what possesses you, what makes you act out of your mind, or at least out of character. It’s you and it’s not you at the same time. You know what I am talking about if you have ever been addicted or sharing life with an addict. You reach a point where you cannot recognize them or cannot recognize yourself if you’re the one with the addiction. Healing is not so much about stopping whatever it is that you are doing, rather it is being back to yourself, back to your senses, back to your life, back to your community. This is in this context that we need to understand Jesus’s healing and exorcism (and I don’t see a major difference between the two). Jesus can cure from impediments but the core of his mission is to set people free, set people free from what possesses them, whether it is a physical or a mental disease, a sin, an addiction, overwhelming grief and so on. Jesus claims people back to God, back to themselves, back to their communities. Jesus restores people into relationships. We have to understand that the man in our passage today was identified as being “with an unclean spirit” which meant he was separated from his religious community (unclean meant “ritually unclean”, he could not participate in worship). The man was kept away from God and other believers. He was lost to himself and to the synagogue. Jesus comes and abolishes this separation and Mark wants us to understand that, right from the beginning. This is what Jesus does, will keep on doing (Mark’s is the shortest Gospel and yet the one with the greatest number of miracles) and this is what the risen Christ will keep on doing.
This is important for us to understand when we wonder why is it that people in the Gospel are healed “immediately”(one of Mark’s favorite word) when it seems we have been waiting for so long for our prayers to be answered. In our passage today, we can observe first that people around Jesus, like us, have been waiting for a long time. Yes, Jesus heals immediately, but this man may have been suffering all his life, and the crowd was also there every Sabbath, waiting to see God at work. They were like us faithful people who kept showing up. We can also observe that the healing, again is not so much about the cure (even if people are cured) but it’s indeed what allows them to be back to themselves, to God, to their people and their lives. Maybe that’s the way we should think about healing as well. It’s not about waiting for God to give us the perfect mind and the perfect body. It’s about asking God to restore our capacity for relationships, to break down the isolation the suffering has brought in our lives.
But we’ll have many other occasions to talk about Jesus’s miracles, healing and exorcisms, because again there are many passages dealing with that in Mark’s Gospel. What is more unique in our passage today is the question of Jesus’s authority, actually the story of the healing / exorcism is likely told as a proof of Jesus’s unique authority. Healing is secondary if you will, whereas remarks about Jesus’s identity frame our text (at the beginning and in the end) and is the source of the crowd’s astonishment / amazement: He does not teach like the scribes…He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.
What we learn here is that Jesus’s authority is unique in two ways:
He is not like the scribes: It does not necessarily mean that the scribes were wimp. Scribes were..scribes. Their job was to read and write and comment the Scriptures, so they had second hand authority in the same way than any other priest today. The source of authority was the Scriptures themselves. So what Mark is telling us when he says that Jesus had authority not like their scribes is that Jesus had first hand authority, he had the same authority as the Scriptures, as the “author” of the Scriptures. It is the authority that comes directly from God, from the Holy Spirit. In the same way, when the crowds say that Jesus had a “new” teaching, it does not necessarily mean that the teaching was “different”, that Jesus was teaching something that wasn’t in the Scriptures or that they had never heard about. Rather, Jesus made the teaching personal, alive. Mark often summarizes Jesus’s teaching when he says that Jesus preached: “The Kingdom of God is among you”. Jesus made God real for people, he manifested God’s character, God’s will and God’s salvation in the here and now. Jesus was both the messenger and the message. And that’s the second way in which Jesus had authority: He commands even the unclean spirits and the obey him. Jesus’s teaching made things happen, it was transformative, it was not just words. This may seem remote but I think this can be true for us too. We can both testify to God in words and action, be the messenger and the message as we can embody God’s presence where we are. Jesus wasn’t like the scribes, detached. He didn’t ignore what was happening right in front of him, the evil or the people in need, he took initiative. As so should we.
And so there is in Mark’s passage a strong invitation to acknowledge Jesus’s authority yes, but maybe we could also question our own authority, especially in a world where Christians do not seem to be heard any more. I think Jesus wants to empower us with his authority, and I believe this was actually the first lesson he taught to the disciples. They had just met him and he takes them to the synagogue to show them how it’s done! So how is it done?
Jesus’s authority was humble and quiet. In our story, it’s the unclean spirit who is loud and dramatic. Not Jesus. He uses very simple, direct words. Yet in the meantime Jesus wasn’t afraid be challenged, he wasn’t looking for a nice religious service where he could share his views with compliant listeners, he could have ignored the man who interrupted him but he acknowledged the disruption, confronted evil and brought words of peace and healing. It seems to me that it’s important to see this balance in Jesus’s authority: gentleness and restraint one one side and one the other side boldness and authenticity. I wonder how we can manage that as disciples of Christ. Are we so focused on denouncing the wrongs that we forget to be humble and gentle, or are we so focused on being nice and accommodating that we forget to address evil? If we could do both, maybe we’d be given more credit.