4th Sunday after Pentecost
February 1, 2015
21They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24and he cried out, “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.” 25But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching — with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” 28At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. – Mark 1:21-28
It would be easy to talk about today’s gospel reading as an exorcism and the man in the story as demon-possessed. That may have been the gospel writer’s intention, and I do not want to deny the forces of evil that exist that we sometimes have trouble naming. But I’m not convinced that this story is about the exorcism of a demon-possessed man.
I think this might actually be closer to home for us, because Mark identifies this man as someone with an unclean spirit. Someone in the local community of faith no less. And I suspect we are all familiar with people of unclean spirit who show up at church, by which I mean all of us, myself included.
We are Lutherans after all. And we so often begin our worship with a confession that names in broad strokes the ways in which we come to the community of faith carrying the burden of our own brokenness – things we can control and things beyond our control, things we do and don’t do, systems we participate in that perpetuate injustice.
Like the unnamed man who encounters Jesus in the synagogue we are broken people. We find ways to hurt one another if not physically, then with our words. We find ways to hurt ourselves with our anxiety, worry, fear, and self-loathing, telling ourselves things we would not dare say to someone else. We find ways to hurt our world from failure to engage in efforts for change to outright harm done to the world around us. And that’s just the things loosely and possibly somewhat in our control. For we also have bodies that are broken with illnesses that cannot be cured. We come grieving the losses in our lives – these pews were filled at a funeral just yesterday. We are people who are broken. People who come with an unclean spirit stirring within us.
And so we gather in church, as they did in the synagogue, and our unclean spirits have two questions for Jesus, who comes into our midst.
The first is “What have you to do with us?” It sets up a division right away. We are here and you are there. You are clean we are unclean. We do not have anything to do with one another. We have our own ways of doing that. When we tell ourselves or each other that we are not holy enough to have a place here, or that we are too broken to be healed. Or we say something like, “The problems in our world are so large, where is God?” God is there and we are here dealing with the mess. Or we do it in our communities when we set up an “us” and a “them.” Whichever side we put ourselves on, we like to have categories for clean and unclean just as much as the people of Jesus’ time did. Jesus, “What do you have to do with us?”
And the second question: “Have you come to destroy us?” The only way the unclean spirit knows how to resolve the tension of difference is to annihilate the other. The presence of the Holy One appears at first as a threat to his existence. And so, too, do we try to eliminate difference and division by eliminating the other. Even as we acknowledge the ways in which many in our world are too quick to end lives – whether on the streets, within our homes, in the midst of war, or by state-sponsored killing – we also have to acknowledge the ways in which we tend to write people off when they disagree with us. Even families sometimes cut off members of their own for reasons that we have trouble understanding. Or the way we try to annihilate ourselves by suppressing who we are to make it by in the community, as if we must destroy ourselves to resolve the difference we see between us and the world around us. In the presence of the Holy One, “Have you come to destroy us?”
But Jesus refuses to play the unclean spirit’s game. What seems to strike the crowd is that they do not enter into some kind of cosmic battle right then and there. Instead it is the authority that Jesus claims that everyone is talking about on the way home. From the beginning it is no question in anyone’s mind who’s in charge, least of all for the unclean spirit. Jesus makes it clear that he has everything to do with the unclean spirit. Jesus is not going to run away, give up, or set himself against this man and his spirit. He will refuse to be set up as clean apart from the spirit’s uncleanness. Jesus is simply going to command it with the authority that is his. Jesus refuses to acknowledge a division between himself and our mess.
AND Jesus makes it clear that he has not come to destroy the unclean spirit, but to release it. The greek word for unclean is a-katharto, that is, to jump languages back to modern English, not having had a catharsis. It seems to me that what happens here is not so much exorcism as catharsis. The presence of the Holy One carries the kind of strong authority that provides a safe and strong container for all that needs to be named and brought out into the open, including but not limited to the challenge of that very authority.
This is a story about God coming into the world to remind us that all that has been, is, and will be are held by God, including the things we label unclean. That is the essence of what we do here in worship – our unclean spirits longing for catharsis come into the presence of God in the bread and wine, in word, in gathered assembly. And we argue, and wrestle, and push back, and cry out. We try to set ourselves against it and cry out to be spared. We let difference divide us. And still God holds us – a container for all that we are and all that we wrestle with.
And the same goes for when we leave these doors – when our unclean spirits go out and encounter the divine there, too. And we kick and scream and cry out. We try to set up our labels of us and them, we seek to destroy or be destroyed. And God holds us there too, including the darkness within and the darkness we see around us.
And as we are held, we are transformed by the presence of that strong authority. Not all at once, and not always in the ways we want or expect. But in the arms of God we are at once released from the unclean spirits that bind us and at the same time held so strongly and so tightly in God’s love that we will never be let go.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 