Mark 1:21-28 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and 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.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They 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.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
A number of years ago, my friend and colleague, the Rev. Collin Adams taught an Adult Christian Education class called “The Scary Side of Christianity.” In the very first class, Collin pointed out that Presbyterians don’t often talk about demons (or “unclean spirits”) even though they do pop up in Scripture from time to time. I suspect that one of the reasons is because whenever you talk about demons, the devil, or any of that stuff, it inevitably becomes a conversation about whether these things even exist.
-“Was the man in this story literally possessed by an unclean spirit? Are demons real? Are they supernatural and active and alive in the world today?”
-“Are ‘unclean spirits’ in the Bible perhaps euphemisms for something else? Maybe something closer to what we might understand today as mental illness?”
-“Is the story meant to be seen as symbolic? A metaphor for a larger spiritual conversation that we are meant to be having as people of faith in the Church and in the world?”
Passages in Scripture like this one are not always the easiest to preach but not because I find them particularly scary. I don’t. However, while questions like these are very good, very reasonable, and very important, I do think they ultimately miss the point of what stories like this one are really about.
To put it another way, these may be the questions that we find ourselves asking, but the passage spends exactly zero verses trying to answer any of them. Whereas nearly half of the verses in this passage go out of their way to point out all these strange little details in the background, which means that we probably ought to be paying attention to them, too.
Pastors Robb McCoy and Eric Fistler describe a demon as “anything that has power of a human that is not of God. Much like enemies in the Psalms do not have to be read as soldiers, demons do not have to be read as spiritual beings. A demon is anything that has power that is not of God.” I don’t know if this is necessarily a perfect definition, but it did get me thinking about that word, “power,” and how important power is in this story (and not always necessarily the supernatural kind).
Throughout Mark’s Gospel, the religious leadership is consistently described as being opposed to and disapproving of what Jesus is up to. And why? Back in Jesus’ day, so-called healers would show up around town all the time. Most of the time, the authorities would just roll their eyes and ignore them. "Whatever. They're just a bunch of weirdos." But when Jesus does it, suddenly it’s "Well, hold on now! We got rules about this sort of thing!” It just sort of begs the question. Why weren't we holding town meetings for those other guys? What makes Jesus so special?
The reason is because Jesus threatens their power. In this passage alone, Mark includes no fewer than two references to Jesus’ audience starting to think that this Jesus guy might be giving them a run for their money. “A new teaching,” verse 27 says, “with authority!” Verse 22: “He taught...as...having authority...not as the scribes.” It almost sounds like throwing salt in the wound, doesn’t it? No wonder some feathers got ruffled.
There are many different kinds of power in this story. Jesus commands authority of the unclean spirit, but the bigger picture here is that he may also be starting to command authority over the religious leadership. At least the public opinion seems to think so. If you’re a religious leader who’s become accustomed to holding that kind of authority around town, that’s a big problem. People who hold power in the world are usually not wild about the idea of losing it.
Let’s be really clear. When the crowd says that Jesus spoke with authority, they mean it. When Jesus rebukes the unclean spirit, he doesn’t say things like “Well, let’s hear the demon out” or “There are two sides to every story” or “Maybe we need to listen to what he has to say with an open mind.” Jesus says, “Be silent!” When the unclean spirit sees Jesus, it asks, “Have you come to destroy us?” and Jesus doesn’t exactly rush to say no. He says, “Get out.”
By the time the story is over, the demon isn’t the only one who is silenced either. Verse 27 says, “They were all amazed” when they saw this. In Greek, the word is thambeó (θαμβέω). It suggests awe, reverence, and maybe even a little fear. When Jesus commands, “Be silent,” it almost reminds me of a word that we as Presbyterians use with some regularity: “renounce.” As in "Do you renounce evil and its power in the world?"
It is one of the questions that we ask when we receive new members into the congregation or confirmation students. It’s the question that we ask new elders, deacons, and ministers. It is asked at the moment of our baptism. Do you renounce evil? If confronted by it, would you command it to be silent? Would you be willing to shut it down? Or would we, like Jesus’ disciples, feel overcome with fear? The Presbyterian answer, of course, is “We do, and we will,” but I wonder what this really looks like in our day-to-day lives?
Back in 2018 before I received the call to serve as your Associate Pastor, I was still quietly interviewing with other churches, and occasionally I would exchange stories and experiences of these interviews with a friend and colleague of mine who was also quietly doing the same. During one such story, this friend of mine shared with me that he had just finished a “first interview” with a church over the phone. As first conversations go, it had all gone pleasantly enough until one topic in particular arose.
“Pastor John,” they said (we’ll call him John), “we here at Such-and-Such Presbyterian Church hold certain values about the interpretation of Scripture. Tradition is very important to us, and we believe that some churches have bucked tradition a little too much when it comes to people in alternative lifestyles or in same-sex relationships.
“Now certainly all are welcome to worship and to repent of their sin,” they said, “but we not only assume but expect that our staff will uphold our values about who may or may not be welcome in leadership. May we assume that you are in accord with those values?”
“No,” John replied.
The phone was silent for a moment or two. “Do you mean,” the moderator followed up after clearing his throat, “that you believe that this is a very nuanced and difficult conversation and that we should be patient with those who do not share our church’s values?”
“No,” John replied.
“Do you mean that perhaps while you disagree with their behavior, we can find other ways to welcome them with a spirit of faithfulness?”
“No,” he said, “I mean that I am not in accord with the values that you hold. I unapologetically and unambiguously support LGTBQIA+ equality in every facet of human life including the Church. That’s a value where I am not willing to bend. If that’s going to be a dealbreaker, then God be with you. We can go our separate ways in peace, but you deserve to know the truth. The answer is no.”
The search committee on the other line was stunned. They had never heard a candidate speak to them with that kind of frankness before. “Well, thank you for your time, Reverend,” they said, “if we feel so moved, we’ll be sure to reach out and follow-up.” But John knew the truth. There wasn’t going to be a follow-up.
As John told me this story, I told him that I admired his bravery, and I certainly feel the same way about being a welcoming and inclusive church. However, I couldn’t help but ask. “Do you think you were maybe a little harsh though?“ I asked, “I mean, I agree with you, but you’re not going to get that job. I think you probably burned that bridge. Do you think you could have maybe found a nicer, churchier way to say that?”
John smiled. “No,” he said, “the answer was no, and you’re right. I’m probably not going to get that job, but you and I both know that relationship was never going to be right for us in the first place.” He was right.
This week, I remembered that story as I thought about what it means to renounce something, and I realized that it’s really quite simple. To renounce something simply means that the answer is no. John did not believe that the church that he interviewed with was evil. They weren’t. They were not demonic, and they were not bad people. They simply understood Scripture and faithfulness differently than he did. However, John also knew that in order for him to follow what he believed in his conscience to be faithful, the answer for him had to be no, and he had to be definitive.
I suspect we’ve all experienced moments like this in our lives. I suspect we’ve also experienced moments where there was a time and a place to have a discussion. To weigh both sides or consider the pro’s and con’s, but that’s not what the word, “renounce,” means. “Renounce” refers to those moments in life when, after searching our heart and searching our conscience, we know there is no ambiguity. Not really. The answer is no.
I will confess that questions and conversations like this one are not always easy for me. There are moments when we as people of faith need to be able to summon the courage to say what needs to be said and to not give in to what Pastor Lawrence described last Sunday as “a failure of nerve.”
And yet, as I’m sure many of us have also probably learned from experience, there are just as many times when (if we’re not careful) simply “shutting it down” can inadvertently do more harm than good. In this passage, “shutting it down” is exactly what Jesus does when confronted by the face of evil. Yet only one chapter later in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus will gather for dinner at Levi’s house in the company of sinners and tax collectors, to which the scribes and the Pharisees respond with a collective “Huh?” (2:15-17) Perhaps there is a time and a place for both, and the wisdom to know the difference is the wisdom is the wisdom and the grace that we see embodied in the person of Jesus.
In the meantime, however, this story in Mark asks us to sit in this space for a while. Do we, as people of faith, have the capacity to renounce that which is wrong? If the moment came, would we have the courage to say that the answer is no? Can you think of a time when you have done that? What does that need to look like in your life? If you can’t think of an example, why might that be? What sort of questions does that raise?
I’m not sure that it’s always necessarily the voices we hear in others. Sometimes the voices that are the most unclean are the voices that we hear in our own hearts. The voices that tell us that our lives, our identities, or our bodies are shameful or ugly or the voices that sometimes tempt us to feel that way towards our neighbor. The voices of greed, prejudice, resentment, or even the hunger for violence.
The next time we are asked, “Do you turn from those ways and renounce them?” and we say, “We do,” maybe the first place that we need to start is by looking at our own reflection in the mirror. When the author of Mark’s Gospel wrote this story down, I wonder if they remembered the words of the fifty-first Psalm. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (51:10).
The story in Mark’s Gospel challenges us to ask some pretty difficult questions and pushes us to think about some pretty difficult things. We are not a society that is always good at saying, “No.” When Jesus’ followers saw him do it, the Gospel tells us that they were amazed. Freaked out. Maybe even a little scared. Maybe we are, too, sometimes. Perhaps finding the courage to say, “No,” is not always easy for us either.
However, following Jesus isn’t always so easy. Sometimes it means following him into the difficult questions and conversations about life and faithfulness that don’t always have easy answers. To let ourselves be pushed and challenged by those questions for a moment while hoping that (in doing so) we may be drawn closer to the One who truly renounced evil. Perhaps we can also find just a little bit more of that courage and that grace that we see in Jesus in our own lives. Until that day comes, the Gospel is not settled with us, and Jesus is not finished with us yet.
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.