January 28, 2024
Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Mark 1:21-28
It probably won’t surprise many of you that I have read – more than once – J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous novel The Lord of the Rings. It will also fail to surprise you that I’ve seen the movies directed by Peter Jackson – more than once. You will probably nod sagely without surprise that I’ve watched them with the director’s commentary track turned on. There are reasons why my personal blog site is titled, “Ordained Geek.”
I can’t remember which movie it was, but in one of those commentary tracks Peter Jackson said, regarding a plot change he’d made from Tolkien’s novel, that “it was time for an action scene.” Well, OK. I remember enjoying My Dinner with Andre, which has no action scenes at all, but that’s not the movie he was making.
Writing at Working Preacher about this synagogue scene in Mark’s Gospel, Mark Skinner says, “Possessed by the Holy Spirit, fresh from successfully confronting Satan in the wilderness, preaching the reign of God, and now in the company of at least four followers, it’s time for Jesus’ public ministry to gather momentum. It’s time for a fight scene.”
I guess Peter Jackson’s sensibilities have deeper roots than I’d believed.
The first thing that strikes me about Jesus’ teaching in the Capernaum synagogue is… we don’t know what Jesus said. Mark wrote that Jesus taught, and left out a description of what Jesus taught. The best we can do is go back a few verses to Mark’s description of Jesus’ early message, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)
Instead, Mark concentrated on the response of the listeners. They were astounded, but not so much by the message. “Repent!” is one of the most common messages of Israel’s prophets. You’re abusing the poor; repent! You’re failing to care for the widows and orphans; repent! You’re giving your loyalty to false gods; repent! Each of the prophets testified to this need for repentance with a sense of urgency and of necessity, as if the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near.
Not so new teaching.
Jesus presented it differently than his hearers were accustomed to. As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindButLovingIt, “I don’t take this to be a harsh criticism of the scribes, as if their teaching were boring, wrong, or weak. In fact, my suspicion is that ‘teaching as the scribes’ is exactly what people expect in the synagogue – their teaching is a close adherence to the scripture, their authority is subordinated to the authority of Moses or the prophets, etc. The scribes’ teaching would be biblical teaching.”
I have to say that that’s how I was taught to preach and teach – to lay out ideas and information such that people – you – can develop your own ideas and theology. In the first century, the rabbis discussed things. Sometimes they argued things. They were not, however, interested in settling into a rigid, dogmatic final answer. It was Christians that settled into that pattern over the centuries that followed Jesus and the emergence of the Church. My training came out of a realization that such dogmatism had deprived most Christians of the opportunity to think and reason and believe for themselves.
It also came out of the reluctant admission that we, the ordained clergy, are not Jesus. We do not have the depth of his awareness. We have to rely on the fragmentary reports of his words and actions. In our preaching, I was taught, our job is to focus on the text of the Scripture itself.
That’s also a not so new teaching.
Then the shouting began.
How are we to understand this “man with an unclean spirit?” Did he have a mental health breakdown? Was it rooted in his body chemistry? Do we need to share the belief in predatory evil spirits with those of the first century? Heaven knows we don’t need to believe that to know that there’s plenty of predatory evil spirits rooted in human greed and power. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Sometimes our ‘unclean spirits’ take up residence in our holy places. That is, we carry our destructive habits and tendencies right into our churches, our friendships, our families, and our workplaces. Sometimes our demons — our fears, our addictions, our sins, and our compulsions — recognize Jesus first because they know that an encounter with him will change everything.”
Osvaldo Vena writes at Working Preacher, “Naming the demons is a way to recognize that they exist. We start with the big one, Unbelief: losing one’s faith in God, in life as a sacred force, and in our fellow human beings. It is the feeling that nothing can be done to solve our problems. Then, springing from this one, come the others in fearful company: homophobia, racism, sexism, classism, religious and ideological intolerance, violence at home and at school, poverty, militarism, terrorism, war, greed, extreme individualism, globalization, out-of-control capitalism, media-infused fear that leads to paranoia, and governmental manipulation of information. To name just a few.”
There are countless habits, ideologies, commitments, and actions that dehumanize life or, if you like, demonize it. They limit human freedom and potential, sometimes of an individual, and sometimes of entire populations. They sometimes get presented as necessities – we have to do things this way or it all falls apart – and occasionally as virtues. In an election year, be very aware of attempts to tell you that harming other people is necessary or right. Those are lies. Those are big lies. Those are the voices of the demons.
How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to say, “Be silent, and come out of him!”
How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to set those free who have been taken captive by malice and falsehood.
How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to break the chains that bind.
We’re still at the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We’ve heard about Jesus’ baptism. We’ve heard the foundation of his message. We’ve heard the call of his first four disciples. Now we’ve heard his first teaching in a synagogue – which turned out to be his first healing instead. I’d just like to point out that, despite it taking place on the sabbath in a synagogue, nobody protested that Jesus had broken the sabbath. Instead, they were just more impressed. I love these words from Melissa Bane Sevier on her blog, “Jesus turns and heals him, just as he will heal so many others of disease or disability. Then he turns back to his teaching. I’ll bet people listen a little more closely after that.”
I’d guess they did, even if the teaching wasn’t all that new after all.
Mark went on to describe a series of healings, because for Mark Jesus’ healing power deeply revealed who Jesus was. He could do these miraculous things – and more to the point he did them to relieve the pain and suffering of those around him. Jesus saw and heard, and he acted.
That’s also not such a new teaching, even if compassionate response to suffering is more rare than we’d like.
Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus reveals a boundary breaking God. We will see this all over Mark. Each and every boundary we try to put in place, we think is in place, even that which we perceive as impenetrable, God bursts through. Political, social, religious, ethic, racial, sexual, gendered, cosmic, even if we are honest, the final boundary we persist in thinking is beyond God’s ability to shatter — death.”
We cannot claim this to be a new teaching, even if it seemed like it to the worshipers in Capernaum. It’s been two thousand years since Jesus said and did these things, it’s been just a little less than that since Mark set pen to parchment. It’s a not so new teaching, that the realm of God is near and we are called to change our lives.
We are called to aid others in their quests for freedom: freedom from the habits, addictions, and assumptions that limit us as individuals; freedom from the ideologies and isms that set boundaries upon human potential; freedom from the unjust rule of powers and principalities that care for their own welfare and not for that of their people. We are called to put this not-so-new-teaching into daily practice in our homes and in our workplaces and in our community.
We are called to follow the example of Jesus.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the recording does not, and will not, match the prepared text.
The image is Christ Healing a Possessed Man in the Synagogue at Capernaum, an 11th century fresco in the bell tower of Lambach Abbey, Lambach, Austria, by an unknown artist – Scan aus: Rudolf Lehr –- Landes-Chronik Oberösterreich, Wien: Verlag Christian Brandstätter 2004 S. 79 ISBN 3-85498-331-X, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6633986.
