Mark 1:21-28 

Jesus and his followers went into Capernaum. Immediately on the Sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and started teaching. The people were amazed by his teaching, for he was teaching them with authority, not like the legal experts. Suddenly, there in the synagogue, a person with an evil spirit screamed, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. You are the holy one from God.”

“Silence!” Jesus said, speaking harshly to the demon. “Come out of him!” The unclean spirit shook him and screamed, then it came out.

Everyone was shaken and questioned among themselves, “What’s this? A new teaching with authority! He even commands unclean spirits and they obey him!” Right away the news about him spread throughout the entire region of Galilee.

I’d like to begin our look today at our Scriptural text by sharing a story about my grandmother, my father’s mother, Inez Jones, who lived most of her life in Meridian, Mississippi, which is the closest thing I too have to a hometown.  She was quite a woman in many ways, being divorced as she was early in her life during a time when such things were not done, and then working multiple jobs while trying to raise three kids on her own.  She would tell me stories of her nightly work at the local movie theater after finishing her day job, scrapping together a living, until she saved enough to open up her own business, a Hallmark Card shop in the late fifties, a store that thrived through much of the sixties and early seventies, when she finally sold it someone else.  She certainly had the prejudices of her time, but altogether she was feisty, hard-working woman in an era when divorced women didn’t open up business by themselves – she always seemed fearless to me, with her fiery dyed red hair and her certainty about how the world should work.  But she wasn’t completely fearless, as I eventually came to see, when I first saw fear etched on her face for the first time when I was maybe 12 or so. I was staying with her in Meridian, and my parents were away from the house, and there was a persistent knock on the door, which my grandmother answered. And yet, she didn’t open the door fully, and she kept the chain lock on, speaking only through the partially opened door.  Words were exchanged, voices were raise, and this man seemed to want in, and she wouldn’t do it, she would let him in, even though it was clear that she knew this man in early forties, who was disheveled, hair a mess, with a face ravaged by time and a world weariness.  Eventually, after a few minutes, he left, and she turned around from facing the door to facing me, her face flushed with both fear and relief.  I asked her who that man was, but she ignored my question, but later, when I asked my mother about who this stranger might have been, she told me that it was one of my grandmother’s nephews, a man who mentally ill, likely schizophrenic I would later guess, and who, when off his meds, could become violent and belligerent.  He would often end up homeless during these times, and show up my grandmother’s door, asking for money or food, which she sometime provided, though not that day, perhaps because my sister and I were at her house. I had never heard of him until that day, never knew of him, and later it would become clear that he become an intentionally forgotten member of our family, perhaps because some were ashamed of him, and others because they were afraid of him. I still don’t know what ever happened to him, this secret shame that my family thought he was, but though I wish now that they and we knew better about how to handle and understand my relative’s mental illness, I don’t know if I can blame them or my grandmother too much – this was all so scary to them, and they did not understand what had happened to him, this sudden shift that likely happened when he was a young man, perhaps even a teenager, when the voices in his head suddenly made themselves known and began to wreak havoc in his life. As I’ve often said, people usually do the best they can in this life, but sometimes the best they – and we - can do is not all that great. 

I thought of him this week, whose name I cannot even remember, much to my shame, when reading this story from the Gospel of Mark, the first account of Jesus healing someone in this Gospel. I thought of the fear that my grandmother’s nephew provoked in her and in the rest of my family, this mental illness within him that they couldn’t understand, and couldn’t quite deal with.  This strange thing had overtaken him, had possessed him somehow, these relentless voices in his head that scared people around him, which up to only recently couldn’t really be treated, not until newish medicine came out that helps those living with schizophrenia live fuller and more manageable lives.  When we read the stories of Jesus interacting with people who often manifest signs of mental illness and yet are diagnosed as being possessed by demons by our ancestors, well, I can see why it seem to our ancestors that some outside force had taken hold of their loved one, their friend, the stranger walking the streets of Capernaum, Nazareth, Bethel, and Jerusalem.  It’s clear that in the Gospels, in much of them anyway, mental illness was associated with the demonic forces, with either one or multiple beings believed to possess the human body, torturing both body and soul, and it seems that Jesus believed this as well.  As much as some of us argue for the divinity of Jesus, the uniqueness of Jesus, we must hold onto to the other side of the doctrine of the incarnation – that Jesus was as human as we are, and was as held captive to the ideas and beliefs of his particular culture and time and place as we all are. If we believe that Jesus is less human than we are, and less prone to believe what others believed, less captured by the culturally and historically bound world than we are, then we ultimately dehumanize him, we strip him of his humanity.  That may seem odd to those of us who want Jesus to know better, who want Jesus to understand that these voices emanating from his fellow human beings were a manifestation of a mental illness rooted in the something going awry in the brain. But if Jesus is human, and he certainly was, then he cannot be somehow exempted from the reality that all humans are shaped by the culture and belief systems that they and we historically find ourselves living within. Jesus cannot be less human than we are – otherwise, he simply becomes a superhuman being, a religious superhero with powers to help others – and the church has warned us against that idea for centuries. 

But where and when and how did the idea of the demonic enter into the biblical narrative, into our Bible, and into ancient Jewish thought?  Well, from what scholars have deduced based on historical records, the term “demon” was first used in the Jewish Bible, our own Old Testament, as a way of describing other deities, other gods, who were competitors to Yahweh, to the Jewish God, from other tribes, nations, and countries. These were simply beings who stood against God since God was the one true God, the name above all names, so to speak.  But when the northern tribes of Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE and were ruled by them for almost a hundred years, the Jewish people began to adopt some Assyrian ideas, including their belief in what we now commonly understand as demons – entities, invisible spiritual beings that can wreck damage on human beings, and actually take control of them, but who are not necessarily gods. Still, unlike the Assyrians, these beliefs about the demonic never became a centerpiece of the Jewish religion – the demonic, demons are actually rarely mentioned in the Old Testament. And yet, by the first century, during Jesus’ time, it was clear that demons and the demonic had become a way of explaining what seemed unexplainable, especially around mental illness.  It’s important to note that people in the first century seemed to understand that some physical illness were just illnesses – rarely, if ever, does something like a highly feared disease such as leprosy get attributed to the demonic. And yet, surely we can understand why ancient people tried to explain the impulses, the actions of those living with mental illness in terms of external forces, or who even tried to explain the push and pull of their own wayward desires, their own wandering hearts, their own particular hatreds in the language of the demonic. Who hasn’t thought, after a moment when we were less than our best selves, who hasn’t felt and voiced that we felt we were somehow under the control of something that was surely not us, not me.  For example, the addict can surely can testify that the desire for drugs or alcohol feels as if it has a life of its own, a pull that seems more external than internal, a craving that has an almost supernatural power.  Even Paul sometimes speaks of sin this ways, as if it was entity unto itself, had a life of its own, a disease that invaded us from the outside and caused all sort of wrongheaded behavior in us and through us. 

So, with this understanding of how the idea of the demonic entered into our faith, it’s interesting to note that the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is replete with stories of Jesus dealing with those believed to be possessed with demonic spirits, and with stories of him confronting those demonic spirits who wish to unmask him as the Son of God, during which Jesus always shuts them up – it is not yet time for him to be revealed as God’s own child.  In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke these encounters with the demonic continue, and yet, by the time the Gospel of John was written, which was likely the last Gospel written, around about 50-60 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the demonic as an explanation of human mental illness seems to have been discarded by the Christian community that helped produce this Gospel and is absent from the text of John, though Jesus continues to heal human beings in John’s telling of the story of Jesus. Demons and demonic possession are rarely brought up in the letters of the New Testament, and writers like Paul tend to understand demonic forces more broadly, using such phrases as “the principalities and the powers,” forces less focused on particular human beings, and more focused on standing in the way of God’s reign, of God’s emerging realm and kingdom in this world. 

And it is that idea of forces arrayed against God’s will, God’s desire for wholeness, for salvation, salvation and wholeness being interchangeable words for the same thing, God’s desire for the new world of love and justice, that I think you can actually find in our text today, despite the powerful drama found this story that reflects an earlier understanding of those living with mental illness during Jesus’ day. Jesus has his cohort, his disciples and then he enter into Capernaum and immediately – as everything in the Gospel of Mark is done immediately, quickly – immediately he goes to the synagogue and begins to teach. Amazement fills the place because Jesus teaches as if he had the right to teach, that he knew what he saying and doing, unlike the religious legal experts of the time. Suddenly, the scriptures say - and again, note the immediacy, suddenly a person who is believed to be possessed by a demon, an evil spirit, starts yelling at him, screaming at Jesus, saying “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. You are the holy one from God.” The evil spirit recognizes Jesus, sees him for who is he is, unlike everyone else in the room. But Jesus doesn’t want to come out yet, so to speak, and this constant admonishment to the demons to be silent, said to both demons and people alike, is something scholars have named as the “Markan Secret.”  It’s simply not the right time for Jesus to be revealed as the Son of God, and so this truth needs be kept quiet, kept hidden, at least for the moment.  And then Jesus commands the demon to depart out of this person and the spirit screams and shakes this poor person until finally the evil spirit comes out of him.  The crowd is stunned, is shaken by this display of power, and they begin asking themselves who this person is, that even the unclean spirits obey him.  It is Jesus’ first display of his spiritual power – and it is, as they say, quite a stunner!

But what are we to do with this story, we who know that schizophrenia is not caused by demons, but an illness in the brain, one that can be controlled by medicine, which is surely proof that it is a physical and not spiritual disease? How do we navigate the meaning of this text, in light of who we are and what we now know of the world? For me, there are still multiple lessons to be learned here, the first being a somewhat odd one but, if you think about it, a fairly obvious one.  First, this truth: out of surprising moments and from surprising people there can come the great truth. The crowd gathered couldn’t see the truth about Jesus and who he was, but the demon, the evil spirit, it saw, it beheld the truth, and that uis this Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God.  From this struggling soul, from this one wracked with voices he could not understand, came a truth, one that others, those with sounder minds, could not see. I know this analogy is an incredibly imperfect one, but what would it mean to really listen to those who were struggling with mental illness, including common ones like depression, which is sometimes called the noonday demon, referencing a text from Psalm 91?  Out of the pain and hurt that comes from mental illness can come some powerful truths about life, the human experience, and perhaps we should listen, listen to those voices that sometimes can tell us some difficult and uncomfortable truths.  I wonder if my grandmother had been able to sit with my nephew, been able to work through her fear, and not just quite literally shut the door to keep out what she could not understand, what we could not understand, I wonder what lessons she and my larger family could have learned?  My own family, including myself, have a long history of depression, sometimes acute depression, but it was so often left untreated, especially in my parents because we also had a long history of not listening to others on this matter, of sweeping the problem under the rug, of literally closing the door to what we could not understand or maybe just deal with, thinking the shadows we were experiencing was just our failure somehow, some external burden we should just be able shake off with some effort, of just feeling sorry for ourselves. That meant we couldn’t just deal with the depression and understand it for what it actually was: a symptom of our brains sometimes going awry, reacting a particular situation or reacting to something deeper, something that went as deep as our own DNA. So, I would say that surely this story from Mark shows that one must face our demons, one must name the truth, as the evil spirit did in this story and one must be able to hear that truth before one can have any hope of casting the demonic out of our lives, through getting help from others, others, which includes healers of both mind and body who so often become the very instruments of the Divine, of God’s healing of us. 

But there is another, perhaps an even more powerful second truth that I think should be heard in this story, and it again comes from this unexpected truth teller, this unclean spirit, and it comes in the form of a question: “have you come to destroy us?” the demon asks Jesus, before Jesus silences it, before Jesus shuts him down and casts him out of this poor soul.  Here again, the demon speaks a truth, the truth about a part of Jesus’ mission, which was surely to confront the principalities and powers of this world, a mission that includes freeing us from the delusional system that has held us in bondage, as Walter Wink in our Modern Lesson reminds us. Jesus has come to destroy the demonic through non-violent means, through love, and a justice that sets the world right.  I know, I know, for some of you, it’s a fool’s hope I offer you on Jesus’ behalf, but it is a fueled by what the demons names here in this text – the truth that all that is evil, both within us and within the institutions that compose the principalities and powers, will ultimately be destroyed by this Jesus, this poor peasant from some nowhere town, this Son of God walking the dirty streets of ancient Capernaum. I do not offer a cheap hope, but one born of hope, and a trust in this Jesus, a hope that even the demons of this world, all those forces that stand against goodness and love and justice, can see, which is this truth: that love wins, that God wins, love being simply another word for God, at least according to Jesus.  If even the forces of chaos and cruelty, the demonic in this world, can see their reign of darkness will one-day end, surely we are invited to see the same, we who are possessed not by the demonic but by the very Spirit of God, this gift of God who is within us, surely we can see the traces of light, of goodness emerging even here, even there, in us, and in this sometimes cruel and broken and yet beautiful world we live in.  “Have you come to destroy us?” the demon asks, already knowing the answer. “Yes, yes, I have,” Jesus must have thought before silencing this truth telling voice – perhaps not right now, but soon, very, very soon. Amen.