Jesus’ first act after calling his disciples is to teach with authority in the local parish, and immediately he is challenged by the people’s anxiety about change. Imagine being there, listening to this teacher who knows the Scripture inside and out and teaches it as one who is intimately familiar with the God of whom it speaks. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s fresh and suddenly certainly true in ways we had always seen but still been oblivious about, and we all wonder at who this new teacher might be, when suddenly there is a disturbance in the Force. I mean, a disturbance in the congregation. A rabble-rouser. The town drunk. A quiet, well-dressed man usually friendly who seems suddenly besot with a bout of insanity. We don’t get more information than the fact he is a man, and his appearance of being under the power of an unclean spirit. How long he has been like this, we don’t know. What was the cause of his situation, we aren’t told. But the words he has to say are startling: ’Holy One of God’ and ‘come to destroy us.’ This is no theatrical trick, either. There is some power behind his words, something which strikes a chord in the hearts of those who hear, something which Jesus silences immediately.
This silencing Jesus does here, it’s recorded elsewhere in the Gospel of Mark as the silencing of the storm at sea. It’s an odd mirror to this tale, for in the midst of the storm, the disciples cry out “do you not care that we are being destroyed?” and in this story the man with the unclean spirit claims Jesus is threatening to destroy them. Both counts are answered with the word of Jesus bringing peace, casting out the unclean spirit and calming the storm.
These two stories are not, after all, so dissimilar as they may seem.
We are still in the season of Epiphany, still discovering who this Jesus is who was born to us in a stable little over a month ago, revealed in the wilderness baptism of John and the Spirit only weeks ago. Today we get the first sign of Jesus’ ministry, after his calling the disciples and beginning to teach. Perhaps his teaching should have been centrally remembered, but this disruption stole the show, so to speak, and the signs seem to stick in our memory more than the words alone, like object lessons we use to teach the kids. The disciples have been called to follow him, and they do, and when they enter the synagogue for study of the Word of God they are interrupted by someone who feels threatened. Somebody who knows they cannot take this teaching seriously and remain the same. Somebody a lot like us.
The mystics know that to be loved as totally and entirely as God loves us would utterly undo us. The people in Deuteronomy were right when they asked for a prophet to be the go-between for God and them, so they might not be destroyed by the sight of God’s face and the sound of God’s voice. God promised such a prophet, like Moses but after Moses. That prophet will be given such devastating news to share with the people that it must be spoken, must be taken seriously, must not be toyed with or taken lightly, or else that prophet will die.
When people come to the faith newly converted, rather than growing up in the tradition and with the stories as they might become rote memorization, they tend to be more zealous, more passionate, more openly curious and experimental in searching for the appropriate ways to live in response to this amazing grace which saved a wretch like me. For some, the power of that conversion moment wears thin over time and gets lost in the middle of the muddle of daily living. Others find themselves newly converted time and again throughout their lives, rediscovering the power of the Good News of Jesus Christ in recovery or by the power of the Spirit poured out in unexpected moments of grace. It may feel like new birth, like a new way of experiencing the world, like a death of the old ways, even if those new year’s resolutions didn’t stick.
And we fight against it, tooth and nail, to retain the old ways. I don’t mean the old ways of traditions which feed the soul and honor the faith of departed saints. I mean the old ways of sick habits which isolate us one from another and offer us empty promises of standing tall by our own might and power. Cycles of abuse, for example, or the classism, racism, sexism, able-ism, age-ism, homophobia, which perpetuate the lies that some lives are worth more love than others because they’ve earned it or were born entitled to it.
When that unclean spirit cries out that it knows who Jesus is, the holy one of God, it speaks truth for once. Lest we come to rely on it for our truths, Jesus silences that unclean spirit and casts it out, freeing that man to leave a life of comfort behind for the journey of discipleship ahead. Because, yes, for the things that unclean spirit represents, Jesus has come to destroy it. To destroy all that holds sway over our hearts and lives. To destroy those distractions which pull us every which way and seek to break us into dozens of pieces all serving different gods. Jesus casts out the unclean spirit and restores a clean slate for that man who carried those uncertain fears for so long, and forgiving, renewing, restoring the man to life.
And all of that bright, shiny-new space can be unsettling. All of that clean can make us frightened of doing anything else which might make a mess. But God knows this process of becoming who Jesus calls us to be is a long and arduous journey, full of mistakes and experiments and learning and fighting and being put back together over and over again. In so many ways Jesus has come to destroy this world’s power of fear and anxiety, and in so many ways Jesus has come to speak the kind of peace which springs up from the depths of God’s love. Jesus speaks that peace with the authority that makes it so. The unclean spirit was silenced, the storm calmed, the sinner forgiven.
This is what Jesus does with his authority, the first sign we have of who he is and chooses to be. He instructs his people in the word of God and commands more authority than our fears. He plants in us the Spirit of life, and dies with us each time we die, and raises us up to new life. Where have you heard Jesus speak peace in your life? Where have you known Christ to turn your worldview inside out? And don’t worry if you can’t put your finger on it. Oftentimes God is sneaky in getting to our hearts with that love above all loves. Primarily Jesus lives it out boldly one moment at a time, and on this side of the resurrection of Christ, while we await our own resurrections, the Spirit is the one working those small wonders among us. With stories like today’s Gospel, we grow to know and to trust that Jesus works healing and peace within and among us, even when we fight against it. May it ever be so.
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