“Called to Both Brokenness and Wholeness"
Deuteronomy 18:15-18 and Mark 1:21-28
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
1/28/24
Deuteronomy 18:15-18
15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. 16 This is what you requested of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’17 Then the Lord replied to me, ‘They are right in what they have said. 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. (NRSV)
Mark 1:21-28
21 They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 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.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 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.” 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. (NRSV)
Mark 1 opens with a grand announcement: Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Son.
Mark affirms that claim by declaring that John is Isaiah’s messenger who prepares the way for the Anointed One. So, when Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near,” the Spirit invites us to join Jesus in his Creation-transforming work—work that often meets resistance because it challenges the world’s greedy power with the spiritual authority of the Christ.
When we claim to follow Jesus, and yet remain comfortable and complacent in systems that seem advantageous to us, but which cause others to suffer, our own voices quickly become those of protesting demons. To gloss over any dissonance between profession of faith and unfaithful action, many have used rather syrupy falling-in-love-with-Jesus language to talk about union with God. I wonder, though, could entering relationship with God have at least a little in common with the disturbing convulsions of an exorcism?
As he does with the man possessed by an unclean spirit in Capernaum, Jesus liberates us from the selfishness and fear that possess us and make us destructive to ourselves, to others, and to the earth. By grace, he wicks the corrupt and corrupting false selves out of us, and leads us into his realm of mystery, mutuality, and truth.
While that news is as good as it sounds, it’s also true that Jesus’ liberation tends to be costly. Just imagine the internal chaos of the first disciples as they leave their families and their vocations to follow Jesus. Mark makes it sound as simple as dropping their nets, but how can that be? Beginning something new is hard enough; so, wouldn’t it be excruciating to drop everything and follow Jesus? Maybe that’s why Jesus compares discipleship to death. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life, for my sake…will save it.” (Mark 8:35)
Before any of the gospels were written, Paul made the same argument: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?…We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed.” (Romans 6:3, 6a)
While Mark doesn’t suggest that the possessed man in the synagogue was trapped within a “body of sin,” it was common in the first century to blame a person’s illness, poverty, or any other suffering on personal sin. So, many if not most people in the synagogue that day would likely have dismissed the man as a sinner and shunned him as a public nuisance—just as many who now claim to follow Jesus dismiss and shun the homeless on city streets.
The NRSV reads, “Just then” the man was in the synagogue. In the Greek, just then is the same word that appears repeatedly in Mark and usually gets translated immediately. To me, the apparent suddenness of the man’s presence mirrors the suddenness of Jesus’ presence. Both men show up possessed by some powerful spiritual indwelling. And both are capable of causing the kind of dis-ease that any of us are likely to feel when confronted by someone whose presence demands of us more than mere pleasantries.
Because Jesus teaches with an unfamiliar authority, everyone’s senses are already heightened. When the possessed man appears, immediately people gather their children close. They move their wallets to their front pockets. They position themselves for fight or flight. Then, the man says something that sounds absurd: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
In Mark, Jesus is cagey with his identity. So, he rebukes and silences the unclean spirit. The man seizes and thrashes like someone dying in terrible pain. The worshipers now have to wonder, Which man is scarier? The man possessed by the unclean spirit and the man possessed by healing authority both seem to be living in alternative realities.
Mark concludes this story saying that the people were “amazed” by Jesus, and that “his fame…spread throughout the surrounding region.” Mark also seems to suggest that mere amazement falls short of faithful discipleship. While amazement and wonder are hardly weaknesses, Jesus wants followers who move beyond any initial, emotional response and who engage people like the possessed man. He wants people who will live inside a holy reality that embraces chaos as well as shalom because chaos is as fertile with wholeness and possibility as it is laden with suffering.1
Richard Rohr calls this the “cruciform pattern” of reality.2 “Jesus,” says Rohr, “was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths…[he was] caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a ‘mixed’ world, which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and…whole. [Holding together all the primary opposites, Jesus] hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly disfigured.”3
As not only the archetype of this holy paradox, but as the one who comes to restore that paradox in humankind, Jesus heals the man with the unclean spirit. Mark never says what happens to the man, but just because he was healed doesn’t mean that his suffering ended. It seems to me, then, that hisdisappearance becomes our invitation. The absence he leaves is where we step in to help create a presence of gratitude and witness. His life is now our life. Jesus has freed us to see, hear, think, and act differently. He has freed us to care for each other, and especially for those who suffer.
We do live in a world where the demons of fear, greed, and violence can torment us and others through us. Andrew Sullivan is a rather controversial figure who nonetheless spoke this demon-exorcising truth: “When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn’t long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.”4
Wherever the world attempts to deny or reject the inclusive love and restorative grace of God, Jesus is there to silence our selfish and fear-stunted hearts and minds. And he calls us to take up our crosses and return to the new reality of God’s realm, where all people are welcome, all things are shared, and all Creation is being made new.
1Gary W. Charles, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 1. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors. Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. p. 313.
2https://cac.org/coincidence-of-opposites-2019-02-07/
3Ibid.
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