For those of you who have been following along, I want you to notice that we’re still in the middle of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark.  By comparison, twenty-eight verses into the Gospel of John, Jesus’ name hadn’t even appeared yet!  I tell you this because I want you to have a sense of the spare prose and the breathless pace of Mark’s rendition. 

      Jesus has gathered some companions and the first thing he does that’s worth noting, according to the Gospel of Mark, is to head to the lakeside town of Capernaum, where, when the Sabbath came, Jesus did some astonishing teaching.  Mark leaves it up to us to imagine just what Jesus might have been teaching.  All he says is that Jesus displayed a sense of authority unlike other teachers they’d heard.  (And here Mark makes a regrettable opening volley – he takes a potshot at the scribes, the scholars of the day.  It’s unbecoming at best and it signals a trend that will eventually grow into deadly Christian anti-Semitism.  I don’t want to linger there, and yet I cannot skip over it without comment.)   

      So Jesus does some memorable teaching.  And just then – there’s that word that I was talking about last week that means “right away,” a guy starts shouting – or rather, an unclean spirit in a guy starts shouting at Jesus.  The unclean spirit in the guy asks Jesus if he’s come to destroy unclean spirits.  And Jesus tells the unclean spirit – the demon – to be silent and come out of the man.   In other words, yes, he has come to get rid of unclean spirits.  Actually, what Jesus tells the unclean spirit is “shut up” and “get out.” 

      You know, when I was growing up, there were certain things that could never be said at our house – and the words “shut up” and “get out” were high on the top-ten list.  I was a compliant child (at least in my early years) and I certainly didn’t ever say inappropriate things!  I don’t know about you, but I think being compliant can get so tiresome after say 20 or 30 years.  So imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered this passage from the Gospel of Mark in my own translating exercise a dozen or so years ago.  Jesus says, “Shut up! Or literally, “put a muzzle on it” and “Get out!”  This is not the Jesus I’d met in Sunday School – gentle Jesus meek and mild.  Mark’s picture of Jesus is not at all pretty. His story and his Jesus are austere and abrupt – staccato if you will.   In fact, this Jesus is a little hard to look at.  Jesus is kind of a jerk in the Gospel of Mark, as easily enraged at human misery and injustice as he is at what he finds to be just plain stupid.  (Stupid.  That’s another word that we didn’t say at my house.)   

      Mark is setting out to introduce Jesus as someone with remarkable skills both in teaching and in sending demons packing.  It’s a kind of show and tell scene – or tell and show in this case. The amazing teaching part is easy enough to believe, isn’t it?  We’ve all experienced that at one point or another in our lives.  (At least I hope we have.)  The exorcising demons part is a little sketchier.  People in my generation might think of the horror movie/or horror novel of the early seventies, The Exorcist – and I’ll admit, it’s hard to get those images and those sounds out of my head.  (And perhaps, that’s precisely the point!)   If it’s not The Exorcist, I bet you’ve seen at least one science fiction film in the same genre.  There’s a way in which those sci-fi stories operate to display or expose oppressive forces (demons) that are much more subtle in polite society.

      You know, in Mark, demons always know that Jesus is the son of God – even as the disciples struggle to figure it out.  In fact, in Mark, one real sign of the effectiveness of Jesus’ ministry is when oppressive forces start screaming bloody murder.  And Jesus demonstrated surprising authority over those oppressive forces that backed people into narrow places, that pushed people down, that put the squeeze on, that limited life and freedom.  In his book entitled, A Costly Freedom, Brendan Byrne asserts that “unless we make some effort to relate [the conflict with the demonic] to our world we shall not really come to terms with the gospel [of Mark] at any great depth.  He goes on to define what he means by demonic:  “[it’s] essentially about control:  the control of human life by forces, frequently transpersonal and socioeconomic, that stunt human growth and freedom, alienating individuals from each other and from their own true humanity.”¹

      I bet many of us believe in the demonic when it’s put that way – “forces that stunt human growth and freedom, alienating individuals from each other and from their own true humanity.”  We don’t have to agree on the sources of the forces to agree that human growth and freedom is not what it ought to be.  So I wonder, how do we get what terrifies us or shames us into alienation, into division and estrangement, out of our heads, out of our communal or corporate psyches?  This is tricky territory because I don’t want to suggest that we should all become Jerks for Jesus.  We’re Episcopalians after all.  But I often wonder if, in our disdain of over-confident Christians, we become under-confident about our own God-given authority to set others free. 

      What if we stopped shrinking from or negotiating with or tolerating those unclean spirits – those oppressive forces -- those demons – that terrify us or shame us into alienation, separation and  estrangement, or into aggression and hostility?  What if we could get more clear that the forces which alienate and diminish the dignity of human beings are decidedly unwelcome?  What if we could figure out assertive and non-violent responses to the diseased spirituality that shouts in our own heads, in our homes, in our parish, on the street – wherever?

      I have a friend of a friend who was driving down Route 1 south of Alexandria, Virginia.  It’s like Route 1 almost anywhere on the east coast – four to six lanes of divided highway, lined with strip malls.    She and a companion were headed to lunch when they saw a traffic accident across the divided highway.  They saw cars stopped, a crowd gathering, and one man hitting another man over the head with a tire iron.  The woman drove across the grassy median strip, while her passenger, cried out in alarm, “what are you doing?”  Without a word, she stopped the car, jumped out, ran up to the two men.  The man with the tire iron was showing no signs of slowing down.  The people standing around were stupefied.  While everyone else watched, the woman shouted at the man with the tire-iron the only thing she could think of to say:  “What is your religious affiliation?”  (true story)  The man with the tire iron paused, tire iron over his head, and said, “Baptist?”  The woman asked, “What do they teach you about this in the Baptist Church?”  In the moment of his incredulity, he had stopped long enough for other people to grab the tire iron away from him.  The police and an ambulance arrived.  The injured man did survive the beating (just barely).  And of course the official police statement to the local news that evening, directed at anyone who might intervene in such an altercation was, “don’t try this.” 

      A number of years later, I was walking in Harvard Square and I happened upon a scene where a woman had gotten out of her car which was still running.  She was kicking a man who was, in turn, hitting her with his bicycle.  I tried to walk by.  I really did.  But I recalled the tire iron story and I thought, “I have to stop.”  I couldn’t bring myself to ask the religious affiliation question, so I shouted, “Do you need me to call the police?”  They both stopped their hitting and kicking long enough to explain to me why they were hitting and kicking each other.  I repeated my question:  “Do you need me to call the police?” And they each said “no.”  With my heart about to pound right out of my chest, I asserted that they should probably move along.

      Where did that sense of authority come from?  I don’t know.  I think it got passed on to me from hearing the first story.  And maybe I’m passing it on to you.  Exorcism is an act of liberation from a spirit that has gotten separated from the Holy One for whatever reason, enmity, cruelty, jealousy, greed, disregard, domination, the list goes on and on.  Exousia – the Greek word for authority, power, jurisdiction -- comes from truth telling, accountability, the assertion of human dignity, love in the midst of struggle.  Asserting exousia recalls the spirit back to its divine task, which is to serve the well-being of the world.

      After this encounter that Jesus had in the synagogue, right away, Mark says, right away the word began to spread.  In the epilogue to his book The Powers that Be, Walter Wink wrote:  “The passion that drove the early Christians to evangelistic zeal was not fueled … by the desire to increase church membership or to usher people safely into a compensatory heaven after death.  Their passion was fired above all by relief at being liberated from the delusions being spun over them by the Powers [and principalities].  Being thus freed determined them to set others free.”²  So what I want to say to you is, “Do try it.  Right away!”

¹ Brendan Byrne, A Costly Freedom:  A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Collegeville, MN:  Liturgical Press, 2008).

² Walter Wink, The Powers that Be (New York:  Doubleday, 1998)