All Is Calm, All Is Bright
Scripture Reading: Mark 1:21-28
Sandy is the artist in our house, but I used to enjoy drawing and even took drawing as an elective back in high school. That might have been the first time that I learned about perspective. On occasion the teacher, Mrs. Mazzadra, would have us arrange our desks in a circle, in the middle of which she would place some sort of arrangement of objects for us to draw. Fruit and flowers are standard for still-life drawing, but the one I remember was a sculpture that she made by stacking desk chairs one upon another in various directions, their legs all akimbo and creating interesting shapes and angles to draw.
I, of course, drew what I saw from my perspective, seated where I was. Other students did the same, capturing what they saw from their perspective. Each of us drew the same object, those stacked chairs, but none of our drawings looked exactly alike. That was because each of us had a unique perspective. Where we sat in relation to the sculpture affected what we saw, and our drawings reflected this. And that’s to say nothing of all the other variables that make one artist’s work different from another’s.
We can think of the four Gospels in much the same way. The Bible offers us not one, but four perspectives on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The author of each Gospel sees Jesus through his own lens, focusing in on some aspects of his life and ministry while leaving others in the background.
For example, Matthew emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus and sees him as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures. Over and over Matthew writes that such and such occurred in order to fulfill the scriptures.
From Luke’s perspective Jesus is especially concerned for the poor. In Luke’s version of today’s passage, when Jesus preaches at the synagogue for the first time, he declares that the purpose of his ministry is to bring good news to the poor.
John is most concerned with the divinity of Jesus. Only in John does Jesus proclaim that he and the Father are one.
Mark as well has his own unique perspective on Jesus, one that we’ll be exploring for much of this year. It comes into focus already in today’s reading.Jesus is preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. According to Mark, it’s his first sermon and the first public act of his ministry.
As first sermons go, things could not have been going any better for Jesus. He has been teaching with great authority, much to the astonishment and delight of those gathered. Any pastor fresh from seminary and preaching their first sermon at their first call would pinch themselves to have things go so well. But suddenly an unclean spirit, a force of chaos and confusion, seeks to disrupt the sermon and prevent God’s word from being heard. Jesus then demonstrates that his authority extends beyond interpreting scripture to also casting out spirits. He rebukes the spirit, compelling it to come out of the man, further astounding and confounding the people.
This is one of several such encounters between Jesus and demonic forces that we find in Mark, and it shows us that Mark sees Jesus as an exorcist and healer of extraordinary power, one who has authority over the spiritual world. With but two words, “Be quiet,” Jesus silences the unclean spirit, and with the simple command, “Come out of him,” he expels the spirit from the man.
Mark sees Jesus as an exorcist and healer of extraordinary power, one who has authority over the spiritual world.
Mark makes clear that Jesus speaks with an authority that is uniquely powerful. Mark’s Jesus is a man of few words, but his words carry considerable weight. As we heard last week, with but two words, “Follow me,” Jesus persuaded Simon and Andrew to leave their boats and become his disciples. He did the same with James and John, who not only left their boat, they even left their father right there in the boat! Now that is some powerful persuasion! See you later, Dad. We’re going with this stranger that we just met.
Jesus speaks with such authority that people are amazed. “What is this?” they ask. “A new teaching—with authority!” Not only does Jesus have a full command of the words of scripture, bringing them to life in the hearts of all who hear, but he also commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!
Unclean spirits? What does that mean? They not only haunt a house, they leave a mess to clean up? No, an unclean spirit was an evil spirit, but the word “unclean” also suggests disorder and chaos. In First-century Judaism, a person who came into contact with something regarded as unclean, such as a corpse, would themselves become unclean, almost as if they had acquired an infection, one that they could spread to others who came in contact with them. A person who had become unclean would need to undergo a ritual of purification to become clean. But because this unclean spirit occupies the body of a man, no ritual could ever make him clean.
…what would have been taken for granted by Mark’s original audience comes to us as something strange and utterly foreign.
I realize that all of this is not something that is part of our regular experience. Nearly 2,000 years separate us from the time that Mark wrote his Gospel, and what would have been taken for granted by Mark’s original audience comes to us as something strange and utterly foreign. We read biblical stories of demonic possession and exorcism and think, “Did that really happen?” But that’s not a question that early readers of Mark would have even considered asking. For them demonic possession was a given. Instead, they would have asked, “What does this mean?”
And that’s essentially what the folks in the synagogue are saying when they ask, “What is this?” They immediately recognize that in Jesus’s words—in both the words of his sermon and in his words to the unclean spirit—they are witnessing something new, something for which they have no frame of reference, and something that compels them to ask, “What is this?”
They may not know what to call it, but they know that they are in the presence of authority. They see firsthand that Jesus is someone whose words carry authority. Twice that word “authority” comes up in this passage. After Jesus expels the spirit, the people recognize a new teaching—“with authority!” And earlier they were struck by how Jesus “taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.”
This is not so much a dig at the scribes as it is a recognition that Jesus has an authority all his own. Scribal authority was based on years of religious training and knowledge that one acquired by studying under a teacher. But Jesus doesn’t present as someone who’s received his Master of Divinity from Jerusalem Theological Seminary. He’s the son of a carpenter. He’s a tradesman, not a scholar. What does this woodworker know about the word of God?
And yet he teaches as one who has authority, an authority that’s not derived from rabbinic tradition but from his very being. His authority is not external but internal.
The people recognize it. So does the unclean spirit.“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” the spirit asks. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” This is one of the ironies that we find throughout Mark. The demons that Jesus encounters are quick to recognize him as being sent from God while the religious authorities—the experts in all things God—do not.
It’s not only the holy presence of Jesus that the unclean spirit recognizes. The spirit also recognizes the authority of Jesus. And so when Jesus commands the spirit, “Be quiet and come out of him,” the spirit has no choice but to obey. To be sure, it puts up a fuss, convulsing the man and shrieking in protest like a wounded animal. But those convulsions and that shrieking are followed by stillness. The voices within the man fall silent. The darkness that had shrouded him is lifted. All is calm. All is bright.
All of these voices swirl in our head, a cacophony of chaos, lies, and confusion. They whisper that we are unloved and unlovable. They want us to think that God would have nothing to do with us.
Wonderful! Praise God! But what does all of this have to do with us? Our world is not one regularly inhabited by unclean spirits. If some poor soul shouted and carried on in the middle of a worship service, our first instinct would likely be to call for a doctor not a pastor.
And yet I would suggest that we are more prone to hearing “unclean” voices now than folks were in Jesus’s day. True, the voices we hear lack the drama that we find in Mark. What we experience is more a nagging voice of self-doubt that tells us we’ll never measure up. We’ll never be good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, or respected enough for the impossibly high standard that we set for ourselves or that others set for us.
Voices that tell us to look over our shoulder at our neighbor who seems to have it all together and to be so much happier than we are. Why can’t I be more like them?
And truly insidious voices that call into question God’s love for us. Do you actually think that God will forgive you for what you’ve done? After all the broken promises? After all the pain you’ve caused? Or the opposite: If God really loved you, then you wouldn’t be suffering so much. God must not care about you.
All of these voices swirl in our head, a cacophony of chaos, lies, and confusion. They whisper that we are unloved and unlovable. They want us to think that God would have nothing to do with us.
And to all these voices Jesus says, “Be quiet.” Silence! No more from you! And in the stillness, in the silence that follows, Jesus speaks to us his word of truth, his word that says to us that we are forgiven, that we are loved, and that we are set free…free from all judgment, all expectations, all comparisons, and all doubts. It may not be a Silent Night, but with just a word from Jesus, all is calm, all is bright.