Some thoughts on Mark 1:21-28

He wasn’t even in his hometown, but it was the Sabbath, so he went to the synagogue and taught. Now the synagogue was not the Temple in Jerusalem, where God was thought to actually dwell, but rather it was the local place where you went to pray and study the sacred Scripture—the Torah. While they were consecrated spaces, it was not necessary to go to a synagogue to worship God, because as long as you could get ten adult males to assemble in one place you could worship God communally. Some prayers required communal worship.

So here’s Jesus going into the synagogue in Capernaum not as a passive listener and learner, but as a full participant to teach. And while he was doing so (apparently quite well, because Mark tells us the people were astounded, something happens that’s so important we should all sit up and take notice, because it’s an important lesson for those of us who enter the Christian equivalent of the synagogue on the Sabbath. After all, as Christians, we are to follow the path of Jesus and try hard to model his behavior.

Mark tells us that there was a man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue. And that really got me thinking, “Really? Only one?” What is an unclean spirit? How would I recognize it? What would I do if I encountered it?

Jesus distinguished between the spirit and the man. He didn’t throw the person out; he rebuked the spirit, telling it to leave the man alone. And it did. I imagine that the synagogue was not too unlike its spiritual descendent, the church. So we can only speculate—did the guy with the unclean spirit attend regularly? Did people shrink away if they saw him coming and talk about him when they thought he could not hear?

The unclean spirits of today surely announce themselves to us, but they speak with contemporary behavior and in words we should be able to recognize. The unclean spirits speak with words of discord or pettiness or even hate. And the more often we hear the words the more anesthetized we are to their effects, and instead of rebuking those spirits in Jesus’ name, we keep silent.

Unclean spirits work kind of like viruses looking for a host, which they can infect with fear because fear paralyzes while the unclean spirits settle in. We all can recognize fear pretty well. It has an unmistakable look—even a smell about it. But the cause of the fear is often cryptic.

The authority of Jesus resides in his very nature: God incarnate in human form. We too carry the authority of Jesus; he gave it to us when he left this Earth, as he had to do because he had taken human form. We are mortal, and the mortal part of Jesus had to die because that is the nature of our human form.

We all are part of the Body of Christ; not the mortal body but the divine incarnation, and that means that we carry the authority to rebuke the unclean spirit, but it has to be done the way Jesus did it—recognizing that the man who was held captive by the unclean spirit was himself a beloved child of God. As members of Christ’s one holy, catholic and apostolic church, we are responsible for tending the body of Christ—all of us. That is why Jesus walked among us; to teach us reverently accept the responsibility for one another that had so long been abnegated by the repeated requests for God to send someone else to save God’s people. Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit because he knew that the authority of God ultimately prevails. And he also knew that sometimes the assembly doesn’t even recognize the destructive consequence of allowing unclean spirits to run amok.

So in the tradition of taking the logs out from our own eyes before trying to remove the speck from our neighbor’s eye, what can we do to make sure we aren’t ourselves the bearers of unclean spirits? First, remember this if you remember nothing else: God is love, not judgment. If we find ourselves more judgmental than loving, something is very wrong. Next, when you are irritated or afraid or otherwise uncomfortable with someone, instead of assuming it’s because of something you can attribute to them, first examine your own heart to make sure you are clear about whether you project the love of God to the people around you. Believe that as a member of the Body of Christ, you have more power that you can possibly imagine through the love of God. You are not paralyzed—it’s a Jesus movement. Love is more than a feeling it’s made manifest in action.

There is not a single person who God does not love, and we can struggle towards loving in likewise manner. And the best way to make it to that goal is to rebuke our own unclean spirits, leaving the assembly…our beloved church free to become the Kindom of God, where all really are welcome.