Sourton, Bratton Clovelly and Germansweek, 5/2/2012
Charles Dickens once wrote of ‘A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other’. We are mysteries to each other. You have to struggle to reflect on that statement in today’s world of certainty, where everything and everyone is packaged and commodified - where, for instance, the mystery of love between two people is reduced to the card-flowers-meal formula presented to us by the commercial Valentines Day. We all know the reality: that what makes a loving relationship is far more complex and difficult to grasp. Love can’t be bought from Clinton’s. Love is an ongoing exploration in the profound secrets and mysteries between us.
‘Every human creature is a profound secret and mystery to every other.’ Today we begin a season of adventures in the Gospel of Mark. And in Mark’s gospel Jesus is first portrayed as a man of mystery. He seemed to want to make a secret of himself. Every time Jesus cast out a demon or otherwise healed someone, he told them not to tell anyone else what he’d done. ‘Be silent!’ he would say. This wound up the religious people who thought they had God boxed off, packaged and commodified, and wanted to categorise and contain Jesus. And this frustrated his followers who wanted to get more people on the road with him.
Mark’s Jesus is a man of mystery. This is an embarrassment to Jesus’ evangelically minded followers. His call to secrecy confounds our belief in Christianity as a missionary religion. In Mark’s gospel it is not obvious who Jesus is. But if we are honest then we might gladly admit that it is not obvious who Jesus is to us, either - we who, two thousand years later, try to walk alongside this wandering exorcist of Galilee. There is hiddenness about the Son of Man, this strange figure who seeks to escape the crowds, who speaks of the coming reign of God as a secret, who urges silence on a demon, because he knows who Jesus is, as later he urges silence on the disciples, because they don’t yet know who Jesus is.
But his hiddenness makes Jesus real to us - it makes him fully human. For if God is truly one of us and not merely stealing our clothes, then it makes sense that we won't immediately know who he is; he will take time and care to disclose himself fully. It will take us time to begin to understand him. The dialogue between Jesus, the demons and the disciples in today’s reading helps us begin to understand.
In Mark's Gospel we face an unholy trinity, the ugly threesome of demons, disease, and death. In his breathtaking narrative, moving rapidly from place to place, incident to incident, over and over again Mark shows us Jesus confronting and overcoming each of them in turn. Demons, disease, and death. These terrible triplets are all children of one father, and the scriptures make clear how Jesus relates to them all: ‘The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil’ (1 John 3.8).
We get told that we live in a secular, unspiritual world world these days, but I wonder about that. People still have great fear of the demonic, and whether here in rural West Devon, or in the past in parishes on council estates or posh suburbs, from time to time I have been asked to come and say prayers in a house where the people are sure that the spirits are up to no good. Whether or not demons exist, it is my duty to act on other people’s assumptions that they just might.
People also see demons at work in the systems of the world - in what scripture calls the principalities and powers. Some first century Jews and Christians saw in the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality which they called Satan, or the ‘Dragon’ of Revelation 12, and encountered this spirit in the actual institutional forms of Roman life: legions, governors, crucifixions, taxations, the sacred emblems and standards of Rome, and these became the ‘beast’ of Revelation 13. Likewise, many contemporary believers see the same sort of spirituality and structures at work in the empires of our times: the American Empire, the Chinese Empire, the multinational media empire, for instance. [2]
But Mark isn’t primarily interested in questions of who believes in demons, or why. Mark is interested in who believes in Jesus, and why. Today’s reading is not concerned with who knows what demons are. It’s about who knows who Jesus is. And Mark’s answer might surprise us. Because it’s the demons who know who Jesus is. It’s the disciples who do not.
Earlier in this chapter the first person in Mark's gospel to confess Christ as Lord is not Peter at Caesarea Philippi, but a demon - an ugly thing inside a man, a malign thing that had made its home in a poor soul in Capernaum. The demoniac doesn't know what's got into him. But ‘what's got into him’ - the demon - knows that it has met its match. He knows who Jesus is. If Jesus is a man of mystery the demon is about to blow his cover and reveal all.
‘I know who you are, the holy one of God,’ the demon screams, reminding us of that verse in James (2.19): ‘The devils also believe and tremble’. The demon knows who Jesus is. The man of mystery isn't happy to have this demon shouting about him like that. ‘Be silent’, Jesus says.
‘Be silent’ is a very strong demand indeed. Literally, Jesus is saying that the man's mouth should be muzzled. In Mark, it's not just the demons who are told to shut up. Jesus says this over and over again. People who are miraculously cured are repeatedly told to keep quiet about who Jesus is and what he is doing. And not in these exact words, but by his reaction to them, Jesus also silences his disciples:
In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ (Mark 1.35-38)
The disciples wanted Jesus to meet up again with the masses who had followed him from Capernaum looking for exorcism and healing. But Jesus sidelined their requests and told them they must move on, for his chief concern was not the exorcism and healing. His chief concern was proclaiming the message.
So whereas the demon punctured the mystery of Jesus by announcing, ‘I know who you are, the holy one of God,’ Peter and his companions couldn’t see past the exorcism and healing that Jesus was doing. They hadn’t yet got the message that Jesus was proclaiming.
It was the demons who recognised that Jesus wasn’t just another exorcist, wasn’t just another healer: after all, there were plenty of exorcists and healers already around Galilee in those days. It was the demons who recognised that Jesus, through his exorcism and healing, but more than that through his message, was beginning to bring in a new rule, a new kingdom, a new way of being in the world: the way of the holy one of God, a way of opposition to the demonic ways of empire which dominated the lives of the people who massed towards Jesus outside Capernaum. It was the demons who first got the message that Jesus was proclaiming. The disciples still had it all to learn.
The purpose of evangelism is not to dispel the mystery surrounding the figure of Jesus, not to provide set answers, but to provoke questions. When Jesus cast out the demon people responded not by saying, ‘So now we know,’ but by asking, ‘What is this?’, ‘Who is this?’
Our journey through Mark’s gospel will provoke such questions in us. It will be an exciting ride. For Mark sees the message which Jesus proclaimed signified in every single thing Jesus did, and in every place he went - and Mark shows the message which Jesus proclaimed consistently challenging and upsetting the prevailing ways of empire.
Today’s reading is an example of this, as Jesus performs a healing on the Sabbath, breaking the oppressive code of the religious authorities, challenging the spirit of empire. But he does so in the home of the sick woman, he does so in other words in private, so as to avoid notice.
In the home of Peter’s mother-in-law, this message is quietly proclaimed: the kingdom of God is coming, is slowly starting to show itself. The demons felt the power of this coming kingdom, and named it; it remained a mystery to the disciples at the time. But this is a mystery we can celebrate and give thanks for, and as we spend more time with Mark in church - and perhaps also at home - in these coming weeks, we will watch as his gospel slowly unveils the Son of Man as the Holy One of God, and we will see what effect that has on his disciples, on the crowds, on the forces of empire, and we will experience the effect it has on us as we respond to all that he reveals.
Notes
[1] Drawing on sermon notes by John Pridmore in the Church Times, 20 January 2006, and Mark 1 - Meeting Demons, a sermon preached at the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, on 29/1/2006.
[2] See Walter Wink, The Powers Trilogy [summarised here], and Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man.
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