Excision and Exorcism

Excision and Exorcism Mark 1: 21-28 One of the coolest Christmas gifts I received this last year was a Smithsonian reproduction edition of the Jefferson Bible. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson completed this work, also known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, by employing a razor and glue to painstakingly assemble selected sections from the New Testament into a careful compilation of the ethical teachings of Jesus. Simply put, Jefferson removed Biblical passages describing the miraculous or the supernatural and retained passages containing life instruction, moral guidance, or Jesus’ teachings on discipleship. It was a fascinating task. And in part, I can understand why Jefferson did it. He was heavily influenced by the scholarship of the Enlightenment, with its interest in science and rationality and reason and its clear suspicion of magic or miracle. Today’s lectionary text is one of the passages that Jefferson removed, and we must confess that the passage rings strangely upon the modern, post-Enlightenment ear. 1 Many of us, as moderns, find it difficult to speak, at least in literal terms, of unclean spirits or demonic possessions. Those seem more a product of a first century worldview, where the world was seen as governed by good and evil spirits, where a severe mental illness, for example, might be named a “demon possession.” The rational or scientific mind struggles to come to grips with a man possessed by an “unclean spirit.” As a result, when this text has come up in the lectionary in previous years, I’ve sort of skipped over it or stepped judiciously around it. I haven’t discarded it, like Jefferson, but I’ve done nearly the same by disregarding it. So, I decided, this time, to wrestle with the text, to dig into it despite my natural hesitation regarding “unclean spirits” or demon possessions, and to see what I might wonder or what I might learn, through the study. As I thought and studied, I arrived at a realization—even if I may not easily think in terms of supernatural unclean spirits or demons, there are certainly forces, understandings, actions or worldviews that I would readily describe as demonic: a word meaning extremely evil or cruel, diabolical, or unholy. Racism, slavery, political or religious fanaticism, the holocaust, the subjugation of women, human trafficking, the plague of gun violence in our 2 nation—all of these might be described as demonic. They are unimaginable evils that are perniciously difficult to cast out—so perhaps I do believe in unclean spirits or demonic forces after all. Further, I reflected, we readily and regularly demonize people—we take people with whom we disagree vehemently and we view them as entirely reprehensible, contemptible, irredeemable, deplorable—disposable. If we regularly treat people as evil or unclean, if we turn them into demons, as it were, then maybe the world IS, not supernaturally but quite naturally, filled with demons of our own making. So—if I don’t believe in unclean spirits per se, but I do believe in demonic or evil forces and ideologies…and if I don’t believe in demons per se, but I do believe that we in fact turn people INTO demons, that is, we demonize them…well then, perhaps our passage for today is not to be so readily disregarded…how does Jesus respond when encountered with the unclean or the demonized? In our scripture passage, Jesus is in the synagogue in Capernaum teaching. The text tells us that Jesus taught them as one having authority, 3 not as one of the scribes. Now as an aside here, what Mark has done, with a single sentence, is that he has established both a contrast with and a conflict between Jesus and the scribes, or the established scholars of the Jewish law. I think I know a bit of the distinction that Mark is drawing…it is the difference, perhaps, between positional or external authority, and embodied or internal authority. Positional authority comes from holding rank or power or an officially sanctioned office…military officers hold positional authority according to their rank, business professionals hold positional authority according to their title, congressional leaders gain increased positional authority according to their tenure in office. Similarly, the scribes command respect or esteem because of their office and because of their supposed expertise. But there is a second type of authority—not related to position but related to…authenticity, integrity, gravitas…an embodied, internal, authority. In leadership, it has to do with not demanding a subordinate do something that you yourself would not do, it has to do with respecting yourself and 4 others, in a religious sense, I suppose, it has to do with practicing what one preaches, or embodying and living out fully what one believes. The scribes, Mark wants us to recognize, have external or positional authority, but not integrity or internal authority. Jesus holds a larger, lived, embodied authority. He does not merely teach ABOUT the kingdom of heaven, he EMBODIES it, enacts it, and lives it out in the world. The scribes teach doctrine—Jesus lives redemption and renewal. It is not just a difference—it is ALL THE DIFFERENCE. I make this observation at the outset, just to note that from the very beginning, as Jesus prepares to interact with the forces of the demonic or the demonized, he does so from a place of integrity. He is not SELF- RIGHTEOUS, he is righteous. It is from this place of wholeness, of integrity, of authority, that the entire encounter takes place. The story continues…. Just then, Mark says, there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. 5 And the man with the unclean spirit cries 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.” Here, it is interesting to me to ponder the question—who is us, in this interaction? When the unclean spirit says, “Have you come to destroy us,” what might that mean? Is “us” everybody, that is the Jewish people in general, is the question whether Jesus has come to destroy the Jewish way of life? Or is “us” the current religious leadership or political structure—the system of authority and corruption that has been worked out between the Roman political elites and the Jewish religious elites? Or is “us” referring to the community of unclean spirits, does the spirit fear that Jesus has come to destroy it and all that are like it? 6 Or in an interesting thought that occurred to me, does “us” refer to the unclean spirit and the man in whom it resides? This concept intrigues me—because, stay with me, I suggest that an unclean spirit wants to take up residence in a person in such a way that the two are inseparable, like a parasite takes up residence in a host. A parasite wants at all costs to remain connected with its host, to be one with its host. Disconnected from its host, a parasite cannot survive for long. In this light, the Spirit might be saying, have you come to destroy me and my host, to destroy US? And this is what intrigues me about that way of seeing the story: Jesus responds to the unclean spirit by keeping it intentionally separate from its host—the Spirit says have you come to destroy US? And Jesus says be quiet! Come out of HIM! He sees and treats the man and the unclean spirit as separate entities. That is a crucial distinction, because let me see if I can explain this. Recall that I spoke earlier of racism or racist attitudes, for example, as being a 7 demonic force. And what I tend to do with people who harbor racist views is that I demonize them—I make them into what they believe. They harbor racist views, they ARE a racist. I have just considered the host and the parasitic ideology as a single being. And the problem is, a racist ideology is irredeemable—so if I make the person and their ideology as one, then that person is irredeemable, or demonized. In this interaction, Jesus insists upon on holding the two separate, the unclean spirit is addressed separately, “Come out of him!” and the man is HUMANIZED. Now I realize that the point I am making may seem a bit esoteric, so let’s illustrate it concretely: Think of the movie Star Wars. In it you have a character, Darth Vader, who is the embodiment, or the personification of the Dark Side. He and it are one. He consistently says to Luke Skywalker, “Give yourself to the Dark Side, as I have given myself to the dark side.” 8 Luke, in the movie insists, upon holding his father and Darth Vader as separate beings— “There is good in you, he insists, I know there is good in you, I can sense it.” Vader, in turn, insists “No, that person, who might once have existed, is gone.” The parasite and the host are a single entity, the evil force and the human person have become one, which makes Vader, as a character, irredeemable. But throughout, Luke holds Vader and the dark side of the force separately—and in the end, I know this is a spoiler alert but you’ve had since 1983 to see the movie—The dark side is overcome and Vader is redeemed. So, take that image back to the interaction between Jesus and the man with the unclean spirit—the possessed man says, “Have you come to destroy US?” and Jesus says, holding the two separately, “YOU be silent and come out of him.” It is not so much an exorcism as an excision—that which is irredeemable is held separate and cut away, that which is redeemable, no longer demonized, is re-humanized.

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