The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

15 The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. 16 This is what you requested of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said: "If I hear the voice of the LORD my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die." 17 Then the LORD replied to me: "They are right in what they have said. 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. 19 Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. 20 But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak-- that prophet shall die." (Deuteronomy 18 NRSV)

21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried 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." 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be silent, and come out of him!" 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, "What is this? A new teaching-- with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. (Mark 1 NRSV)


“HEALING EVIL”

As a child I had a nervous stomach. It would bother me from time to time and particularly when I was in college. The summer I was an undergraduate research participant in Madison, it got to the point where I went to the doctor about it. It was at the student health center. I don’t know why, but the doctor explained what she was doing in incredibly great detail. Perhaps they wanted to educate us patients about heath care. The first part she called “subjective” and that was what my complaint was. The other part was called “objective” and that was what the doctor could observe on examination and tests. I thought about that. The physical findings should match the complaint. If they don’t match, the illness might be an unknown or mysterious one, or might be “all in the patient’s head”, that is, imaginary.
The reading from the Gospel tells us more about who Jesus was. But first, the reading from Deuteronomy tells us that Moses predicted long ago that another prophet like him would arise. That prophet will proclaim God’s word to the people because they did not want to see God directly. The prophet will tell them what God wants to say and they are to heed it. It will be the words from God and if a person does not heed those words, that person will be held accountable. But the prophet needed to speak only the words God gave to the prophet. If the prophet spoke words other than the ones God gave the prophet he or she would die.
The Early Church saw that Jesus was that prophet. He was raised up from his people. He spoke the word of God truly. He should be listened to. The Gospel of Mark gives us a picture of Jesus at the start of his ministry. As Jesus began his work of declaring God’s word, this incident happened. He taught in the synagogue in Capernaum, and the people were amazed. He taught in a new way, “not like the scribes”, it says. This is not to say that Jesus was a loud or vigorous teacher, whereas the scribes were pedantic or timid. It is that Jesus not only talks, he does something . He not only tells the people that the kingdom of God has come, he brings it into their midst by what he does. What he did was to cast out the unclean spirit of a man who had come into the synagogue. It is a confrontation in which the evil spirits know who Jesus is and he knows who they are. He commands and it is done. Then the people notice and are amazed at his teaching.
The biblical world distinguished between illness and possession by evil spirits, but it was a simpler world. They lacked the diagnostic sophistication of this modern age. Much of what they would call demonic, we might understand differently. I say this because we need to understand the passage as not commanding us all to go out and cast out evil spirits. There are those who think that evil spirits are imaginary. Now I am not one of those persons who says there are no evil spirits, but I am not one who sees them behind every bush, either. Sometimes there is evil in this world that goes beyond anything that can be easily explained. There is evil that sometimes seems to go beyond this world. Perhaps that is where the demonic element is found. Whether demons are real or not, evil is. Whatever we think of demons, we do have the opportunity to make the world a better place by casting out evil. Evil comes into this world and we can be like Jesus when we help heal the world of it.
Sometimes that is by use of the medical skill and knowledge. In generations past mental illness was seen as some kind of personal or moral failure. It is more hopeful that nowadays it is seen as just an illness of the mind. When it is seen as an illness, then people can seek treatment for it. It is not that they are “bad people”; it is that something is wrong with them. A broken arm does not have the stigma (at least usually) that mental illness does. And much in our world needs healing. One of the professors at the University of Iowa would point out that the Russian dictator Josef Stalin was abused as a child. Some of the folks who heard him would dismiss that idea, since they were still thinking in terms of the Cold War and could not say anything that would make the enemy more human. Now, it really is hard to say anything nice about Stalin; he was a ruthless dictator with a truly evil regime. But, it is not hard to see that what we experience when young shapes how we think and act as adults and think, What could have possibly been different if someone had helped Stalin before he rose to power? How would have history been changed if the evil that was done to him had been healed before he inflicted it on others?
Perhaps where we can begin to heal the world is to start to set it right. There is much in this world that is wrong but not demonic. Sometimes healing evil is in our hands, when we have the opportunity to right a wrong or help someone who is on the wrong path in life get on the right one. It makes the world a better place. Sometimes that is done carefully, quietly, persistently, gently, but other times it might be that kind of confrontation with evil like Jesus had in the synagogue in Capernaum. There was an obituary recently of Stetson Kennedy, 1916-2011. He was unable to serve in the military in WWII due to health so he fought racist terrorist here rather than abroad by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and revealing its secrets to journalist and the authorities and in a book. Kennedy first saw racism in how his classmates treated the black people in Jacksonville, Florida, but grew up to do something about it. There are times when we follow Jesus’ teaching by removing evil from our lives, from the lives of others, and our world.
There are other times when we ourselves are in need of healing. That is the time to recall Jesus as the healer. Fay Angus tells the story of a time she found help with fear. She was putting off a medical test both for the discomfort of the test and what it might reveal. She and her husband were in a park, picnicking, watching the family next to them. The children took turns spinning around and falling backward into their father’s arms. The youngest of them was reluctant to do this last part. Finally he did and then he couldn’t stop. He did it over and over. Fay found in this a lesson to trust God with her life and health. Jesus came to heal us from those evil things that limit or harm our lives.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus came into our world to change it. He can cast out its evil. That is a teacher with authority. He does not only give us God’s words, he acts for God around us. He touches our lives. He makes the world a new place. He calls us to follow him into this new world. We follow him into that new world when we oppose evil like he did, and we find it when we let him heal us. It is teaching—with power. It is teaching we can hear. It is teaching that can help us live.