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The synagogue in Capernaum, I was there years ago in my seminary days during a study tour of the Bible Lands. We visited the ruins of the ancient town of Capernaum and I stood in the ruins of the synagogue there. It wasn’t the same synagogue Jesus taught in. That one was probably 10-15-20 ft below where I stood. The synagogue ruins that stand there today were built a few hundred years later and likely on top of the one that Jesus taught in.
Those ruins are special to me. It was there that I had an epiphany, a flash of insight about the historical realness of Jesus. If you go to Jerusalem, everything is so crowded and touristy and religious to the point of being superstition – pray here where Jesus did this, light a candle, leave a donation and receive a blessing. But Capernaum is different. It’s very rural. It lacks the crowds. I could stop and breathe and take it all in and not worry about getting pickpocketed.
Capernaum was where Jesus began his ministry. It was his home base. There’s indication in Mark that Jesus may even have had a house there. He gave the Sermon on the Mount just a little way down the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The place where he fed the 5,000 (actually more than 15,000 considering women and children), it was not far from there. Most of his ministry happened in and around Capernaum.
As I stood there in the ruins of that synagogue at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, it suddenly began to sink in that Jesus really lived. The stories of him that we have in the Gospels are memories of things that really happened. It’s kind of like going back to your home town and to the house you grew up in after years of being away, back to where you began and realizing “my memories really happened. I am real.” If that makes any sort of sense. The stories in the Bible really happened and I was where they happened. This faith we share has real historical roots. It’s not just a bunch of beliefs.
Thinking about that synagogue itself and what it would have been like back in Jesus’s day, it would have been more than what a church is for us; you know, the place we go to usually only on Sunday morning to worship and socialize. Outside of the home, the synagogue and the market place were the two most important places in any Jewish town. Similar to us, they did their weekly. They went to synagogue Friday evening at the beginning of the Sabbath for worship, but it was also a bustling place every day of the week. It was a social hub like what a coffee shop would be today or, forgive me, Facebook. You had the enclosed place for Sabbath worship, but there was also a huge courtyard with a covered porch going all the way around it. People gathered there. In one of the four corners there would have been a special stone slab for a rabbi or elder or scribe to sit and teach so that here was teaching going on all the time. There were people debating matters of faith. People debating politics. People talking about life and business. This space, this synagogue courtyard (where I was standing) was the place to be when you didn’t have anywhere else you had to be. It was the social hub, the newspaper, the place of shade to sit, the sacred place, all rolled into one.
Well, to take a moment to think about who Jesus was to the people in Capernaum. Prior to his first visit to that synagogue there would have likely been some buzz about Jesus going around. Though his Baptism by John the Baptist had happened a few months prior several days walk from there down in the Jordan Wilderness near Jericho, word-of-mouth news would have travelled up to Capernaum about what happened when Jesus was baptised there among all those people flocking out to John the Baptist. The people of Capernaum would have heard about how a voice came from the heavens saying about Jesus, “This is my beloved Son; with him, I am well-pleased,” and how the Spirit of God like a dove came down upon him. But then he suddenly and rather hurriedly ran off into the barren wilderness with nothing but the clothes on his back only to show up forty days later just after John the Baptist was arrested, wandering around, heralding the message, “The appointed time is now. The reign of God is upon us. Repent and believe the Gospel.” Then, as he got closer to Capernaum, he started to invite some local men to come and be his disciples, his students. When can assume with high probability that by the time he got to the synagogue that Sabbath the people of Capernaum were curious to hear him.
Another thing to consider, if you’ve been paying attention the last couple of weeks of my sermons, you will remember that I have been highlighting there’s Jewish Messianic and Roman Imperial innuendo going on in the way Mark introduces Jesus as Son of God. That was one of Caesar’s titles. And, what God said at Jesus’s baptism is pretty much what was said when the Roman Emperor adopted a son to be his successor. And, remember that the Romans are in the land as an occupying force. All this talk going about Jesus, that he is/might be the One, the Messiah, the Anointed King appointed by God to establish his reign on earth was verging towards treason. The synagogue would have been where people would have been talking about all this.
So, here we are, Jesus came to Capernaum where a couple of his disciples lived, Peter and Andrew, and when the Sabbath rolled around, they went to the synagogue and the leaders allowed him to speak. The people were astounded because Jesus taught as one who had the authority to interpret the Scriptures unlike the scribes. The scribes were the experts, but all they ever did was say that the great Rabbi so-and-so said this and the great Rabbi so-and-so said that. But Jesus, for some reason, he could say, “But, I say this.” He had authority to speak for God.
While he was teaching, a man with an unclean spirit came into the synagogue and began to make a scene. I imagine him to be one of those loud-talking-bully types. He shouted: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth (there was some stigma associated with Nazareth back then)? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: The Holy One of God.” This is where things get weird, so allow me to take a moment and talk about what an unclean spirit is.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke use the term “unclean spirit” pretty much interchangeably with the term “evil spirit” something we would call a demon today and it does refer to being possessed by a spirit. A spirit is a personal force from another realm that can exert influence on a person. For it to be “unclean” meant that it wasn’t serving God according to the good ordering of this world that God created and called good and so it was not welcome in God’s presence. Like the Serpent in the Garden of Eden story, this unclean spirit was a muck disturber from another realm who twists the truth or outright lies to get people to work against God and we can add, in self-destructive ways.
In our “scientific”, “psychologized” culture today we don’t give much credence to the existence of these sorts of spirit-things. Mention the word demon and immediately people will either start thinking Linda Blair in The Exorcist levitating, spinning her head, screaming obscenities, barfing green pea soup, and snapping the necks of very ill-prepared Roman Catholic priests. People think that or conjure up some other medieval beast with horns out of Dante’s Inferno. Or, they go to the other extreme and do what typically gets done in the world of biblical studies: explain these things away by literally “demonizing” mental illness and epilepsy.
There’s little to no way to address this topic these days without going to either of those extremes. But I’m going to try it. So, let’s try to see this man with the unclean spirit and what he does from two perspectives. First, let’s look at him from the perspective that we don’t know he is possessed. Let’s imagine what this man’s behaviour would appear to us to be apart from the “unclean spirit” stuff. I think it would look familiar. I think he would appear to your typical bully. Imagine, a man from the community walked into the synagogue and started rudely and loudly shouting at Jesus, “What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth?” We would right off the bat take him as being anger-issued, loud, and bully-ish.
This first question is straight out of the book of bully tactics. He is highlighting that Jesus isn’t from there and really had no business in Capernaum. Jesus was not “one of us”. The us here would not be referring to some sort of cohort of demons possessing this man, but rather to us, the people of Capernaum. Moreover, the man is pointing out that Jesus was one of them Nazareth-people. Back then, Nazareth was stigmatized for some reason. We don’t know what, but there was a phrase floating around back then that went, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” So, If we didn’t know this man had an unclean spirit possessing him, he would appear to be a loud bully trying to turn the synagogue crowd against Jesus by means of prejudice - “He’s not one of us. He’s one of them.” This verbal bullying by means of awakening prejudice makes this spirit unclean.
Next, the man moves on to another bully tactic - fear mongering. He shouts, “Have you come here to destroy us?” Here the loud bully, knowing that the talk about Jesus is that he might be the Messiah and knowing that Jesus had been preaching Kingdom of God stuff that could and would upset the Romans, is more or less saying “Why have you come to our town with your left-leaning Kingdom of God politics. Are you trying to get us on the radar of the Romans who will send in their army and destroy our village and our livelihoods?” We see this today – conservatives scaring people by using the word socialism and liberals scaring people by using the word fascism. This attempt at fear mongering makes this spirit unclean.
Next, the man uses a third bully tactic of mocking Jesus. Tack a little “Yeah, right” into the tone of voice when he says, “I know who you are: The Holy One of God”. Mocking Jesus like this would only serve to destroy the people’s hope in God by making it appear impossible that Jesus of “Nazareth” could in any way be God’s anointed and that God might be finally acting to remove them from oppression. This bullying by means of mocking and belittling makes this spirit unclean.
Well, looking at this man not knowing that he has an unclean spirit living in him lead us to consider him to be like one of those loud church bullies who rants on at church meetings loudly and angrily knowing that people won’t stand up to him. He or she always get their way because they mock and belittle others, and make people lose hope and be afraid of what the future might bring. They conjure up our latent prejudices to keep us from loving our neighbour in more than just saccharin words. We’ve all encountered people like that, and in church of all places.
Now let’s look at this man from a second perspective - Jesus’s perspective. Jesus knows he has an unclean spirit in him. The man, whether willingly or not, had given free rent in the safe haven of his mind to an unclean spirit who twisted the truth to his own ends so that the truth became a lie. It was true that Jesus was/is the Holy One of God who has come from “not from around here” to save us from all things that make us afraid and lose hope in God and what God is up in the world and to heal his creation that has fallen victim to sin, death, and evil. Indeed, if “us” refers to this unclean spirit and his cohorts, Jesus had indeed come to destroy them.
Jesus, saw the unclean spirit resident in the man and told him, “Shut up! Get out of him.” Jesus did not try to reason with it. He took its voice away and commanded it gone. We need to know that when people bully others using prejudice, fear, and mockery to preserve themselves and to stand in the way of compassionate progress, we are dealing with unclean spirits. We can’t reason with them for they thoroughly believe the lies to be the truth. We can only expose the lies. If that doesn’t work, we take away their voice. If that doesn’t work, we send them away.
This past Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A friend of mine posted a meme to Facebook that read and I don’t know who originally said it so I can’t properly give credit: “Remember, it didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with politicians dividing the people with ‘us vs. them.’ It started with intolerance and hate speech and when people stopped caring, became desensitized and turned a blind eye.” That was certainly true of Nazi Germany. The meme was also directed at the political situation in the U.S. these last five years. But, you know, this same sort of unclean spirit thing persists even up here in “O Canada”. Anytime topics like Indigenous Rights, Refugee resettlement, or Immigration come up, the “unclean spirits” rush to the floor attacking person and awakening prejudice and fear. It is so sad that this unclean spirit still rears its head even in churches today and instead of shutting it up, we the followers of Jesus, give ear to it and quite often we put them in the pulpit and stand amazed at their teachings. Seriously, too often it is the case that the minister who says things like welcome the refugee or understand the homosexual gets fired, when the one who spouts fear and prejudice in the name of God gets a raise.
I don’t know anything about exorcism. I can only pray, “May we who follow Jesus be able to discern that unclean spirit and its lies when it comes into our midst, for it inevitably will, and may we strive to not let it get hold in our congregations, and may we rather overcome evil with the radical love that the Church is supposed to be known for. Amen.
