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I’ve spoken before of when I was in seminary and went on a study tour of the Middle East that included a stop in Capernaum, where the story in our passage takes place. It’s now just a tourist stop, not much to see other than a small cathedral over the house where Peter lived, the house where Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law so that she could show them hospitality. It's also likely the place where four men lowered a paralytic down to Jesus through the roof. One of the ruins there is of a synagogue that dates back to the 400’s CE that is built on top of the synagogue where Jesus often taught. The synagogue ruins themselves are not all that spectacular; just some remnants of walls, a stone floor, and a few pillars. There's also an old olive mill and press from Jesus' day.
Back then Capernaum was little more than a backwater fishing village of probably about 1,500 people, as seemingly insignificant as its ruins are today. Yet for me, Capernaum was quite significant. It was the most “soul-touching” place in all the Holy Lands for me. Capernaum was the place where it just really hit home with me that Jesus had actually been there and taught. Just a few feet below me, Jesus really did what we read about here in Mark's Gospel.
It was the first Saturday or Sabbath after Jesus called Peter and Andrew and James and John. He called them and immediately they all went to Synagogue together. It would have likely been a very under attended synagogue. The Jews in Galilee were a bit laxer than those down around Jerusalem. Jesus and the four entered and for some unknown reason the local rabbis let Jesus teach. The people were amazed at Jesus’ teaching. He taught with an authority that the scribes, their usual teachers, just didn’t have.
Let’s not mistake Jesus’ authority as mere charisma and say that the rabbis were boring and irrelevant while Jesus was enthusiastic and able to “make it practical”; the sort of thing for which so many Christians today check their brains at the door. The Greek word for authority there is exousia – ex meaning “originating from” and ousia meaning “being”. So, roughly it means originating from the very root of being. Here it means that Jesus with his proclaiming and teaching about the arrival of the Kingdom of God was the root of a new creative act by God in and among his people. He was teaching them that what God had long ago promised by the voice of the prophets, God was now doing in their midst, indeed in them right in the midst of their little backwater community.
Amazed is too weak of an adjective for the people's reaction. Here was this backwater under attended synagogue in a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee and the Lord God of Israel was right there at that moment in their midst finally beginning to bring about his Kingdom through the actions and preaching of this Jesus of Nazareth. The authority that Jesus taught with was the reality of the Kingdom of God actually coming into their community and into their actual lives. Frankly, we really do need to be thinking on the scale of this being an event as big as creation itself. In this backwater, under attended synagogue a new act of creation was beginning. The Big Bang of all things being made new n Christ was happening in their little Synagogue.
Things got strange in Capernaum that day. Something the people there I’m sure never thought would happen in their synagogue. There was a man among them, a man with an unclean spirit, and he stood up to challenge Jesus. What he said was something that no one could possibly know. Jesus of Nazareth is the Holy One of God, the Messiah. At this point in the story, it takes behind the scenes knowledge of reality and what God is doing to know that. Well, the people in that synagogue are about to find out just how powerful the nature of Jesus’ authority is. As this is an act of New Creation, we should expect that the powers of Darkness or Chaos would show up as well. God spoke the first Creation into existence out of the primordial waters of darkness. Not only is Jesus’ authority rooted in the power to create, it is also the power to dispense with darkness, with evil in its hidden, twisted, personal form. Jesus told the unclean spirit to shut up and get out of the man and it obeyed. If that happened here, it would quite literally scare the Hell out of us.
So, what is this unclean spirit? The man didn’t have a mental illness as many scholars would say. He had something else. The writers of the Bible believed that there was a spirit realm, a part of the creation that we don’t see but it is there and is inhabited by personal beings and by personal I mean relational. They are presences and powers that will at times relate to us and have effect on us, even possess us. The Bible speaks of these beings as angels, demons, evil spirits, unclean or impure spirits, and also the dead. It also strongly warns against trying to conjure up or enter into a relationship with any of those things.
This man at the synagogue had an unclean spirit possessing him. Unclean is an Old Testament term meaning impure due to contact with death, blood, or something “unnatural” and because of that it was not permitted to be in the presence of God or in contact with others. If one was unclean, one was not allowed contact with other people nor allowed to go into the temple until pronounced clean by a priest and the required sacrifices made. So, this unclean spirit was a relational being so impure as to not be permitted into the presence of God, a being that had the capacity to possess a person and depersonalize that person as a human being by keeping him out of God’s presence.
So, here in this under attended synagogue in a backwater fishing village we have this New Creation event of the Kingdom of God breaking forth by the word and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. In the midst of the event evil came forth embodied in an unnamed man. Strangely, the unclean spirit seems unable to keep itself from blurting out who Jesus is. Here’s an odd literary fact for you. In the Gospel of Mark, only the unclean spirits know for sure exactly who Jesus is and what he's come to do. The unclean spirit 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.” Jesus boldly told the unclean spirit to shut up and get out of the man. Immediately, in a horrific display of screams and contortions it left the man. The man was freed and cleansed from that evil that that possessed him and made him less than the person God had created him to be.
Well, if amazed was too weak of an adjective to describe how Jesus’ teaching impacted the people there in that very under-attended synagogue, how could we describe their reaction now? This man, Jesus of Nazareth, has authority even in the spirit realm, even the authority to cast out the evil spirits from which all evil and fallen powers on earth derive their twisted, abusive power. The people blurted out, "What is this new teaching?! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him!" The word Mark uses to describe their reaction is that they are amazed almost to the point of terror. Other exorcists in their day had to invoke gods and do all sorts of rituals to maybe get the job done, but Jesus simply spoke and it obeyed. Only God can do that.
So, what does this story have to do with us? And remember, it was the first act of ministry Jesus did in front of his first disciples; a ministry which also included healing people, confronting the hypocrisy of the religious authorities, miraculous feedings, calming a storm. And also remember, Jesus sent his disciples out with the authority to do these very things as well and they did and were themselves amazed that they could. These things continue to happen today in ministries which the traditional church regards with much suspicion and usually disregards as fake, but mostly just doesn’t know what to do with them.
For the past two hundred years or more in North America and centuries before that in Europe the church has been little more than an institution serving as the agent and enforcer of morality undergirding political powers. Christian faith has become little more than a matter of private belief. It has no power. It’s lost its exousia and hence it wanes. How off guard would it catch us if Jesus came here to this under-attended backwater church and did what he did in that under-attended synagogue in a backwater fishing village as a matter of first course? Friends, the Jesus who turned Capernaum upside-down is our Jesus and he's with us now. He lives. He has power even over the grave. Call out to him. Trust him with your life. Settle your life on him without reserve. Paul wrote in Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” I don’t know if you/we can grasp it, but Jesus, the one who has power even over the unclean/evil is living in us. Trust yourself to him. He loves you and has given his life and exousia to you. Why be afraid? Why worry? He is here. Amen.
