As I mentioned last week, Mark 1 can be a challenging chapter for the educated mainline modern ear with its references to unclean spirits and demons. We progressives would always prefer to call Jesus “The Good Teacher” rather than “the Good Exorcist!”
However, when reading this chapter, it is impossible to ignore the fact that it seems very important to Mark to inform his readers that a primary responsibility in the job description of the Son of God is confronting, rebuking, and exorcising demons or “unclean spirits.”
Last week we read in verse 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.’
And today, beginning with verse 32 we read:
That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; …And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
Now, before we decide to amend the church budget so we can purchase some holy water, a few giant crucifixes and a book of exorcism rights and begin looking for people whose bodies contort and heads spin around, let’s keep reading this chapter in Mark.
For I believe to understand the nature of demonic or “unclean spirits,” I believe it is important to look closely at the details of the story which ends chapter one.
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’
Isn’t that interesting? At the end of the chapter about Jesus casting out unclean and demonic spirits, comes someone considered to be unclean begging Jesus to make him clean. In other words, “Jesus, if you choose, you can exorcize the unclean or demonic spirit that is tormenting me.”
Leprosy was the most feared and dreaded disease of Jesus’ day, one that always brought horror and despair. “Leprosy” is an indefinite and general term used for a whitish rash on the skin. Spots, sores and swelling may also be present. It was an uncomfortable disease; however, what made leprosy so feared, and so demonic, was not what it did to a person physically, but what it did to a person socially. Perhaps like no other disease, leprosy excluded, marginalized and utterly otherized. You could say that it demonized another.
And it must be pointed out that this demonic otherization was created by so-called, “good,” Bible-believing folks who loved to quote passages from Leviticus to back up their demonic acts.
Chapters 13 and 14 of Leviticus discuss the social side effects of this disease at great length. Because a person with leprosy was considered “unclean,” a leper had to wear clothes which had been torn so they could be easily recognized and avoided. Lepers also had to cover their mouths and cry “unclean, unclean” in the presence of others so no one would approach them. Eduard Schweizer comments that rabbis considered a leper to be a “living corpse.” They were alive, but not alive. They were here, but not here; in the community, but not a part of the community. They were unalive, unaccepted, and untouchable.
We are then told that Jesus is “moved with pity…”
It is important to note that the Greek word used here describes visceral, gut-wrenching feeling. Jesus was moved from deep within his soul. Jesus literally felt the pain and the stigma of the leper. Because the leper suffered, Jesus also suffered. Some scholars say that the word is better translated: “angry.” When Jesus encountered the suffering of the leper, it angered him, but he was angry not only by the physical pain of it, but by the social pain of it— how this dehumanizing disease took people out of community, how it made them social outcasts, outsiders, other.
Here’s how we know that Jesus is angry at not the disease itself, but at the social injustice of it all. Jesus reaches out his hand and “touches” this one who was considered by faith and culture to be “untouchable.” “Immediately the leprosy leaves him, and he is made clean.” Then we read: “He sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
Although Jesus had healed the man from the leprosy, Jesus needed him to follow through with the cleansing rituals that would restore him back into community. More than anything else, Jesus wanted this outsider to become an insider. Jesus wanted this untouchable to be touchable, this otherized to be welcomed, seen, heard, valued, loved, and supported.
1972 was a year of enlightenment for me. For it was not only one of the first times I experienced the love of God in action when Mrs. Banks came to visit me in the hospital after my tonsils were removed, it was the first time I had an encounter with the demonic.
Since I attended a segregated church and a private kindergarten, First Grade was my first exposure to children whose skin color differed from mine. During the first few weeks of school, I immediately became friends with a student of color named Robert whose desk was directly behind me. I also remember playing on the playground with Robert during recess and eating lunch with him in the cafeteria.
About a month into the school year, I remember overhearing my parents and my grandparents, who lived just down the road from us, having a discussion that I did not understand. Although it had been three years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, I remember his name being invoked as an example of how “colored people” like “to stir up trouble.” They talked about a racial riot which had occurred at the high school, how a school bus was set on fire and how a white girl was stabbed with a knife by a black boy.
I remember hearing my parents and grandparents talk about people of color as if they were animals, suggesting that they, like the Native Americans, did not have souls like white people. And I distinctly remember them somehow using the Bible to back up their beliefs.
Before going to school the next day, I will never forget my mother sitting me down at the kitchen table and telling me that “colored people were bad people and wanted to cause trouble,” and they may try to start a fight with me.
Mama said: “So, if a colored person comes up to you, I want you to just ignore them. Don’t pay them any attention. Do you hear me?” I had learned that whenever she ended a sentence with “Do you hear me?” I better do what she said, as I was constantly reminded as a child that God would punish me if I disobeyed my parents.
While standing in the front of the line preparing to go to the cafeteria on the following day, I will never forget Robert, who was standing three or four students behind me calling my name, “Jarrett, Jarrett.” And obeying mama, I ignored him. “Jarrett, Jarrett, Jarrett, Jarrett,” he kept calling my name. “Jarrett, can’t you hear me? Jarrett!” I just stood there, acted as if Robert did not exist.
And as we walked in a single line to the cafeteria, I remember feeling sick, convicted that I just did something terrible, diabolical. It was the very first time that I realized that my parents could be wrong. That their understanding of scripture could be wrong.
All because during the first few weeks of first grade, Robert had become me my friend. All because we talked and listened to one another in class, at lunch and on the playground. As novelist and gay activist Sarah Shulman has written: “Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.”
It has been said that the greatest problem of the twenty-first century has been the greatest problem in every generation: the problem of “othering,” a demonic evil that has existed since the human beings first walked on the earth. Virtually every global, national, regional, denominational, church and family conflict is because someone made the decision to identify a group that is “us” and another group that is “them.” Othering undergirds territorial disputes, sectarian violence, military conflict, genocide, the spread of disease, hunger, food insecurity, and even climate change.
And it almost always begins with words. A few dehumanizing, otherizing, demonizing words describing a group of people as “illegals,” “aliens,” abominations,” “animals,” “vermin” or an “infestation.”
We heard it this past week from a congressman from Florida when he suggested that we not refer to even babies on the Gaza strip as “innocent Palestinians’”
And recently we have heard a presidential candidate repeat the assertion: “They are poisoning the blood of our nation.”
I often wonder how much better this world would be today if churches took Jesus’ response to the evil of otherization as serious as we took Jesus’ acts of healing, if along with the great hospitals that churches have built all over the world, churches built advocacy centers for social justice. What kind of world would it be if every church taught and advocated for social justice like they pray for people who are sick?
As disciples of the Good Exorcist, we must always stand ready rebuke and call out any otherization we encounter today, in all its forms, as the abhorrent, demonic evil that it is. We must be moved to holy anger like Jesus when we see anyone marginalized by culture or religion.
We don’t need carry around holy water or a giant crucifix. We just need to possess some courage to speak up and speak out whenever we encounter racism, xenophobia, queerphobia or any type of hate. We must never be ashamed of the good news of the gospel that all people, all tribes, all nations are beloved children of God. And we must continue to be a church that welcomes all people to the table, believing that there’s no such thing as “us and them,” because there’s only us. This church must always be a place where everyone is seen, heard, valued, loved, and supported, and there are never any exceptions.
Just Love 