Oh yeah! Today is going to be a fun one. Your man is taking on a bad guy. Jesus tells him where to go (who doesn’t do that anyway) drawing a line in the Palestinian sand. Best yet, he sits in the seat of the paranormal! (spooky music here, please) Woooooo.

Really? In this day and age, do you really think people swallow this? Evil, unclean spirits possessing people? That’s what psychiatric intervention and treatments are for. Your hocus pocus of religion is so ridiculous, it’s sickening.

Ok, granted, like some cable tv shows that are heavy on the entertainment factor but maybe not on reality, this story sounds like it’s way out there. Jesus is easier to take if you just leave him to blessing the children and telling stories about lost sheep. Call him The Nicest Man That Ever Lived and deposit him on a shelf with last month’s elf. What goes on here is way off from that story. But you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

Preach to Where They Live

So give this a chance. Jesus has become a regular in the local synagogue, speaking every Saturday. People like him. That is, they really like him. He’s got an incredibly interesting take on teaching the Torah, ancient writings of the Jewish law and the prophets. Most of the regular legal experts, the scribes, are pretty dry in how they rehash what’s been said over and over. But Jesus, well, he tells it like it is but puts a greater spin on it. He doesn’t disagree or say it’s not so. Yet, when you hear him tell it, you get the idea that he’s letting you in on how God sees it, like from God’s lips to Jesus’ ears to our heads and hearts. While Jesus is known as a sort of a self-made rabbi, not coming through the usual religious systems, when he speaks you know he’s got something in him worth listening to, an authority the rest of the religious leaders don’t quite have.

A Mirror of Mind and Soul

Take for instance what is famously known today as his Sermon on the Mount. Jesus goes over it time and again. “You have heard it said (fill in a commandment), but I say….” The scribes will tell you what the law is: Do not commit murder, adultery, break your vows, etc. Geez, we can read that for ourselves. Isn’t the whole point of preaching supposed to help us see deeper, think differently, live with more integrity? Jesus showed the amateurs how it was done.

Murder? Watch your emotional response towards another. If you are angry, if you demean a person, if you curse someone, you are in a dangerous place, the kind of place that very well could lead to taking another’s life. Adultery? Let lust, a fantasy of a sexual nature desiring another, dominate your musings, and you’ve just as well put yourself in bed with her or him. You’re certainly are closer to acting on it. Break your vow? Don’t even say it, and you won’t be putting yourself in jeopardy of violating it.

In other words, Jesus had this way of piercing motive and thought life, how we position ourselves with others. Cognitive behaviorists will tell you what you allow yourself to think leads to emotional responses which often dictates action. Jesus was way ahead of them on that. In short, the authority credited to him was in his ability to get into people’s psyche and soul.

So Jesus was a master because he knew where people were coming from and could make their religion relevant to them. He had charisma? I wouldn’t expect you to say anything less. That’s essential to anyone who wants to lead a movement. But I gotta ask. I know this is still early in his career, but given how he made the synagogue leaders look kinda bad, wouldn’t this be a problem for him pretty soon?

Partners in the Plot

More than pretty soon. Let’s move on to that guy who disrupted Jesus’ teaching that day. He’s variously described as having an unclean, evil spirit that possessed him. What’s a character like that doing in a synagogue, a place considered holy, where people came to meet their God? Who would have let him in the door? That depends. Was it the front door? Or the back door? And who would benefit by letting this wretch get by the Jewish gatekeepers who wouldn’t let anybody in with any kind of disease or illness and who even kept the women back behind screens because they had a monthly issue of blood?

Admittedly, this is only conjecture, not written explicitly in the record, but don’t put it past those who had a lot to lose if this upstart preacher got more notice than they. You know how it happens. When climbing a ladder, the worst thing you can do is be better than your boss.

As it was, Jesus’ confrontation with the possessed man turned out to be a fight for way more than the admiration of a crowd. Strangely, the man shouts, “What have you to do with us? Have you come to destroy us?” But then he shrinks back. “I know who you are…” His words reveal the struggle, all the crushing evils of the world speaking though an individual torn in a destructive battle for his being and soul. Need a contemporary example? Addicts will tell you when the need for a fix overtakes all motivation, you are talking with the drugs and not the person. It’s a possession more real than you’ll ever find in a paranormal portrayal.

Wicked Warfare

They fight. He calls Jesus, “the holy one sent from God.” Jesus commands the spirit to shut up and come out of him. Usually, you have to name a disease or disorder to cure it. We have no designation in this record. Call it what you will: a psychological or personality disorder, a neurological illness, a soul twisted from physical, sexual, religious abuse. Any way you frame it, it destroyed and sucked the life out of him. That’s the goal of evil in its most insidious form. Still, he knew clearly who Jesus was and his purpose. He fought it with a squawking screech, the kind that sounds like it originates and ends in the bowels of hell. The warring factions within convulsed his body. Then it was over. The guy was ok, healed of whatever had clenched him.

So maybe Jesus came out on the winning side that day. His authority and power over what possessed this man impressed and gave him even more validation in the eyes of the people. But it’s not over. It takes a good long fight, battle, outright war to beat back evil. Yet, we only have to look at history to know it’s never gone for good.

Preach all you want, pass all the laws you can, write all the books you can ink, broadcast the experts, stream all kinds of authority. But hatred, racism, sexism, slavery, political and economic oppression, whatever pounds the spirit into oblivion, will rear its ugly head in another time and place.

Whereas Jesus may have dealt defeat over that day’s expression of evil, it did not disappear and would follow him, haunt him until his own demise upon an evil cross. His final battle would culminate in a clash with life’s fiercest foe, the true purpose of evil as death, and bring a healing three days later never possible before in life restored.

The Lord’s Prayer is understood as given by Jesus to pray for ourselves in God’s will. Yet, in a way, Jesus may have meant the final petition, read in the original Greek, for himself as much as for the world.

“Rescue us from the evil one.” Matthew 6:13

Mark 1:21-28

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