Mark 1:21 - 28
During my years of higher education I had a lot of really good teachers, some of whom I did not appreciate until long after I had taken their classes. When I was at Catholic University we had some required religion classes. My new testament professor was a priest whose name was “Christian Paul Ceroke”. With a name like that I guess you’d have to end up in some sort of ministry. I had him for one semester, and never heard anything about him after that, until, as I was thinking about today’s gospel, I put his name in Google and found his obituary -- and learned that he was a noted scholar and teacher, and a member of the Carmelite Order. The thing I remember most about Father Ceroke was that he made the New Testament come alive. His method was to assign us a reading from scripture, and then he would discuss it at the next class. His word pictures and enthusiasm left me with a life-long interest in the bible, especially the gospels.
In today’s gospel Mark tells us, before Jesus performs the exorcism, that the people who heard him were astonished. Now I can understand words like “interested” or “enlightened” or even “enthused”, but astonished? That’s the word used in several translations, so I wondered what the Greek word was. It is “ekplesso” and to my surprise, it means “to be blown away”. We never learn what Jesus was actually teaching. I doubt he was telling the people anything very new. In fact when we actually see examples of Jesus’ teaching in the gospels, he draws from the long tradition of the Old Testament and picks and chooses what to emphasize. But it must have been the way he taught -- Mark says it was because he taught with authority.
Now Mark compares Jesus’ teaching to that of the scribes, who taught by citing the law and the prophets to bolster what they were saying. But you wouldn’t have to go too far to find places where Jesus cites authority for his teaching. So I went back to my Greek dictionary and learned that the word “exousia” can mean “power” -- Jesus taught with power. And maybe this is more to the point; Jesus was interesting to listen to; he made you want to hear more; and that’s a major characteristic of a great teacher.
Father Ceroke taught with power. He got me to open my bible back in the days when Catholics were not really known as bible folk. I remember the bible in our house when I was growing up. It was huge, and the first few pages consisted of forms where you could put down the various milestones of each of your children -- birth, baptism, first communion, and so on. Our bible never got opened beyond those pages, but it sure was pretty.
One thing about power, though, it always raises opposition. You see, people don’t like to be under someone else’s power. Some of my classmates took offense because Father Ceroke seemed to speak irreverently about the scriptures. He said, for example, that some people followed Jesus around because he provided bread and fish. He said some people enjoyed watching him confront the Pharisees; they liked a good fight. Others took offense because Father Ceroke graded based upon essays we had to write. This was a long way from true and false tests. In any event, even though Father Ceroke taught with power, made the scriptures come alive for some of us, in doing so he raised up opposition.
And that’s what we see happening in the gospel story. Jesus’ teaching, which astonishes his hearers, raises opposition. We probably see the possessed man as someone who howls at the moon and has convulsions or needs to be chained up so he won’t hurt himself. After all, some possessed people described in the gospels were like that. But think about it, this possessed man is in a synagogue; he’s probably an upstanding citizen. But the unclean spirit in him calls out, “What do you want with us, Jesus! Have you come to destroy us?” Whatever Jesus was teaching, the unclean spirit in the man saw it as a threat. And you know, I think that’s a reaction all of us have when we are challenged to change, when the way we see the world is threatened. Our tendency is always to withdraw into a more comfortable environment, one in which we aren’t threatened. We divide ourselves from each other. And this tendency is magnified tremendously in these days, because with the click of a mouse we can find a silo in cyberspace where everyone agrees with me; a place where my ideas are safe and I am not challenged.
A lot of the people followed Jesus because his teaching astonished them, because he challenged them to change, to re-examine the beliefs they thought were set in concrete. And those who did so were changed; they were on the way to salvation. But there were those who reacted by crying out “What do you want with us, have you come to destroy us?” And in the end they thought it was better to put an end to Jesus.
So today, when we hear Jesus teach, are we astonished? Are we ready to change? Or would we rather he leave us alone and have him take his message elsewhere.
