Hilton Head Island, SC – February 14, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 1:21-28; Luke 8:1-3 and Mark 16:9-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they were all amazed, so they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the evil spirits, and they obey him.” Mark 1:27
Today I am beginning a series of sermons whose general theme is this: The Company He Kept. Each sermon will attempt to point out an unusual group of people with whom Jesus deliberately associated. All of these people would have been considered inappropriate by some of the theological and cultural enemies of Jesus, of whom he acquired a rapidly growing number. It is evident in reading the four Gospels that from the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus specifically chose to talk to and to minister to types of people whom Jesus’ detractors thought every respectable person should very carefully avoid. Today we will be thinking about the mentally ill.
When you were a child and a teenager, I presume your parents told you what my parents told me. “Be carefully of the company you keep,” they said. “They can influence you for good or ill, and they may be very influential in how you are perceived by others.” In other words, be sure you have good and respectable friends, or you may create problems for yourself in later life.
In that respect, from the first time Jesus set out preaching and teaching in the Galilee, he appeared to seek out individuals whom most people would consider to be peculiar or strange or even disreputable. Jesus did not steer clear of such folks; it actually appeared as though either they sought him out, or he gladly welcomed them into his presence, or both. Considering the nature of first-century Jewish culture, Jesus knew this would raise the hackles of puritanical and morally inflexible religious leaders. Nonetheless he never hesitated to welcome social misfits into his presence, a few of whom became his inner core of disciples and followers.
According to the Gospel of Mark, the very first miracle Jesus performed was on behalf of a man whom Mark described as having “an unclean spirit.” In the first century, Jesus’ century, that meant what we call mental illness. We may think that we are much more tolerant of mental illness than those people were, and we think we understand mental illness much better than those people back then. Sadly however, tragically even, in general we have little more comprehension and acceptance of what constitutes mental illness and how ordinary people ought to deal with it than did the residents of first-century Judea.
Mental illness is often the most difficult sickness to diagnose definitively and to treat effectively. In addition to long-term counseling, the medications that exist to assist those who are its victims do not necessarily help at all or are not consistent in treating mental patients. As little as the average person understands about mental illness, however, we do conceptualize it differently than did Jesus or his contemporaries.
In the episode from Mark’s Gospel, on a Sabbath morning Jesus went into the synagogue in Capernaum. Capernaum was a fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, the large lake which gave its name to the whole northern region of Judea. In some manner which is never clearly explained in any of the four Gospels, at the outset of his ministry Jesus was considered to be a rabbi. How or why or where that was conferred it never says. But Mark does make this observation: “They were astonished at his preaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22). In other words, Jesus spoke like someone who received what he said directly from God, and not like the men whose life’s vocation was to interpret the Torah, the religious law. Whatever “it” was to have, Jesus had it.
Once I had the privilege of being asked to preach in a large and prestigious church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Sitting in the front pew was a middle-aged man dressed like a soldier in a military-like uniform, but a very odd one. Nothing seemed to match, and he was wearing an overseas cap, one of those narrow cloth hats which fits from forehead to back, and can be tucked into one’s belt if that is the appropriate thing to do. I whispered to the associate pastor to inquire about the man, and I was told not to be concerned; he was there every Sunday, and that was his customary position. He would not disrupt anything. Frankly, I was greatly relieved to hear it.
Apparently there was a man who regularly attended the synagogue in Capernaum who was like that, except the congregation was accustomed to seeing him acting up or acting out. When Jesus had finished his sermon, the man stood up and shouted, “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!” (1:24) Mark then writes this: “But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’” (1:25) Why does Mark say that Jesus rebuked the man, and what does “come out of him” mean? Apparently this man’s demeanor and behavior was somewhat like that man in the front row of the Fifth Avenue church, except that he was not silent in worship; he might cry out at any moment.
“Come out of him!” doesn’t mean anything to us, but to everyone in that synagogue its meaning was crystal clear. Not only did Jesus show himself to be an accomplished preacher, but he also displayed an ability to be a miracle worker. The miracle he performed that Sabbath morning was to cast out of the man what Mark calls an “unclean spirit.” Jesus commanded what the people in the synagogue and very likely even Jesus himself called a “demon” to exit the man.
We would say that Jesus was treating someone with mental illness, but they would say he was casting out a demon. To the people of that time, the devil was the cause of mental illness. They thought the man had an “evil spirit.” Luke relates a similar kind of story, saying that some of the followers of Jesus were “women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities” of whom one, he said, was “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2).
Now are you starting to get the picture? Jesus had disciples who many people thought were crazy! Insane people seem to have been drawn to Jesus like iron filings to a magnet! Somehow they knew that Jesus would not ignore them or avoid them the way most people did. If they thought themselves to be “demon-possessed,” maybe Jesus could cast out their demons.
What would you think of a minister or priest or rabbi who both attracted and welcomed people like that into his inner circle? Honestly, what would you think? Would that impress you, or might it give you the heebie-jeebies? For Jesus in first-century Judea, a few were impressed, but most were repelled. It was unseemly for Jesus to hang around with such folks; it seemed irreligious; it was wrong! Many of the people in the Capernaum synagogue would have been disgusted that Jesus paid any attention to the poor soul who disturbed the sanctity of their worship, but Jesus wasn’t put off by him.
I think Mark improperly described what happened by saying that Jesus rebuked the man; instead Jesus spoke firmly but kindly to him, saying, “Come out of him!” to the mental impairment which had afflicted this poor soul for his whole life. The people of Capernaum knew him and put up with him as best they could, but when Jesus directly confronted the man’s mental disability, and it convulsed him, and he was suddenly cured, some in the congregation were amazed and others were probably appalled. An accusation was made elsewhere in the Gospels, “He casts out demons by the prince of demons.” The residents of Capernaum were content to deal with the man in their own benighted manner, but when Jesus cured the man of his derangement, they may have ascribed it to devil worship.
How do we deal with mental illness? We call people “crazy” who suffer from it. We say they are “nuts.” We avoid them if we can, and we do the best we can with them if we must. Nonetheless, mental illness is still the most difficult malady for society to know how to handle. We can manage heart disease, cancer, and other physical impairments fairly charitably, or physical malformations in others or in ourselves. However, to us mental illness is so bizarre, so off-putting, that we simply do not know how to cope with it.
Jesus knew. He accepted people with mental illness in the same way he accepted everyone else with any other abnormality: openly, kindly, with a love and compassion which emanated from every fiber of his being. Because he was like that, and because many people like that flocked around Jesus, many people, especially religious leaders, became highly skeptical of Jesus. No true man of God would associate with such people, either because they thought it was truly wrong to do so or because they thought Jesus should know that it prompted bad public relations to do so.
On the bulletin cover is a quote from Glenn Close about mental illness. “What mental health needs is more sunshine, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” Our tendency is to try to keep mental problems in the closet. Here are two more quotes about the subject. From Bill Clinton: “Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” From Fred Rogers, who is not just Fred Rogers, but Mister Rogers, of PBS, documentary, and now biopic fame, courtesy of Tom Hanks: “Anything that is human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable is manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.”
Jesus treated people with mental illness the same way he treated everyone else: with understanding, acceptance, love, and compassion. But when he “cast out demons,” to use the first-century vernacular, he was playing with fire. People who had almost no comprehension of the nature of mental illness ascribed it to the devil. That is truly perverse. Jesus knew that’s what many of them thought, but he openly kept company with mentally ill people anyway.
Of all the incomes of all the specializations among medical doctors, psychiatrists have the lowest income. One of the main reasons for that is because people who are mentally ill are often incapable of holding down a job for very long, so they don’t have much money, and therefore they may not have health insurance. Even if they do, health insurance companies are often skeptical about claims regarding mental health. Back when Freudian psychoanalysts were popular, they could make a lot of money from people who had a lot of money to pay them. But Freud is now on the back shelf, and psychiatrists still do what they have always done; they listen to people, and talk to them, and prescribe new medications that they hope will help them. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t. Nevertheless, they steadfastly keep at it, and they are among the greatest unsung heroes in the ranks of medical professionals.
Jesus was a psychiatrist without a license. One of the people he helped the most was a woman whom we know as Mary Magdalene, Miriam of Magdala. Magdala was a village on the northwest shore of the Lake of the Galilee, about two or three miles or so from Capernaum. Both Mark and Luke tell us that Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary. Why “seven” we aren’t told, and why “demons” we aren’t told either, except that was the way it would have been perceived by both writers. Almost no one in the first century had any tools for conceptualizing mental illness, so nearly everyone said that the devil was its cause.
But why would Jesus go out of his way especially to befriend and help people who had mental problems? It was because so often they are people who are universally shunned and avoided and deliberately forgotten. They may be the ones who need more love and concern than anyone else, if only because they may be the most difficult to love and for whom to show concern.
Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus’ most devoted disciples. She is the only person recorded in all four of the Gospels to have gone to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. She was completely heartbroken when Jesus died, and she could not confront her grief anywhere but at his sepulcher.
There is a second-century Gospel called The Gospel of Mary which was kept out of the Christian Bible. It isn’t about the mother of Jesus; it’s about Mary Magdalene. One of the things it says about her is that Jesus married her. That’s the last idea the early Church wanted circulated about Jesus, so they banned that Gospel, along with several others which they also considered unorthodox. They were certainly right about that; all the Gnostic Gospels seem unorthodox, compared to the Four Gospels that did pass muster to make it into the New Testament.
The thing about Jesus, though, is that most of the religious authorities of his own day also considered him unorthodox. Jewish rabbis were supposed to be married, but the early Church insisted that Jesus never married. Maybe they figured it would create all kinds of theological and ecclesiastical problems regarding succession. If Jesus had had sons, would they have succeeded him in his ministry, like many rabbis’ sons, or like Jerry Falwell’s sons or Robert Schuller’s sons? It’s a problem, don’t you see. So the Gospel of Mary never made the ecclesiastical cut.
As it was, Jesus had more than enough problems with his own religious authorities in his own day. Most of them, whom the Gospels call “the scribes and Pharisees,” were mightily put off by Jesus and the company he kept. But of that, more in the next six Sundays.