Hilton Head Island, SC – March 13, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 1:21-28; Mark 2:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” (Mark 1:27)
According to the Gospel of Mark, after Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, he was tempted for forty days in the wilderness by the devil. And after that Jesus returned to the region of the Galilee, where he had grown up in Nazareth. Mark tells us that he began preaching “the gospel of God.” Note: Mark does not say, “the gospel of Jesus Christ”; he says, “the gospel of God.” Immediately after that Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). In Mark, as in the other two Synoptic Gospels, “the kingdom of God” is the primary thrust of Jesus’ preaching. Please keep that always in the forefront of your mind.
The word “Gospel” means “Good News.” God sent Jesus into the world to preach good news to everyone, but especially to His chosen people, the Jews. A new reality had entered into human life by means of God’s newly proclaimed kingdom. But in order for the kingdom to take root in human hearts, humans needed to turn toward God and to turn away from self-centered behavior.
The next thing that Mark tells us is that Jesus found two brothers who were fishermen in the Galilean lake, Simon and Andrew. Simon, whom Jesus was later to call Peter (in Greek Petros, “The Rock,”) was to become the leader of the twelve apostles. That is important, because as we learn in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Mark (who in Acts is identified as “John Mark,”) became Peter’s right-hand man in his missionary journeys to Jewish synagogues around the eastern Mediterranean region. It was Peter who told Mark what Jesus had said and done. Since none of the four Gospel writers knew Jesus, the Gospel of Mark is the closest thing we have to an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus, because of events Mark describes come from the fertile memory of Simon Peter. The other Gospels are the records of people who knew people who knew people who knew people who knew Jesus.
These Lenten teaching sermons are all based on readings from Mark’s Gospel. The first reading for today tells about Jesus in Capernaum. Capernaum was and still is a village located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it is where Peter and Andrew lived. The text says that Jesus went into the synagogue (which is still there, although it’s a newer and much larger structure that the one Jesus was in). Mark writes, “And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit” (1:23). Mark frequently uses the word “immediately.” Maybe that was because it was a word commonly used by Peter when he told Mark these stories. Peter was an uneducated man who used the words of an uneducated man, and “immediately” was perhaps one of the words Peter most frequently used in telling Mark the story of Jesus, because Peter was himself drawn to the story’s “immediacy.”
Now we need to take particular note of the mentality of first-century Jewish peasants. They did not think like we think. Science was completely unknown by them. Nearly everyone in that day and age thought that unseen demons could cause people to become physically or mentally sick. Everyone in Capernaum knew this “man with an unclean spirit.” His behavior was peculiar. He “acted up,” and he may also have “acted out.” No one ever knew what he might say or do. But that day, when he saw Jesus, he said, “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!” (1:24-25)
Did the man actually say that? And why did he call Jesus “the Holy One of God”? How could the man know that? And if he knew it, why would he say it? We are led to think that his “unclean spirit” feared that Jesus was about to do something to drive out the factor that was causing the man’s mental derangement, which is, so we are told, what happened. Jesus said to “the demon,” “Be silent, and come out of him!” When Jesus said that, the man was convulsed, and instantly his mind was cleared of its confusion, perhaps for the first time in his life.
Next Mark wrote, “And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, ‘What is this? A new teaching! With authority Jesus commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him’.” It is easy to imagine Peter telling this to Mark, word for word, because Peter had been so impressed with what occurred in the Capernaum synagogue. For his whole life Peter had known this man who acted so strangely, and Jesus cured him of his malady “immediately.”
Commenting on this passage, William Barclay wrote that it doesn’t matter what modern people think about evil spirits; it’s what first-century people thought that matters, and they thought that all illness was caused either by sin or by unseen internal demonic forces; all illness. Ultimately, they believed, the devil was behind every negative factor in human life. In my opinion, that is a devilish notion, but it’s what they thought. For us that is too simple, too simplistic, but for them it explained things that otherwise couldn’t be explained.
The last episode in the first chapter of Mark tells about Jesus healing a man who had leprosy. When the man had been cleansed, and both he and Jesus knew that it had happened, Mark writes, “And (Jesus) sternly charged him, and sent him away at once, and said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone.’” Why? Why would he tell that to the man who was cured?
Please listen very carefully, Christian people. Jesus did not want to be known primarily as a healer. He wanted to be known as a teacher, a rabbi. He wanted to be known as a preacher. He wanted to be seen as a prophet, a spokesman on behalf of God. He could heal people, and he did heal people, but he did it only because he had compassion for them, and not because he wanted people to know he had the gift of healing. People in that time or in this time think that if anyone is miraculously healed, it is because God gives somebody the charismatic gift of healing, and that person did the healing. It is NOT so! Miraculous healing occurs because those who are healed believe they are healed! The healer does not accomplish the healing; those who are healed do it.
Again and again in Mark Jesus tells people he cured not to tell anyone it was he who did it. Again and again these people spilled the beans, and so Jesus is increasingly confronted by people who beg him to heal them. Healing depleted Jesus, and he knew he had far more important fish to fry. In the progression of the telling of each Gospel, Jesus less frequently insists that those he cures must not divulge how it happened, until by the fourth Gospel Jesus deliberately “proves” that he has divine powers by his miracles, and that “proves” that Jesus is divine. In Mark that is the last thing Jesus wants anyone to believe, but fifty years after Mark was written, John was writing that Jesus was not only the Messiah, (which Jesus never claimed to be in Mark), but that he was the Son of God, and in fact God Himself. “I and the Father are one,” John has Jesus say; “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
It is inconceivable to me that Jesus ever said that, or anything like that. Throughout the first century, New Testament Christians steadily elevated Jesus in their Christology, at the expense of their theology. It is understandable why they did that, but I am convinced Jesus would not approve of it. Jesus preached and taught the Gospel of God and God’s kingdom. Nonetheless, the early Church became more intent on preaching the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
In the first episode of the second chapter of Mark, Mark says that Jesus was “at home.” Capernaum was his home base during his three-year ministry in the Galilee. A large group of people had crowded into the house where Jesus lived to hear what he had to say. Some other people brought a man who was paralyzed to be healed by Jesus. Because there was no more room in the house for them, they took their friend up onto the roof, and they tore it apart. Judean homes had flat roofs which consisted of long poles stretched across from one side to the other, and then they were covered with wet clay which hardened in the sun, making the roof waterproof. So they lowered the man by ropes attached to his pallet down into the crowd beside Jesus. This took a great deal of what modern Jews call chutzpah, but Jesus didn’t seem to mind. They were a determined group, especially the paralyzed man himself, and Jesus was moved by that.
Mark, recalling the words of Peter, says of Jesus, “And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven’” (2:1). Mark notes that some religious scribes were also present. Long before there were printing presses, the only way that books of the Bible were printed was to have each separate book copied by hand. That was the scribes’ vocation, in addition to which they wrote commentaries on what they thought each biblical book meant.
When the scribes heard Jesus say that the man’s sins were forgiven, they went ballistic. “Why would Jesus say such a thing?” they asked themselves. “It is scandalous! Only God can forgive sins!” But you see, at that time people believed that besides evil spirits causing illness, sin also caused illness, which is a different but related first-century way of explaining the origin of illness. In their minds, all illness was devilish. They didn’t know about bacteria or viruses or metabolic imbalances, and it was universally assumed that anybody who was sick was sick because of their sins. It added insult to injury, but it was their concept for explaining medical anomalies.
From our standpoint, Jesus told the man that his sins were forgiven because he knew that if the man was convinced his sins were forgiven, he would be cured of his paralysis. But the scribes were incensed because Jesus told him that. They thought Jesus had no authority to forgive sins. Only God can forgive sins, the scribes insisted. So, to answer their objection, Jesus asked them, “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet, and walk?’” Then, with even more drama, Jesus said to the scribes, “But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” Jesus said to the disabled man, “I say to you, ‘Rise, take up your pallet, and go home’” --- and that is what the man did. He who had been unable for years to walk, walked! Assuming that his sins had been forgiven, he stood up, and walked away! A new teaching! A completely new understanding of how, if someone believes his sins are forgiven, his disability leaves him!
Sin can cause illness. Even peccadillos, little sins, can cause illness. Knowing that sins have been forgiven can overcome illnesses. Jesus had the ability to yoke those two truths to make illness disappear.
The New York Times has a new opinion writer named Tish Harrison Warren. She is an American Anglican priest. Last Monday she wrote what I think was a brilliant essay about the nature of sin. Telling about how sneaky sin is, she described how it works within her. She wrote, “It was the ways I would casually manipulate people to get my way. It was that part of me that could not rejoice in a friend’s big award or accomplishment, even as some other part told her, ‘Congratulations!’.” She quoted the English author Francis Spufford who says sin is “the human propensity to mess things up.” She quoted Martin Marty, the American church historian, who said, “We live in a culture where everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven.”
People like us, who are basically law-abiding folks who never commit murder or rob banks or embezzle millions of dollars, don’t think we sin much. We think that because we don’t commit those kinds of sins. We sin right along with the “worst of sinners,” but we just don’t commit what we assume are the biggest kinds of sins. Therefore to us everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven, because we imagine that we don’t need forgiveness.
There are so many references in all four Gospels to healing narratives that we should acknowledge that Jesus did have the power to cure people of their maladies by convincing them that their sins were forgiven. There truly are people who have the power to heal the sick, and Jesus was one of them. However, for healing to succeed, those who are made well need to trust that the healer has a God-given gift. Thus the Capernaum paralytic was enabled to walk when Jesus told him to walk.
But there is more to this narrative than just that. Note that in Mark Jesus did not refer to himself as the Messiah or as the Son of God or as God Incarnate; he calls himself “the Son of man.” That is nearly always the way Jesus refers to himself in the Gospel of Mark --- as “the Son of man.” In the first-written Gospel, Jesus makes no messianic or other such claims for himself; he merely calls himself the Son of man. It is a term that is used dozens of times in the prophecy of Daniel, the last book in the Old Testament to be written. Apparently Daniel was very influential in the thinking of Jesus, and he, like Daniel, called himself “the Son of man.” It means, perhaps, a human being as God intended all humans to be, a person as God meant for each of us to be. Jesus is the example God wants all of us to exemplify, and we can do that, if we devote ourselves to becoming that type of person.
Please listen again very closely. Jesus of Nazareth was a unique son of God, not mainly because of what he DID, but because of what he SAID. It wasn’t miracles of healing which made him God’s Messiah. It was what he said about the kingdom of God which made him God’s Messiah. Did Jesus raise the son of the widow of Nain from the dead (Luke, chapter 7)? Did he raise Lazarus from the dead (John, chapter 11)? Perhaps. Did he preach the kingdom of God? Did he explain how God can enter into the world and into our hearts in new and powerful ways? Did he ever!!!
But did he really? What do you believe about that?