NewCreation

Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our Gospel today from Saint Mark is a direct continuation of the Gospel from last Sunday. Last Sunday, if you remember, Jesus has chosen his two sets of brothers as disciples, one who are fishing, the others who were preparing their nets, and now he moves to Capernaum and starts going to the synagogue. What's Capernaum? Capernaum is a small seaside town beside the lake. At the time, it probably had around a thousand people — not huge. It did have a Roman centurion; some elements of it are known, but it seems to have been a small local, a local provincial centre. And Jesus seems to have had some — or his disciples seem to have had some — family connections there, since, as we know, Peter's mother-in-law lived there. So he comes into the town and he goes into the synagogue. This is straight away — Mark always has something very quick happening. Now that Jesus has gone through his testing in the wilderness, everything now is very quick; things are coming in very quickly. He comes into the synagogue teaching, and they were all amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one having authority, and not like their scribes. Okay, well what does "as one having authority" mean? It's an odd word, because it doesn't appear very often in the Hebrew Bible at all, this Greek word. And we tend to think of authority in two ways. Someone speaks with authority, meaning someone has appointed them — they've said, "I hereby name you to go and talk with that; you are my authorized agent." Or we have a more charismatic sense of authority: someone speaks with a certain personal gravitas, an interior quality that makes you think they're worth taking seriously. That's the kind of thing we usually mean when we talk about someone who speaks with authority — he knows what they're talking about, that sort of thing. Okay, well here this is where the passage from Deuteronomy, which is our first reading, is very helpful, because authority seems to mean actually something more than that in this sphere. When someone teaches with authority, we see what Moses prophesied. Moses prophesied that after him would come another prophet who would speak the words of the Lord truly, and he reminds people that when God had wanted to speak to them they hadn't wanted to hear — they said it was so frightening that they said to Moses, "No, you go and listen, write it down for us, and then come and tell us." In other words — and Moses says, "Well, I'm going to send you" — the Lord says he will send another prophet whose own words will speak. In other words, this is the words of the Lord. In the Deuteronomy passage which we have, we're then told: any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak, that prophet shall die. And then here are a couple of verses that we don't have in our first reading today, but which are very important: "You may say to yourself, how can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken? If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be frightened by it." Now here's what's important about this. We're not talking about guesswork here about who's got the right telephone line to the Most High. No, behind this is the notion that the word of the Lord is creative. It's the creator who speaks, and if the Lord says something, that is part of bringing into being. The creator speaks reality into being by his word. So if a prophet is speaking the word of the Lord, that thing will be. He's not talking about, if you like, future prestidigitation about lottery numbers or things like that. He's talking about someone whose word is part of the bringing into being of what is. That's the sense of authority that we're talking about here. So when people perceive that the one who is speaking is someone who is to do with the bringing into being of what is, they know that something different is amongst them. And that's going to be the key question. Is Jesus the one who is bringing all things into being? That's going to be the question throughout. And here we have, if you like, this first sense of something quite shocking about the one coming in. So here he is, he's come in to the synagogue and he's teaching them, and then we have this very odd phenomenon. And straight away — so yet again this is very quick, very emergent — "there was in the synagogue a man in an unclean spirit." And this is a very odd phrase. It doesn't say a man who has an unclean spirit; it's a man in an unclean spirit — not that the unclean spirit was in him, but that he was in the unclean spirit, the impure spirit. And this is very odd. Admittedly, the synagogue wasn't a Temple, so it wasn't as though there was the holy place which must be kept clean, protected, separated from all impurity. Rather, the synagogue was a meeting place, a place where the word was heard and discussed, the place of the coming together. Even so, it's very odd that in the synagogue there should be someone in an impure spirit. And the question is reasonable enough: what were the scribes doing about this? How were the scribes able to cope with this? What was going on? Let's just remember what's going on in the teaching about purity and impurity. This comes in the book of Leviticus, after the first atonement sacrifice which Aaron instituted when his priesthood was instituted. The presence of the Lord came down in such a frightening and terrifying way that it actually killed a couple of Aaron's own sons, who got the wrong fire in their censers and were killed. And Moses and Aaron, reasonably enough, were a bit shocked by this. And then the Lord said to Aaron: "Now you've got to learn how to separate, and teach people how to separate, between the holy and the profane, between the pure and the impure." So four different categories. But these were the categories which enabled people not to be destroyed by the holiness of God, essentially to have a peaceful life without running the risk of being destroyed by God. So that was, if you like, the work of the priests: teaching people to distinguish things. So something has gone wrong in a synagogue where the right sort of distinctions have not been made, and someone is there with an impure spirit. We'll see a little hint of what the impure spirit is about. So the man who has the impure spirit cries out, saying: "What is it between us and you, Jesus the Nazarene? Have you come to destroy us?" So first of all it speaks in the plural. This is a standard feature of spirits — evil spirits, impure spirits — that they are contagious elements of other people's shared life. Something about this particular person's weakness has been infected by something that's going around, so that they have become, if you like, a bearer of all the awfulness that is around. So there's this plurality. But then in Jesus's presence, who is there, this person speaks in the singular, which suggests that something new is coming out: "I know who you are — the Holy One of God." Now this is a tremendously shocking thing to say. The Holy One of God is God, is God himself. God dwells in the Holy of Holies, the one from whom all sorts of impurities must be kept at a distance, because he threatens to destroy. The presence of the most Holy One is a tremendously dangerous presence, as the story from Leviticus can tell. So that the Holy One of God be present in the synagogue should be mega-terrifying. I mean, this is really quite a shocking thing to say — much more shocking than it seems. And yet this is what's going on here. The understanding, ever since John baptized Jesus and said that Jesus would baptize in the Holy Spirit, has been that the Holy One of God is coming in — and the Holy One of God is going to come in with the view not to abolish the purity code, but to undo the ultimate source of all impurity, which is death. The whole of the Levitical system is designed to keep death away from the Holy One. The utter aliveness of God has to be kept separate from anything that either has to do with, or looks like, death. And of course the Holy One of God will go up to his death on the cross, thus finally detoxifying — assuming death into himself. and making it possible for us no longer to be run by death and its fear and all its consequences. But the route into that, which is what's starting here, is that the Holy One of God is coming in, until finally he'll be recognized — and it is death on the cross — as truly, "This was the Son of God," meaning the high priest incarnate, the incarnation of God, God himself. So this is the beginning of the recognition of that, but the recognition has come, if you like, far too violently and far too soon: "I know who you are, the Holy One of God." So not only teaching, the one who's bringing something in, but the one who is actually going to enact the great sacrifice, the Holy One of God himself. So Jesus rebukes him, saying: "Be muzzled." This is a strong — this is a strong form, and interestingly it's the form that's used not to talk to a human. When it says that you should not muzzle the oxen, this is the word that's used — not muzzling the oxen. It's silencing in a muzzling sense, in a less-than-human sense. When Jesus calms the water, he says, "Peace, be still, peace, be silent" — this is the verb that's used of the sea. In other words, it's used of animals or forces. It's a very, very strong word. And: "Come out of him." So this spirit of impurity produces a huge alteration of this poor man's body and soul, shouting with a great voice, comes out of him. And the people are amazed, and quite rightly, because they've just seen something that again has to do with Moses. Moses — this is the beginning of the book of Exodus — is told by the Lord to go and take the people out of Egypt. He says, "I'm not very eloquent, I don't think I've got the right vocal qualities to do this, you need to send someone else." Then the Lord says to him, "Who gives speech to mortals, who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind — is it not I, the Lord?" In other words, Jesus has actually enacted the Lord speaking to Moses. So at the very beginning of Jesus's ministry we have him coming in, enacting the new word, the new teaching, the Creator speaking, and the power that is the power of the Most High to remove sources of impurity. That's what's going to be acted out. And we get the two responses to it: the people being amazed and curious about what this is, and the evil spirit having too quick an idea of what it is, not yet being ready to see the Holy One of God fulfilling his role — so as actually then to destroy all sources of impurity and enable death itself to be conquered, which is going to be the route that he follows.