Sunday 5 January 2020

By whose authority?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
5 January 2020

Mark 1.21-45

To listen to this sermon click here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/by-whose-authority


Having read the original trilogy some years ago,
            I’ve been very much enjoying the BBC adaptation
            of Philip Pullman’s superb book ‘His Dark Materials’.

If you’ve not come across these,
            they are set in an alternative universe which is a bit like our own,
            but with some significant differences.

Not least, people’s souls are visible
            - personified as various kinds of animals.

A lot of the story focuses around whether a person
            can exist in separation from their soul,
and this provides the opportunity for Pullman
            to address some profound questions about what it means to be human.

For a self-professed atheist, I have always found
            that Philip Pullman shows a deeply spiritual side to his writing.

One of the characters in the books is known as ‘The Authority’,
            and he is first encountered as the spiritual head, and focus of, the church.
For a while it looks as though The Authority
            is the His Dark Materials universe’s equivalent of God,
but eventually it becomes clear
            that The Authority is actually an imposter posing as God,
            exercising political power through the structures of the church that serves him.

The critique here of the dogmatic power-focused abuse
            of religion in our own world is obvious.

But what particularly interested me,
            as I was preparing to preach on our passage today from Mark’s gospel,
was the fact that Pullman named this character as ‘The Authority’.

I don’t know if you noticed it in the readings,
            but one of the key debates surrounding Jesus’ teaching and actions
            is the question of where he gets his authority.

We will find ourselves coming back to this again and again
            as we go through the gospel,
and it is clear that for Mark, the authority of Jesus is a central issue.

One of the enigmas of Mark’s gospel
            is that Jesus is frequently described as a preacher and teacher,
but as we read through the gospel
            we find that it gives us almost no record
            of what it was that Jesus actually said.

Matthew and Luke attempt to fix this, of course,
            by adding various blocks of teaching into Mark’s basic structure;
passages such as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew,
            or the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.
John’s gospel takes a different approach altogether,
            ignoring Mark’s gospel completely
            and offering a very different narrative of Jesus’ ministry and teaching.

But in Mark, which is going to be our gospel for this year,
            we get no real hint of what it is that Jesus teaches.
All we really know is that it is a ‘new message’
            which contrasts significantly with the preaching of the Scribes
            by having an authority that theirs lacked.

So, Jesus preaches with authority,
            but authority to do what?
You might well ask, given that we don’t get to hear Jesus
            preaching or teaching much at all in Mark’s gospel.

We would find some clues if we read a bit further on into the gospel,
            such as Jesus having the authority to forgive sins (2.10),
but in our reading for this morning
            we get our first glimpse of what will become
            the dominant aspect of Jesus’ teaching and message
                         - which is that he has authority over unclean spirits,
                        and can reverse their effects on the people they afflict.

In the first of the stories in our reading today,
            we encounter Jesus casting the unclean spirit
            out of the man in synagogue.

He has gone into the synagogue to teach,
            and the people in there are, we’re told,
                        ‘astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority,
                        and not as the scribes’ (1.22).

And then, after he has cast the spirit out of the man,
            Mark tells us that the people witnessing this
                        ‘were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another,
                        "What is this? A new teaching-- with authority!
                        He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." (1.27).

The contrast here with the Scribes is crucial
            - it’s their synagogue, but they have no authority in it.

After all, why is a man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue in the first place?
            Why haven’t they done anything about him before?
Either they should have cast out the unclean spirit themselves,
            or they should have cast the man out of the synagogue.
He simply shouldn’t have been there,
            because one of the rules of the priestly purity code,
                        that governed the Scribes’ behaviour,
            was that unclean people should be kept away
                        from the holy places such as the synagogue.

However, they had neither healed him,
            nor had they cast him out.
It seems that they had no authority
            to resolve this situation in either direction.

The Scribes are trapped in a system of their own making
            where the unclean person is perpetually present,
                        yet perpetually other-ed;
            always there, but not-there.

To understand this,
            I think it’s worth spending a few moments with the Scribes,
            getting to grips with the basis for their authority.

They were the priests of their world,
            maintaining the worship life of the synagogues.
And their authority derived, at least in their eyes,
            from their careful custodianship of the scriptures,
                        and the many additional texts
                        that detailed how the Hebrew Bible was to be interpreted and applied.

However, as is so often the case
            with those who look for a legalistic base to their authority,
they were the kind of leaders who had learned to play the populist game
            to ensure that no-one ever had the temerity
            to question their interpretation of their sacred texts.

They knew how to use the rhetoric of othering,
            and strategies of apart-ness,
to whip up the mob majority
            into supporting whatever proposal it was
            that they were offering to solve their society’s ills.

The true basis for the Scribes’ authority wasn’t the scriptures,
            it was their ability to manipulate and control the mob.
And of course, a mob-mandated solution is rarely good news.

Populist leaders who base their spurious claims to authority
            on appeals to the masses
are always bad news for minorities,
            for those who get to be othered, set apart and sent packing
                        as the easy and obvious scapegoats
                        for whatever it is that ails the majority.

We see this all too often in our world,
            in the populist dog-whistle rhetoric of politicians in our own world,
who tell us that if only we could deal with the… insert unpopular minority here
            then order and prosperity would be restored to society.

It almost doesn’t matter who is to blame,
            or the grounds on which they are scapegoated;
but ethnicity, education,
            culture, ability, and dependency are all popular targets.

The Scribes of our day are very good at defending
            their own right-ness according to the letter of the law,
all the while casting aspersions on those
            whom the law was never very good at defending in the first place.

This is where you end up,
            when you base your authority on popular appeals to the masses,
it’s true in our world,
            and it was true in the first century.

The Scribes ruled the roost, and defended their power
            with a carefully constructed system of scapegoating,
whereby they could blame anything that went wrong
            on those whom their law declared ‘unclean’.

And the people went along with it,
            because to take a stand against such a system
is to run the risk of being declared unclean yourself,
            and of becoming the next target for othering.

So, is it all the mob’s fault?
            Do people simply get the leaders they deserve?
            Do we???

Well, at one level, yes of course.
            Without popular support, populist leaders fail.

But at another level,
            the mob are as much a victim of the oppressive system
            as they are the sustainers of it.

So in Mark’s gospel,
            when Jesus starts teaching a new message,
                        with a different authority,
            which breaks the power of sin over people’s lives,
                        and which restores back to community
                        those who have been ostracised,
            the mob start to show an interest,
                        because it opens for them the possibility of their own emancipation.

And so we come to Jesus teaching in the synagogue
            and confronting the man with the unclean spirit.

Have you been wondering why the Scribes
            were keeping an unclean man in the synagogue?
They lacked the authority or motivation to declare him clean,
            but they hadn’t cast him out either…

The answer, it seems to me,
            was that he was useful to them.
He was their on-hand scapegoat.

At any moment, if anyone questioned them or their authority,
            they could point to him and say, ‘it’s all his fault - he’s unclean’.

This is the context in which Jesus casts out
            the unclean spirit from the man.
He does what the Scribes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
            He restores the man back to society
            by removing from him his uncleanness.

We don’t often talk much in our society
            about demons and spiritual warfare,
and in church life it is usually the more conservative and charismatic traditions
            that take such language seriously.

I remember as a teenager reading Frank Peretti’s novel This Present Darkness,
            with its vivid depiction of a world of demons and angels
                        just beyond our sight, fighting for the souls of humans,
            and thinking that I found this an unlikely explanation
                        of what Jesus was doing when he cast out spirits from people.

I think we can get a bit closer to the way
            in which this language functioned in the first century
with a phrase such as, ‘the demon drink’
            referring to the addiction of alcohol;
or if we speak of someone’s battles with poor mental health
            as them ‘battling their demons’;
or if we refer to the recent general election campaign
            as a ‘fight for the soul of the nation’.

In the first century, it was much more common than it is for us,
            to use the language of a spiritual battle
            to dramatise the conflicts of both soul and society.

But this isn’t to reduce such language to mere metaphor.
            It rather conjures a world-view, which we have mostly lost,
                        where the universe consists of two orders,
                        the normal and the demonic.

It’s not so much a battle between Good and Evil, between God and Satan,
            as it is a battle against the human tendency
                        to take God’s good creation and mess it up.

In the world of the first century,
            the casting out of the demonic was the restoration of normality.

And for the man with the unclean spirit in the synagogue,
            his life was anything but normal.
He couldn’t worship normally, he couldn’t work,
            or have a normal family life.
He was condemned by his having been declared unclean
            to the role of perpetual scapegoat in the synagogue.

And Jesus’ casting out of the unclean spirit,
            the dramatic declaration of him as clean,
restored him to normality,
            to his normal and rightful place in society.

The interaction between Jesus and the demon is interesting.

The demon speaks to Jesus, and says to him
            ‘I know who you are, the Holy One of God’ (1.24).
But Jesus silences him,
            and immediately casts the spirit out of the man.

Since the early 20th century scholars have pointed to this
            as the first instance of what they call Mark’s ‘Messianic Secret’
which is that if you read through Mark,
            Jesus seems repeatedly to silence those
                        who try to spill the beans on who he is,
            until we get to the point half way through
                        when Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah.

Whilst there may be something in this, as a rhetorical device,
            I think there is a more compelling reason
            why Jesus silences this demon.

I think it’s because the demon is trying to label Jesus
            in an attempt to take away his authority.

The phrase ‘Holy One of God’ is a priestly title,
            and if Jesus accepts this holiness
he is immediately sucked into the holiness system of the scribes
            which keeps them apart from the unclean and the outcasts.

The demon is trying to root Jesus’ authority in the holiness tradition
            of keeping things apart to keep them pure,
and if Jesus had accepted the title
            he would have been unable to exorcise the demon,
because he would have found himself co-opted
            into the very system he had come to overthrow.

This is how systems of oppression work
             - they co-opt and compromise, they flatter to deceive,
            they reward complicity and compliance.

The holiness system of the synagogues
            was built on a foundation of scapegoating the vulnerable,
and Jesus’ threat to that had to be silenced;
            so the demon tried to label Jesus as just another priestly scribe,
                        as compromised as the rest.

But Jesus is having none of it
            - he silences the demon and casts him out,
clearly demonstrating that his authority to act
            is very different from that of the scribes.

The mob turn to Jesus at this point,
            although of course they will turn on him later in the story.

But for now they are drawn to his teaching,
            which comes with the authority to forgive sins,
                        to cast out demons,
            and to declare clean those who have been labelled as unclean.

And of course, as they are drawn to the new and different authority of Jesus,
            the authority of the Scribes,
                        rooted in their control and manipulation of the mob,
            starts to erode.

And so the demons, which are dependent on system of the Scribes to exist,
            try to counter this power shift
by misrepresenting Jesus
            as just another bearer of priestly authority.

He resists, and silences them
            because the system they have existed within
            has no power to declare people clean, only unclean.
It creates demons rather than casting them out.

Jesus then does something interesting,
            and he heads out to the wilderness to pray.

Sometimes, this is preached as an example
            of Jesus going on some kind of spiritual retreat,
as if we should all head off into the wilderness
            to be silent and pray from time to time.

However, as we have seen in our sermons
            over the last couple of weeks
            (available on the podcast if you missed them - just saying),
the wilderness in Mark’s gospel
            is more than somewhere quiet
            to have a bit of a prayerful think.

It is the place where the prophets go
            to proclaim their messages of radical transformation.

Jesus repeatedly ends up in the countryside and the wilderness
            rather than the towns
because the true home of the radical
            is removed from, rather than enmeshed in,
                        the compromising complexities
                        of the commercialised urban centres of civilisation.

Jesus, you see, has in mind the radical transformation of society
            - it’s religion, politics, and economics,
and this can only be achieved
            if he keeps himself outside the system.

So just as he refuses the priestly title from the lips of the demon,
            he makes a point of physically removing himself
                        from the structures of his inherited religious tradition,
            by going from the priestly synagogue space,
                        into the prophetic place of the wilderness.

He has already gone into the wilderness for baptism at the hands of John,
            and into the wilderness to be tempted,
and in today’s reading he symbolically steps out of the synagogue
            and back to the wilderness,
removing himself from the violent sacrificial scapegoating structures
            of religion and society,
so that when he later steps back into the towns and the holy places
            he does so as one who come to transform them,
            not be co-opted into them.

So Jesus then, once the crowd have tracked him down,
            comes back into the synagogues of the area,
preaching and casting out demons,
            systematically restoring people to ‘normality’
                        by removing the causes of their exclusion,
            and silencing the demons from speaking their lies
                        which would undermine his power to act.

And it occurs to me that we live in a society
            which systematically excludes.
I don’t think our world is all that different
            from that of the scribes in the first century.

We too have leaders whose authority is mandated on populist politics,
            and on the othering of the weak and the vulnerable.

And I’m not just talking about national politics
            - we encounter this in church life too,
where leaders bolster their popularity
            by taking moral stances about who’s in and who’s out
            - dressing it up as a commendable concern for holiness.

And what happens to those who challenge this?
            Who argue for a kinder way, a more inclusive path?
They are themselves tainted and scapegoated,
            or they are compromised and co-opted.

And so we come to the final story in our reading this morning,
            the man with the skin complaint
who comes to Jesus not wanting to be healed,
            but to be made clean.

He has been othered by scribal purity regulations
            which have excluded him from society and faith.
He has become just another convenient scapegoat
            for the ills of his society.

It occurs to me that there are two possible ways
            that his request could have been answered.

Firstly, by healing his skin condition,
            or secondly by overturning the purity law
                        which meant that someone with a skin condition
                        was deemed unclean and unacceptable in the first place.

And this is where I start to get a bit uncomfortable.

Because when I think about the way in which the church
            has sometimes responded to people who are excluded
                        and othered and scapegoated
                        because of their gender or sexuality,
            it has done so by abusively using the language of healing.

The conversion therapy approach to minority sexuality
            has a long and profoundly un-Christ-like history
            of trying to change people away from their God-given natures.

So what are we to make of what Jesus does here,
            responding to the man’s desire to be made clean,
            by simply healing him?

Is this Jesus selling out on the project to transform society and faith,
            and simply giving the mob what they demand - yet another miracle.

I’m not so sure.
            Jesus is clearly furious.
The Greek for ‘sternly warning him’ in v.43
            is more like ‘growling with fury’ or ‘snorting with anger’.

And it seems to me that Jesus’ anger is directed not at the man,
            but at what the need to heal him represents
                        - at the system of exclusion
                        that created his uncleanness in the first place.

In his case, of course,
            the skin disease was not an essential characteristic of his person,
            and so healing him does no violence to his created nature.
Perhaps we should not push the analogy with conversion therapy too far.

But Jesus clearly only reluctantly addresses the man’s symptoms,
            whilst keeping his eye fixed firmly on the bigger battle
                        with the deeper sickness
                        of a society built on systems of exclusion and scapegoating.

So when we in our world encounter those who are othered,
            set apart, and scapegoated
- either within the church or within wider society,
            what should our response be?
            What is the Christ-like path that we can tread?

At a personal level, Jesus never does violence to the individual.
            He always seeks to raise a person up,
                        to remove the barriers to their exclusion,
            and to restore them to the deep blessings of normal life.
And we too are called to acts of mercy, of love, of inclusion.

But Jesus’ authority to do this was derived, as we have seen,
            from his own set-apartness,
            from his intentional resistance to the compromises and rewards
                        that complicity in the systems of power can bring.

And so we too need to guard our own hearts,
            to take ourselves into the wilderness from time to time
                        and discover again within our own selves
            the prophetic voice that calls to us from beyond.

And finally, we need to pay attention to ourselves.

What is it that we do that makes people unclean in our midst?
            Who would we exclude?
The lesson of the Scribes is that whenever anyone is declared unclean,
            the authority in play is not from God.

Divine authority always casts out uncleanness
            and restores people to community.
In God’s eyes, there is no one who is unclean,
            no one who is unwelcome in his kingdom,
            no one who deserves to be turned away. 


Today is Epiphany Sunday,

            when the church remembers the revelation of God to the gentiles,
as the wise men from the East came to visit the infant Jesus.

And here we discover the same story,
            rooted in the infancy story of Jesus,
which is that God will not be constrained by border and boundary,
            that God transcends ethnicity and social standing,
that God is for all,
            for me, for you, for each of us,
coming to us in love and peace
            to bring us to wholeness, as individuals and as a community.

And in a divided world, with nation turned against nation,
            we need this revelation of God
                        in and through the birth, life, and ministry of Jesus,
            made flesh in our time through those of us
                        who are the body of Christ in our world.
 

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