Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
5 January 2020
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,
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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