What do you have to do with me?

In many ways, today’s Gospel passage is the first scene in Jesus’ ministry.  This is the action onto which the camera zooms in after the Star Wars-like words have scrolled across the screen, setting the scene.  Or, if you will, this is the big Apple Computers product launch rally.  Or, this is Jesus’ debutante coming out ball.  Whatever metaphor you choose, the Gospel action proper begins here and now. 

Before this scene, Jesus has been baptized by John, tempted in the desert by Satan, and called to him his band of disciples.  In other words, everything has been preparatory.  Now, though, Jesus has found his way to Capernaum, the largest and arguably most important town on the Sea of Galilee.[i]  Jesus has entered the city and gone straight to the synagogue, the town’s primary locus of both civic and religious life.  And there, Jeus stands up and begins to preach. 

Everything about it freaks people out: Who Jesus is, what he says, and the way he says it.  Some translations read that the congregation is “amazed;” other translations say “astounded.”  But we misinterpret if we take this to mean they think Jesus is awesome.  Perhaps a better translation would be that the people are slack-jawed. 

Nobody says a word, except one guy.  If you have a study bible, there may be heading over this story saying, “Jesus exorcises his first demon,” and the NRSV reads at verse 23, “there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.”  The preposition “with” surely makes it seem as if the spirit is something separate from the man—like a demon—that resides within him alongside his own spirit.  But scholar David Bentley Hart’s more faithful translation of the original Greek reads, “there was within the synagogue a man in an impure spirit.”[ii]  That’s a distinction with a difference.  That translation reads less like a demon possessing this man than that the man’s own spirit is impure.  His thoughts, priorities, and motivations are wrong.  His conscience is twisted.  Whatever is impure is him, not some outside force controlling him.

Let me pause here and tell you a quick anecdote.  You’ll know by now that I’m an extrovert.  I like to talk, joke, backslap, and the volume of my voice generally carries.  I was once in a study group with some colleagues in which everyone patiently waited their turn, was respectful when others spoke, and did not fill important moments of silence with noise.  One day I said to my closest friend in the group, “I love this group.  There’s not a blowhard among us.” My friend responded, “Barkley, if you can’t identify the blowhard, it might be you!”

Maybe so.  Related to today’s Gospel, the man in an impure spirit asks Jesus, “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?”  Usually, when this passage is characterized as talking about a man possessed, the “us” is assumed to refer to the man and his demon.  But if we privilege David Bentley Hart’s translation and consider that this is not a man possessed with a demon, not two entities speaking with one voice, but rather a man with a twisted and distressed soul, then who is “us”?  Who is this man referring to besides himself when he asks, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

There’s only one possibility.  If you can’t figure out who it is Jesus has come to critique, indict, call to change…maybe it’s you!  The “us” to whom the man in an impure spirit refers is himself and his fellow congregants, all those slack-jawed worshipers who are likely wondering the same thing of Jesus.  In truth, their spirits are likely as twisted, their consciences as compromised, as the man who speaks.  Everybody in that synagogue—that church—wonders, “What has this guy Jesus got to do with us?  Is he here to tear down everything we assume?  Is he here to call us into question?  Are we in danger in his presence?”  That’s ironic, isn’t it?  The church is supposed to be the very crucible for the Gospel.  But is it?

The Rector’s Book Club is reading Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion this month, and the book is all about the ways in which the church often serves as an impediment to the very Gospel it should embrace.  Instead of being receptive to the Gospel’s life-altering message, Douthat argues, churches often become bastions of the worldviews their congregants bring to church with them. 

“Oh yes,” we may immediately react, “Those other churches do that all the time.”  But Douthat points out that this is an equal opportunity pursuit, operative on both ends of the theological spectrum and everywhere in-between, in multiple and varied ways.

Non-denominational churches tend, Douthat says, increasingly to embrace a “prosperity gospel,” in which God’s blessing is believed to be of the most literally materialistic sort.  If you have enough faith, so it goes, God will provide you with a better job, or bigger portfolio, or a nicer house or car.  This is the Gospel of such television personalities as Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, or Joel Osteen, who has actually said to his enormous flock, “You need a bigger vision, a bolder prayer: ‘God, I’m asking to be debt-free—my home, my car, my business, my credit cards…Somewhere in your path there’s promotion, increase, good breaks, divine connections.”[iii]  For Christians whose deepest desire is upward mobility or material ease, the prosperity gospel renders Jesus a first-century Peter Drucker.

The doppelganger of the prosperity gospel is found one Barnes & Noble aisle over.  It exalts not material success, but the self as the center of all concern.  This worldview seeks not transformation of the self or service of the self to others, but acceptance and embrace of the self exactly as it is found.  It is the gospel of “focusing on me.”  This is the Gospel according to Oprah Winfrey, or Elizabeth Gilbert, who actually writes in her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love that when she hears the voice of God, “It [is] merely my own voice, speaking from my own inner self.”[iv]

Yet other Christians bring into the church a political worldview and then want the church to serve as the justifier of their ideological values and convictions.  The church becomes a front for civic religion, a muscular Christianity more about the American flag than the altar and cross, where beliefs are claimed as Gospel whether or not they grow from the words and actions of Jesus.

And finally there is, in the name of enlightened reason, the worldview that refuses even to admit the possibility that Jesus is who the Gospels and Paul claim him to be.  Jesus may be a teacher of sublime ethics, a mystic, even a healer of some unusual sort, but the incarnate Son of God?  The redeemer of humanity?  The savior of the world?  That’s all so passe.  Surely, we’re beyond that.

Ross Douthat does not only say that each of these very different versions of church is mistaken; he boldly calls them heresies.  Douthat’s book is offensive, in that, at least a bit and on some level, it offends virtually every kind of modern American Christian.  (Heck, it offended me more than once.)  But that’s his point: Jesus is offensive. 

To the materially striving prosperity Christian, Jesus says strive first for the kingdom of God and tend to the least of these. 

To the inwardly-focused Christian who hears God as an echo of one’s own desires for the self, Jesus says that we are, each of us, broken in the pain we do to one another and to ourselves.  It is not enough to accept who we are; God wants us to become who God calls us to be.  God wants to redeem you and redeem me.

To the political Christian, Jesus says do not make a religious idol out of an ideology.  Do not confuse power or winning for God’s favor.  All rulers, dominions, and powers will pass away.  Look not to them, but to God’s grace.  Be in all things agents of love and grace, not political partisans.

To the sophisticated Christian who would domesticate Jesus into a wise but mere human being, Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.,”[v] and gazing upon this Jesus, the Apostle Thomas cries out, “My Lord and my God!”[vi] 

What worldview did the man who speaks to Jesus in Mark’s Gospel bring to church with him this day?  One of these? Some other?  What is the twistedness in his spirit?  What about all those other congregants?  How have they misunderstood God and the Gospel?  They must all wonder, as they stare at Jesus slack-jawed, “What have you to do with us?  Have you come to destroy us?”

In a manner of speaking, yes.  Jesus intends to disrupt and destroy all our worldviews.  And it hurts.  (The man in the impure spirit today shouts and convulses as Jesus redeems him.[vii])  But that, and nowhere else, is where redemption must begin, as Mark’s very Gospel begins today.  We must be open to the possibility that through Jesus the very God speaks to us, sharing the Way to life abundant.  And we must grant that Jesus’ Way is not the way of material striving, or self-actualization, or party politics, or domesticated faith.  Jesus’ Way is one that admits our fragility and flaws, that seeks redemption in us and for the world, that hopes the answer to the question, “What do you want from us, Jesus of Nazareth?” is “Everything.”  Then, in our lives, the Gospel begins. 

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[i] First-century Capernaum had fifteen hundred residents.  By comparison, Nazareth had somewhere between one hundred-fifty and three hundred.  

[ii] See David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation, 64.

[iii] Douthat, Ross.  Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, 209.

[iv] Ibid, 212

[v] Revelation 22:13

[vi] John 20:28

[vii] Mark 1:26

Found

 Last summer when Jill and I were in Iceland, our very Viking-like guide, Stefán, carried on and on about Icelandic chocolate treats.  They were the best in the world, Stefán repeatedly claimed, and at one stop he purchased a bag of chocolates for us to try.  They looked like little mini Twix bars, except, truly, the chocolate was extra creamy and succulent.  My mouth started to water, and Jill and I popped a chocolate into our mouths with a smile and bit down.  At the same instant, the smiles on our faces shifted, first to confusion and then to revulsion.  Jill gagged and spit her candy into her hand.  I choked mine down.  What we’d learned is that the secret ingredient, the special something in the middle of Icelandic chocolate, is a thick plug of the densest, most potent, home-grown black licorice imaginable.  Now, you may enjoy licorice.  I do not.  Neither do many others.  I perused the internet for descriptions of the taste of black licorice; here’s what I found: In answer to the question, “What does licorice taste like?” folks responded, “Like chewy black death,” “a mouthful of carpenter ants,” and “the most delicious poison you’ll ever try.”[i]  Icelandic licorice was infinitely more putridly-strong than anything I’ve encountered here.  And it was juxtaposed with creamy milk chocolate.  It was horrific, and it coined a new phrase that Jill and I thereafter giggled under our breath: “Can anything good come out of Iceland?”

This is the phrase Nathanael utters when his friend Philip approaches him and shares with Nathanael the news that he has encountered Jesus.  Nathanael scoffs, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  What’s this reaction all about? 

First of all, it’s worth noting (as we learn much later in John’s Gospel[ii]) that Nathanael is from Cana in Galilee, the next village over from Nazareth.  Whereas Cana was a long-established town, Nazareth was not.  Nazareth was a new bend in the road, settled by folks from the South of the country with tax incentives from King Herod.  Nazarenes were poor and—even more importantly—they weren’t from around there.  We can imagine how people from the surrounding towns might look upon them.  We all understand civic rivalry and the one-upmanship (sometimes light-hearted, sometimes severe) that comes with it.  It’s not unlike how the sophisticated folks from Paragould and Jonesboro in my native part of the state might scoffingly look upon people from the little the bend in the road community halfway between our burgs: “Can anything good come out of Goobertown?”

But there’s something else going on here when Nathanael says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I believe.  In twenty years of priesthood and fifty-one years of life, I’ve observed a thing or two about human behavior.  And perhaps the most consistent element is that virtually every expression of disdain for another person is truly, deep down in the recesses of one’s soul, disdain for oneself.  Whether through simmering cynicism that belittles others with biting jokes and sneering ridicule, or else through more explosive lashing out that sometimes does violence in households and the community, the deep, interior motive is virtually always some subconscious self-loathing. 

So many of us don’t like ourselves.  And though we deflect by saying of the other, “How can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  what we really fear is, “How can anything good come out of me?”  We may present to the world like premium chocolate, but we suspect that in our core we are that plug of pungent licorice. 

This is what’s going on in John’s Gospel this morning.  This is what’s behind Nathanael’s reaction.  And how does Jesus respond?  Though we refer to these biblical passages where Jesus first encounters his disciples as “call stories,” John doesn’t actually use that term.  We see in verse forty-three today that Jesus doesn’t call Philip, as if beckoning Philip from afar; Jesus finds him.[iii]  And Jesus finds Nathanael.  Jesus seeks and approaches these men, and Jesus sees through to the very heart of them, as Jesus does all people.  He tells Nathanael who Nathanael is in Jesus’ eyes.  And only after Jesus has found these two does he invite them to follow.

This is a variation on the same theme we see in the Old Testament this morning, except here the subject is not a weather worn Galilean like Nathaneal but Samuel, a child committed to service in the Shiloh temple.  It’s important to note that in the social economy of the ancient world, children were not regarded as full persons.  (In our own society so centered on children, this may seem foreign, but lest we forget, scarcely a century ago at the height of the industrial revolution, children as young as eight or ten were used and used up in factories and coal mines like cogs in a wheel with no regard for their well-being.[iv]  Children as invaluable is a most recent phenomenon in human history.) 

The child Samuel is what biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan would call “a nuisance and a nobody.”[v]  Samuel is someone who doesn’t register, doesn’t count, isn’t worth considering.  Many of us know what that feels like, too.  In Samuel’s young life, we hope that he hasn’t yet learned self-loathing like Nathaneal, but undoubtedly he already detects that his existence doesn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.  And yet, not once, not twice, but three times and four God finds Samuel.  God seeks out and approaches not Eli the judge and priest, but the one who is to society a nuisance and a nobody.  God finds Samuel.

Perhaps nowhere recently have the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness been examined more effectively than in the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen.  One character so dislikes himself that he disdains and lashes out at all others.  Another experiences himself as completely unseen and insignificant.  The play captures the dual alienation that marks our human experience in a decidedly contemporary way.  And the redemption song that punctuates Dear Evan Hansen is titled “You Will Be Found.”  It begins somberly, “Have you ever felt like nobody was there?  Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?  Have you ever felt like you could disappear?  Like you could fall, and no one would hear?”  The cast then sings out in hope, “Even when the dark comes crashing through; When you need a friend to carry you; And when you’re broken on the ground, you will be found!  So let the sun come streaming in; because you’ll reach up and rise again.  Lift your head and look around.  You will be found!”

That is the very heart of the Good News.  Like Philip, Nathanael, and Samuel, by Jesus we are found.  Jesus finds us, and approaches us, and sees into our souls.  Deflection fails; pretense sheds; attempts to hide who we fear we are falter.  By Jesus, we are found.

You’ve heard me mention my grandmother, Boo, who gifted me with so much in my life.  Of all Boo’s gifts, the most important was that when she looked at me, Boo saw not who I was in that moment or season of my life, and certainly not the vision I had of myself, but the version of me that God created me to be.  She saw in me someone worthy of love, someone of infinite value, someone who just might be able to follow Jesus.  And when Boo looked at me, I believed her.

That is how Jesus finds Philip and Nathanael today.  That is how God finds Samuel.  That is how Christ finds us.  Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  Can anything good come from you and me?  Jesus looks upon us and knows exactly who we have been, and who we are, and who God creates us to be.  And Jesus finds us infinitely valuable; and loveable; and he calls us to come and see what life can be like if we will but follow.  Lift your head and look around.  You are found! 

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[i] https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-describe-the-taste-of-black-licorice

[ii] John 21:2

[iii] See Frederick Dale Bruner’s The Gospel of John: A Commentary, pg. 107.

[iv] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm#:~:text

[v] See John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Chapter 3, “A Kingdom of Nuisances and Nobodies.”