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