“Jesus – Scourge of Demons”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Reading: Mark 1:21-45
Today’s passage actually has six different stories in it. It comes to about 500 words. I tried to narrow it down by underlining the words I had to mention today. Think of these phrases: “as one with authority.” You could spend a lifetime on that. Here are my favourite words: “everyone is searching for you.” Everyone. You could spend all the lifetimes there are on those five English words. But I underlined the words we couldn’t possibly skip today and came to about 80. Still too many.
The Revised Common Lectionary divvies out passages for mainline Protestant and Catholic churches over three years. I preached through it about three times over a decade and mostly don’t now. But I can see why the lectionary apportions these stories one by one. Here: preach this story today, that one next week, not all six at once, that’d be a terrible idea.
Maybe we could settle on one word to focus on. How about this one?
Demon.
I believe I have your attention now.
Our language has cliches about the devil. “The devil made me do it” comes from a legal case in Connecticut in the 1980s, and it’s spurred a slough of terrible horror films. That’s the most transparently idiotic of the cliches. “The devil is in the details.” Now that one’s more interesting—lawyers and real estate agents use it a lot. According to thorough research in dusty libraries conducted in obscure languages (that is, Wikipedia), it comes from the Renaissance belief that God is in the details.
You may know the famous wedding portrait from London’s national gallery. Jan van Eyck painted it in 1434. The mirror behind the couple reflects the image back to the viewer. Astonishing. And there are even more miniature paintings within that painting within a painting. Because the details are where God is. Can you believe I once managed to fly to London, go to that gallery, spend hours, and miss that painting? Great job, genius. A friend of mine said, go back to the airport, fly over there again, you make that right, right now.
Christians, like Jews and Muslims, believe that God is in the details because God loves creation. It was the great atheist, Frederick Nietzsche, who turned the saying around to say the devil is in the details. And he’s right too, isn’t he? Especially when it comes to negotiating contracts. I don’t think there are contracts in heaven.
I digress.
“Give the devil his due” has a much more interesting theological provenance: the devil is a creature made by God like the rest of us. A fallen creature, a corrupted angel, the greatest of the angels some say. But as a teacher of mine used to say, “if you grab the devil by the scruff of his neck and look at the label on the uniform it says, ‘property of the triune God’.”
The devil rages because he is not his own master. And he knows it. Most of us think we are our own masters, too. We think that’s normal, praiseworthy even. It is no such thing. Every created thing belongs to God. The demons know this. And hate it. Demons know all the correct data about God. And they rage against it. Knowing things is not what it means to be Christian. Trusting God, and loving God and neighbour and enemy and stranger: that’s what it means to be Christian.
When I speak of angels and demons, I do so, guided by Karl Barth, our greatest theologian of the 20th century. Barth doesn’t talk very much about demons. When he does, he dismisses them crossly. But he can talk about angels all day. And always cheerfully. Demons: stern quick dismissal. Angels: lengthy cheerful dissertation. GK Chesterton, said “angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly.” Demons, I guess, are heavy, and demand seriousness.
So, Barth:
The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous one. As they laugh, they say to one another, 'Look! Here he comes now with his little red wagon full of volumes of the Dogmatics!'
And they laugh about the men who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the Angels laugh.
In the ancient Christian literature from the desert, demons are sort of stupid and self-important, and best defeated by mockery, or even better, humility. Demons can’t stand humility. So, one early desert monk was asked by a demon, “who are the sheep and who are the goats?” That is, who’s bound for heaven, and who for the place with the people with the pointy sticks? And the monk responds, “The goats are people like me. Who the sheep are? God alone knows.” The demon rages and flees, shrieking, “I am driven out by your humility.”
But maybe mockery is not all that cutting edge in our culture. We already don’t take demons seriously in relatively affluent North Atlantic cultures like Canada or Britain. We’re used to mocking everything. Or at least everything pretentious and self-important. I bet the funniest sendups of tomorrow’s presidential inauguration will come from the UK. Here in Canada, we’re too close, so it’s not particularly funny. The American talk shows are not renowned for their political balance. They’ll be funny, but with threads of fear and sorrow. Maybe Britain is far enough away to laugh out loud? A friend from London says there is no sympathy with Vladimir Putin in that country as there seems to be in the US, no footsie with isolationism or surrendering Ukraine. Brits remember bleeding in two world wars, as do we in Canada. In parts of the US, where the oldest building you ever see might be younger than you are, the second Iraq War seems like a long time ago. It was 2003-2011.
Let me give you an example that’s between funny and frightening. Philip Jenkins, world renowned scholar, tells this story. It’s of a mission group in a remote part of south-central Africa, somewhere near the Congo River. The church group is led by a pastor with a degree from Harvard Divinity School: the oldest seminary in North America, founded by Puritans, but long since Unitarian, very suspicious of anything supernatural. But they like serving poor people. So, they arrive at their host village and a party begins. The unitarians join in, best that white people with fancy degrees can. Finally, one asks ‘why all this fuss?’ Well, normally our local exorcist visits once a week, but he couldn’t come today so God sent you to lead our exorcisms. They taught you how to do a proper exorcism at Harvard Divinity School, right?
Now I think that’s hilarious: I’ve been on trips with Haitians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Indonesians, Ugandans, South Sudanese, Filipinos, Kenyans, where you can be asked to preach with five minutes’ warning. I go with a sermon in my back pocket now. But an exorcism on the spot? No prep? Uh, how’s your cell service out here? Bad? Can I get a minute with that satellite phone?
But Jenkins’ story probably wouldn’t be funny for the folks in the village. For them, evil is very real. And not just in disease, they know about modern medicine, they know the midwives might have to call a doctor and life or death can hinge on travel times from bigger towns. They know about substance abuse, “they have their demons,” as we say too. They know about education because they want some for their kids, though that might mean the children will never live in the village again. And they think there’s more evil out there than can be accounted for scientifically. Now again, be careful: they’ve seen our bad films too!
I’ve done two exorcisms that I’m aware of. One, a parishioner at a church I served got to his rural roadside business one morning and found that a total stranger had taken their life there on his property. Someone in despair with no connection to his place drove there to die alone. A few weeks later he came to me and said, “I don’t even know what I’m asking you for, but can you just come over?” I did. We prayed on the spot. And I hope both the poor suicide and my poor friend found some peace.
Another church I served, we had a new family seeing things in a house they’d bought. What kinds of things?
I don’t know, it sounds crazy.
Try me, I’m pretty open-minded.
Well, we can’t really describe it. But our kid is seeing worse things.
So, I summon the interns, we all stuff ourselves in robes, grab candlesticks and crosses and baptismal fonts and water, we pray in every room in the house, sing hymns, anoint everything with oil, flick water everywhere.
They call back: how’s it going?
Well, it's 90 percent better.
Hey, 90 percent! That’s an A! Even with grade inflation.
Then they up and move away and I never hear from them again. Maybe we forgot the garlic? And if that story shows up in any movie, this church gets a cut!
But see, there I go again making fun. Because you know who else takes people seriously when they say they’re troubled by demons? Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and Saviour, Son of God, and as human as we are. Roman Catholic archdioceses have exorcists. They don’t talk about it too loudly, because it sounds crazy. Anglicans do too. Don’t tell anyone. Our culture here in this great city is what Jesse Jackson calls a stew pot. Not a melting pot. We don’t homogenize. We are different together. That’s good, in some ways. And some of you—yes, you— have told me stories that keep me up at night.
Philip Jenkins again points out how the strangest stories are usually FOAF tales. Not folk tales—take folk tales seriously—especially the fun ones. But FOAF tales: a friend of a friend says. F-O-A-F. Jenkins’ example: after an Allied victory in World War I, a children’s book depicted the dead from the battle of Agincourt 500 years prior rising to fight the Hun. We English will remember that there were quite a lot of French dead at the Battle of Agincourt! My name’s French by the way. Anyway, the book was a smash success in wartime Britain.
Then folks started to take it a little too literally. Some would say to the author ‘a friend of a friend saw arrows in the dead Germans on the battlefield.’
Yeah. I’m the author who made that story up.
Really? I don’t know, my uncle said a friend of his said ...
I don’t mind making fun of the pretentious, but never do that to village elders in a non-western non-wealthy culture. Those aunties and uncles have kept people alive despite oppression with wisdom cured for centuries.
You and I live in a moment of mass paranoia fueled by social media. A friend of mine used to say how excited he was watching the moon landing as a kid. Made him go into science. But his uncle said to him, “boy you believe everything white people tell you? There ain’t no man on no moon. They got a movie camera out in Arizona...” Funny, right? But that urban legend was made into a movie last year with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, so it must be true. Or not. And now you have a FOAF tale of your own.
This is a sermon in a Christian church. So, what does scripture say? What does God say? You’ve heard me say before that if you look at Jesus’ business card, it says: “first century Jewish exorcist and faith healer.” Next Sunday is about the faith healing bit. This Sunday: whatever Karl Barth says, I owe you a sermon on demons.
This is tougher than it might seem. There aren’t too many church songs about demons. I think we’re singing them all today. We can reduce the stories to psychological tropes and then we’ve all experienced demons, if we’ve experienced real evil: abuse of any kind, violence, intergenerational trauma. Someone I love had his place broken into decades ago and his precious work equipment either stolen or destroyed. I don’t think he’s ever recovered from that violation. That’s demonic. And I’ll never make fun of it. I’ll ache as long as he does. Until Christ comes and heals him and all things.
Belief in demons is common in Jesus’ world. Not so much in the Old Testament—demons are barely there. The devil is only mentioned three times in Israel’s scripture (and not at all in Genesis). But if you believe in angels—that is, messengers with good news, then the question sort of follows, okay, does the other team have messengers too? I love angel names: Michael and Gabriel and Raphael and all the rest. Demon names? We don’t use them too much in here. But don’t be afraid. They have no power here.
St. Mark is likely the earliest gospel written, around the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. By then, for centuries, Jews, Christians, pagans are all into demons. If you can cast out demons, you got more job security than any union or bureaucracy can grant in our day. Because every outbreak of chaos is demonic before modern medicine or even ancient medicine. The first hospitals are developed by monks in what’s now Turkey in the 4th century, before that the only institutions are homes for Roman soldiers to rehab in and that’s it.
Jesus casting out demons isn’t unusual. Here’s what is. They know who he is.
Now that doesn’t seem unusual to us. We know who he is too, so does the author, St. Mark. But the other characters in the gospel of Mark do not. The disciples don’t. His human opponents don’t, religious and Roman alike. Only the demons do. So, Jesus is always rudely silencing the demons. “Be quiet! Come out of them!” Then the demons convulse their way out of the poor patient. That’s when people gasp: what is this teaching, with such authority? With authority. There are stories afoot of an exorcism that the late Pope John Paul II could not accomplish. As great as his moral and political authority were, that demon was stronger.
Not stronger than Jesus though. That’s what authority means. You can bring healing. Wholeness. Life out of death. Every single time. Only God can do that.
The feminist wannabe in me grates a little against Peter’s mother-in-law getting healed to go cook for the boys. But then again, everybody’s gotta eat. I’m told every Asian mother about force feeds their adult children: it’s a way of showing love. Mrs. Peter-in-law does have four apostles in her house, two are her own adult children, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself, and she’s ... sick in the bed. “The fever left her, and she began to serve them.” That’s the most dignified thing any human being can ever do: Serve somebody else. Without modern feminism, my life and our church and our city make no sense. So, let’s read this as feminists, shall we? The most human and humanizing thing any person ever does, is offer hospitality to Jesus and to his weird friends, and to his beloved poor. Male or female or refuse to answer.
Jesus’ fame spreads. This is very bad. Fame is poison. The famous people FOAF tales agree: You don’t want fame. Wealth? Maybe. Fame, no way. Fame ruins. At his cross, Jesus is utterly alone, abandoned by everyone, except some of his female besties. So here Jesus goes and prays all by himself and no one can find him. I love this: So, you can heal everyone of everything and ... you’re off praying by yourself? I mean, why not just wave a magic wand and heal everyone for all time right now?!
The great atheist writer Christopher Hitchens used to complain about the immorality of Mother Teresa. She should have used her fame to raise money to end poverty. That’s not what God called her to do. I’m not sure how much time Hitch spent caring for the dying among the poorest of the poor away from the cameras. I wonder if Hitchens should’ve divulged that his brother was an Anglican priest—do you think that would have been relevant? Or Nietzsche that his father was a Lutheran pastor? Yeah, we got therapy for that, yo. Fame can ruin you.
We don’t know why anyone gets sick. We don’t know why anyone gets well. Here’s what else we don’t know. Why anyone gets born in the first place. Why there’s a world. The amount we know, even in our supposedly enlightened age, is hilariously stupendously tiny. Trust me, that’s not from Wikipedia or AI.
Anyway, the disciples find Jesus and say, “everyone is searching for you.” Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone is searching for you: especially those who swear they’re not.
Final word today. Last story. A man with a skin disease. You’ve heard sermons and I’ve preached some, decrying systems of ritual purity: clean and unclean, claiming Jesus is against these systems. He’s not. Our modern western culture doesn’t do ritual purity or impurity so much today, and we’re the weird ones. Cultures around the world, including ancient Greeks and Romans (that is, pagans) have ritual purity systems. We do too, in a sense. Someone sneezes beside you in an enclosed space, do you like it?
Yeah, but we know about germs.
Okay cool whatever. God bless you.
Anyway, Jesus, we’re told, is moved with pity. Uh, no, the Greek is clear. He’s mad. Furious. He snorts like a horse whose nostrils flare. He’s stompin’ mad, Tom Connors. Why? Jesus orders the man to tell no one. Fame is awful remember? Instead, “He went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly but stayed out in the country, and people came to him from every corner.”
Most Christians feel we should be doing more to spread the gospel or at least, I don’t know, to make people recycle, or be nicer to animals or something. That deep guilt that we’re not doing enough? Catholics have it. Jews have it. Evangelicals have it. Even we liberals have it... just not usually about religion, more about moral matters. We can’t imagine a crusade for religion anymore, but a crusade for women’s rights or the environment? Sure. Just don’t call it a crusade. A jihad? No, that’s the same word as crusade. A campaign!? Perfect. That’ll do.
In our story, Jesus orders this guy to say nothing, just to do what Moses commands. Like any good Jew then or now or ever. And instead, the man goes out and evangelizes. “I’m healed! Clean!”
This is what our literature teachers call irony. Irony is not coincidence. Irony is really hard to define. You can see it when texts work on multiple levels. Jesus’ friends ... don’t know who he is. Only the demons do. Jesus’ people don’t save the world like we think he wants. When one of us tries, here, Jesus is furious. That’s his job alone. And Jesus saves the world with his cross. The cross is Jesus Christ’s exorcism of creation. He drives out the demons on Good Friday. And on Easter Sunday, what breaks loose, like a bat out of hell, is resurrection life that will never, ever be stopped. Amen.