[To help the folks of Friendship Church and any other church that uses the lectionary prepare for worship this weekend, I present these summaries of my study and reflections on the Bible passages on which worship will be built. The link to the first pass at this week's Bible lesson is here.]
Mark 1:21-28:
21They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27They 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.” 28At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
Summarizing Others' Thoughts:
General(1) Brian Stoffregen sees this passage as being part of a larger unit, encompassing verses 21-45. Its theme is Jesus' Authority Over Demons and Illness.
(2) Stoffregen asserts that "the significance of these miracles goes far beyond the physical or biological cures. It seems unlikely that Jesus would have been tortured to death for simply healing the sick."
He goes on to look at first-century Judea's "sociocultural" understanding of illness, based on an article by J. Pilch in Biblical Theology Bulletin, 1985. Pilch said that there are, as Stoffregen puts it, "two approaches to illness. There is the biomedical perspective that emphasizes diseases and cures of individuals." The second approach is from the sociocultural perspective, which takes into account relationships with other people."
Pilch talks about leprosy in Judean culture, for example. Leprosy wasn't a biomedical condition, but one that threatened "communal integrity and holiness" and had to "be removed from the community." This is why there were leper colonies.
Old Testament law provided for the steps to be taken should a leprous person be cured of their disease. They were to go to a priest--not a physician, as one might expect from the biomedical perspective--who would certify the person's fitness for resuming their former life, including living with family members, practicing their profession, and so on.
Stoffregen's presentation of Pilch's work helped me, for the first time, to understand the climactic comment on the healing of Simon's mother, which appears in next week's Bible lesson, Mark 1:29-39. Mark says that as soon as the woman was cured of her fever, she stood up and served people. I used to think, "That's well and good. She was healthy enough to work. But it seems like a ripoff for her to have had to serve others as soon as she was feeling better!" I was looking at the text as a twenty-first-century person who hates sexism.
But for Mark, the woman's ability to once more serve others meant that the dignity of her station had been restored. Illness prevented people from functioning in the community. They were "put out to pasture." Healing allowed them back in.
What all of this suggests is that part of the opposition that developed against Jesus had to do not only with when He brought them healing, exorcism, or restoration--the healing in this passage occurs on the Sabbath, thereby violating the commandment not to work on that day--but also that He uses extraordinary means to restore people to community. He freed people from being trapped on the sidelines of life.
For people like Scribes and Pharisees, who selfishly occupied positions of superiority in the religious hierarchy, Jesus' liberation of the demon-possessed and the ill represented a threat to their authority.
(3) The foregoing discussion may all be unnecessary babbling if the old, long-dead Bible scholar, R.C.H. Lenski is right. Lenski insisted that exorcisms and healings by Jesus, although both being signs of His power, are two completely different categories of activity. There is some warrant to his perspective, I think: Mark always mentions these ills as belonging to two different evils conquered by Jesus.
By Verse
v. 22: (1) They were astounded at his teaching: The word for astounded is ekplessein in the Greek of the New Testament. Lenski renders this "dumb with amazement." With good warrant, Stoffregen says that a literal translation would be "blown out of their minds." He's right.
Matthew uses the same verb, Lenski points out, at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. There (Matthew 7:28), it's used to describe the people's reactions to Jesus' teaching.
(2) What amazes the people is Jesus' teaching here as well. Lenski is probably right in saying that the teaching is the same as in Mark 1:15.
(3) he taught them as one having authority: The Interpreter's Bible (IB) says that, "Jesus...spoke with immediate and personal authority."
Lenski says that the deity of Jesus shone through His words.
(4) The authorititativeness of Jesus' teaching is seen by the synagogue crowd in contrast with the teaching of the scribes.
Stoffregen points out to Jesus people attribute "authority," exousia in the New Testament Greek, a word that can also be translated as power.
They also say that Jesus presents a "new teaching." A better translation of the adjective here would be "fresh."
The power of Jesus' teaching then is that unlike the stale approaches of the scribes, Jesus' teaching has the freshness of God-Power. Only those who surrender to Christ can speak or act with such power today. As Lenski reminds preachers, "pulpit talks" that fail to convey Jesus' teaching or the Word about Him aren't really preaching.
(5) My old mentor, Richard Jensen, in his commentary on Mark says that, "Scribal authority was based on their ability to recite the opinion of many Rabbis on a given topic. Jesus' word had authority because when he spoke, it came to pass."
That may explain why in verse 27, the crowd refers to Jesus' casting the demon out of the man as "a new teaching."
v. 23: (1) I once doubted the existence of demons. Then I met missionaries who served in places like Africa and India. They actually encountered people who were under the slavery of demons and saw many liberated from them in Christ's Name.
Why don't we seem to see this phenomenon in the twenty-first-century West? I have a theory. The serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to sin in the book of Genesis was described as the most subtle of the creatures. As such, I think he represents the subtlety of evil and of the evil one. He finds ways to market his evil that will work in any given culture or on any given individual. More subtle approaches are appropriate for us in the sophisticated First World. After all, if people dismiss your very existence, why allow their defenses to be erected by disabusing them of that notion? But can any of us look at things like racism, sexism, sexual promiscuity, materialism, drug and alcohol abuse, and other ills and actually say that the demonic is absent from our world?
Another reason that we fail to clearly identify the demonic in our part of the world is that we have buried our sensitivity to the elemental and instinctive aspects of life beneath veneers of self-assured rationality. We believe that we can explain everything. Evil plays to that egotistical viewpoint, I think.
(2) The term "unclean spirit" hardly appears outside the New Testament, says IB. It's cited in two books of the Apocrypha, which Protestant Christians don't consider to be part of the Bible and in the Old Testament, at Zechariah 13:2.
(3) "unclean spirit" is in contrast to "the Holy One of God" Who is teaching on the sabbath in a holy place, the synagogue, Stoffregen says. Holy versus unclean is one of several important contrasts in this incident.
v. 24: (1) Demons, says Lenski, always recognized Jesus' deity. And, according to IB, a look at other ancient documents, including those from Greek culture, show that, "Demons often sensed the power of the exorcist."
(2) Holy One of God: This was not a usual title associated with the Messiah, IB points out. In Psalm 16:10, the writer refers to himself in this way, although the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible renders it, "faithful one."
Stoffregen suggests that this may be an effort on the part of the demon to get the upper hand on Jesus. In ancient thought, to tag someone or something with a name was to take control of it. We see this notion at work in Adam's naming of the animals in the Old Testament book of Genesis.
Really, it's not such an "ancient" idea. When I go to the doctor's office and undergo tests for some bothersome symptoms, I feel great relief and more in control once the results have come back and the doctor can name my malady. My condition hasn't changed, but naming it indicates a regimen of treatment through which change will come.
v. 26: Lenski points out that this is the first miracle of Jesus recorded by Mark. It fits the theme of the first half of this Gospel: Jesus shows Himself to be the Christ "by his mighty teaching and deeds."
v. 27: (1) Lenski says that, "...no one seems to have inquired about who Jesus really was." Instead, they ask about what has happened, not yet getting Who is standing among them.
(2) IB says, "The new teaching is authenticated by the manifestation of power to ban an evil spirit."
(3) IB also comments on the phrase, unclean spirits that this event is representative of other signs that Jesus would perform in His ministry.
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