Sermons
Silencing the Demons
Mark 1:34
“Silencing the Demons”
February 5, 2012
One of the central themes of the gospel of Mark is a clash between Jesus and the demons. To someone like me, a product of modern times, it’s almost an embarrassment. I can sing the words of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”:
“And though this world with devils filled
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us…”
and when I sing that I really feel it, and really mean it. When he wrote those words, however, Martin Luther understood himself as living in a world filled with malign spirits working to drag the unwary soul into eternal misery. I don’t see things that way. I suspect that few of us do.
To be brutally honest about the world and ourselves, though, is to admit that there are situations where forces that may, be called (and I don’t use the word lightly) evil take hold of the mind of an individual or (even worse) those forces grip entire nations or peoples. Then the clash of God’s truth, embodied in Jesus, with the powers of falsehood that all too often lie within ourselves becomes a very real experience. Then it is truly good news, truly the gospel, to hear of Jesus and how
“he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.” [Mark 1:34]
Some evils are so deeply embedded that Jesus, and only Jesus, can remove them from the human soul.
One of the greatest evils is that which demonizes others, rather than seeing the dangers within ourselves. Racism, fear of the immigrant, homophobia, whatever form hatred may take, in its extreme form will seize people and, if not confronted issues in horrors of the sort that led to a proclamation by the German district governor of Warsaw on November 10, 1941:
“Any Jew who illegally leaves the designated residential district will be punished by death. Anyone who deliberately offers refuge to such Jews or who aids them in any other manner (i.e., offering a night's lodging, food, or by taking them into vehicles of any kind, etc.) will be subject to the same punishment. Judgment will be rendered by a Special Court in Warsaw. I forcefully draw the attention of the entire population of the Warsaw District to this new decree, as henceforth it will be applied with the utmost severity."[1]
In the midst of that horror, which took place with the vast majority of people acquiescing, a relative handful of people stood against it.
“Late one evening in April of 1943 a knock was heard at the door of the Suchodolski family in [a Polish] village ... Adam Suchodolski opened the door and slowly made out the shadow of a man in front of him, his body swollen from hunger. The man fell down on his knees and begged for mercy. "Please help me stay alive." Adam and his teenage daughter Jadwiga painstakingly studied his face and finally perceived that it was none other than Michael Shaft, who, with his family, had lived in the village many years before. Michael had left the village to study law in Warsaw. The vicissitudes of the war had taken him from one place to another, and earlier that same month he had participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Escaping, he had wandered back to his native village...
As danger lurked on all sides, from neighbors and untrustworthy relatives, they decided to keep Michael's presence a secret. A pit was prepared in the granary, the opening of which was covered with animal fodder. There, Michael remained hidden, cut off from the world, for almost two years, 'til the village's liberation on January 15, 1945. He was regularly fed by a member of the Suchodolski family, who approached the granary through the chicken coop, ostensibly to feed the poultry.
‘I come from a very devout Catholic family,’ Jadwiga states in a letter to Mrs. Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, in 1972. ‘My family and I did what we did because we wished to observe the commandment of “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” I am proud, indeed, to be counted as a Righteous person. At the same time, I am glad that my family and I performed such an important commandment, and I believe that due to this, we have merited a place in the world-to-come.’”[2]
That was then. In our own day we face demons of greed and love of ease that prevent us from addressing issues like how to share dwindling energy resources or how to make our health care system fair or how to do something about global warming. What would it mean for us to let Jesus silence our fear of the sometimes drastic changes it would take to do that? What would it mean for us as a people to show the courage of the people who started tearing down the Berlin Wall after Bible study at St. Thomas’ Church in East Berlin? What would it mean to take the risks made by the Freedom Riders in the American South, or by Christians in South Africa who took the radical step of having human beings of all skin tones drink from one cup at communion? We do a great job, a necessary job, prompting people to share with events like the Souper Bowl of Caring, but we fail to ask what has gone so wrong that the need has grown so great so quickly. As that modern-day prophet, Stephen Colbert, has said,
“If this is to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition, and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
That is the kind of truth-telling that Jesus brings to the world. It’s the way that the demons’ voices are silenced. In the long run, it’s the way that our lives are healed and the world is healed. It is the voice of the one who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”