With Authority

Mark 1:16-28

January 28, 2024

 

Winston Churchill referred to it as the “black dog.” Apparently, it was something that hounded and haunted him. Author and illustrator, Matthew Johnstone, created a book and an animated short film about the black dog, because he too was hounded by that creature. In his short film, Johnstone illustrates how he tried to ignore the dog, but it wouldn’t go away. He tried to suppress it, silence it, but the dog continued to pursue him. Johnstone pretended the dog didn’t exist, especially when he was around other people. He put on a happy face, and silenced the canine as best he could. But nothing seemed to work.

As Johnstone grew older, the dog grew bigger. He turned to drinking and smoking, but the dog refused to be silenced. It refused to heel. No amount of ignoring it, pretending the dog didn’t exist or numbing its ferocity through other means made the dog disappear. It was persistent. At one point in the film’s animation, the man and the dog become one creature; the man brought down to his knees by the dog who not only followed him but seemed to have possessed his entire being.

This black dog is depression. With no disrespect intended to either dogs or the beautiful color black, this was an apt and poignant analogy for what depression feels like and for what it can become to the person who is struggling under its weight.

According to statistics published a few years ago by the World Health Organization, depression affects over 300 million people worldwide. According to that organization, “It is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease.” That was a statistic before the pandemic. I can only imagine what it is now.

In 2020 Mental Health America reported that 1 in 5 Americans are living with a mental health disorder of some kind. And another statistic I found said that 16.1 million adults, aged 18 years and over, have experienced at least one major depressive episode. That represents 6.7 percent of all American adults. Perhaps you have not experienced depression yourself, but there is a good chance that someone you know, someone you love, has.

Depression can feel like a dog that won’t leave you alone. Depression can also feel like you have been taken hold of by something you cannot understand or control. In other words, to be depressed feels as though you are possessed.

I realize that this is a provocative statement. To say that someone is possessed has many difficult connotations. For those of us who are old enough to remember the movie The Exorcist,  thinking about someone being possessed might bring up images from that movie. That movie and others like it, along with the descriptions we have from scripture about people possessed by demonic forces, seem a far cry from how we understand someone who is depressed today. I think of the man in the tombs, who in Mark’s gospel appears in Chapter 5. That man had no control over his words, his actions, even his own strength. The people would bind him with manacles, and he would still break free. That doesn’t sound like our modern understanding of depression.

And I certainly don’t want to make an insensitive connection between depression and demonic possession. People who struggled with mental illness were thought to be possessed by demons, and how much worse was their suffering made because of that kind of thinking?

But if you have ever struggled with depression, if you have ever seen the world through its particular lens or bought into the great lie that it tells you, then maybe the image of possession isn’t such a far cry after all. Depression feels as though it owns you, body, mind, and soul.

It is impossible to know if the man with the unclean spirit who confronted Jesus in the synagogue was depressed or not. But we do know that the spirit that possessed him recognized Jesus. The unclean spirits that Jesus confronted always seem to recognize Jesus.

And the first thing that Jesus does in Mark’s gospel, his first public act of ministry, is to exorcise this unclean spirit, to rid the man of this thing that possessed him. The first act of Jesus’ ministry tells us a lot about the gospel writer and how he sees Jesus, and all four gospels record a different first act of ministry.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. In John, Jesus changed water into wine at a wedding in Cana. In Luke, he preached in the synagogue and was rejected by the people. And in Mark’s gospel, Jesus exorcised a demon. Biblical scholars make a point of noting these differences because as I said, they denote the gospel writer’s agenda. So, here we are in Mark, and Jesus exorcises a demon.

Jesus does not exorcise the demon through prayer or rite or ritual. He offered no laying on of hands. Jesus exorcised this demon by rebuking it. He ordered it to leave the man. The unclean spirit confronted Jesus by calling out to him,

“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.”

But Jesus was having none of it. He was not cowed by the presence of this unclean spirit. Jesus rebuked it. He ordered the spirit to leave the man … and the spirit obeyed. The spirit obeyed because the spirit recognized Jesus. The spirit recognized Jesus’ authority. Jesus exorcised that demon with immediacy and urgency. And that’s a fundamental message of Mark’s gospel. Immediacy.

Jesus is on an urgent mission to preach to the people that the kingdom of God was in their midst. His ministry was urgent, because God was on the move and there was no time to waste. Anything that prevented God’s people from full life, from abundant life, had to be dealt with … immediately. If anything could prevent someone from the abundant life found in God, it would be an unclean spirit. So, Jesus wasted no time in sending that spirit packing and freeing this man to the fullness of life in God.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”

Yes. Anything that possessed people, any spirit or idol or ideology or blinder that kept people from recognizing God, from full and abundant life in God, had to be swept away, Jesus did not just exorcise that demon, he confronted it. He rebuked it, and he did so with authority. His ministry at that moment was made clear.

I wonder who else in that synagogue needed Jesus to release them? I wonder what other unclean spirits needed to be rebuked. The man may have had the unclean spirit, but I can say with assurance that he was not the only one who was prevented in some way from living an abundant life in God.

What keeps us from having abundant life? It seems to me that you don’t have to have experienced depression or another form of mental illness to understand possession. Maybe you are possessed by fear. Maybe you are possessed by hopelessness or anger. Maybe despair holds you in its grip, or maybe it is something else. But whatever it may be, know this, the first thing Jesus did in Mark’s gospel was exorcise that demon with authority, the authority that comes from God. He rebuked it, confronted it, and cast it out, so that the man could have abundant life in God. Isn’t that what God wants for all of us, for all of God’s children? Isn’t that what God longs for? Isn’t this a fundamental tenet of the incarnation, of the Word becoming flesh in Jesus? Jesus came so that what blocks us from relationship with God, what prevents us from abundant life, and that which makes us stumble and fall could be rebuked, removed, and cast out.

The first thing Jesus did was confront and cast out a demon. The first thing Jesus wants for us is to be able to live the abundant life God has promised. That is our hope. Maybe what possesses us cannot be cast out as cleanly as the unclean spirit was, but that does not mean that Jesus is not working on us and in us. The first thing Jesus does is confront what stands between us and God. And he does it still, again and again, calling us to follow, calling us to abundant life.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.