The Gospel of Mark catches your attention from the very
first chapter. The first thing to notice is what’s missing. No birth story. No
Jesus in a manger; no Bethlehem; in fact, no Mary at all. Instead, you get grown-up
Jesus and the makings of a Hollywood thriller. There are demons everywhere, and
Jesus goes around casting them out like he’s the t-shirt guy at a sporting
event—everybody gets a demon cast out of them! This will prove to be just how
Mark tells the story, and it is probably my favorite Gospel, but it’s not to
everybody’s tastes.
One thing to note about the demons in Mark’s Gospel: they
know who Jesus is. One thing to note about the disciples, the lawyers, the priests,
and everybody else in Mark’s Gospel: They don’t have a clue who Jesus is, even
when he tells them to it straight. Now, about those demons. The demons are part
of daily life in a way that is foreign to the rest of the Gospels; in fact,
it’s hard to find a corollary for all this demonic stuff anywhere in the Bible.
Sure, there are instances of demons in some places, but nobody envisions a
world crawling with them quite like Mark. The demons in Mark’s Gospel have two
defining traits: 1) They know who Jesus is, and 2) They can do nothing against
Jesus’ power.
Meanwhile, the people in the Gospel of Mark are all idiots.
I’m not remotely being harsh either. Jesus spends the entire life of his
ministry in Mark’s Gospel dealing with people who blatantly ignore everything
he says. Every time he heals one of them he says the same thing, “Now, don’t go
telling anybody about this!” And every time he does that what do they do? They go
blabbing to everybody! This is a central point of Mark’s Gospel: The people
never listen to Jesus; the demons always do. This is the first lesson of Mark’s
Gospel: A mark of discipleship is not having a correct understanding of who
Jesus was, because nobody did, but, rather, discipleship is about following Jesus
even when you are getting it wrong.
This point will be brought home many times over the next
few months as we read through Mark’s Gospel, because the disciples are the
biggest blockheads of them all. They never get it. Not once do they recognize
Jesus for who he really is. Jesus preaches a very simple message. He says: I’ve
come to die for the sake of the world. And the disciples hear, “I’ve come to
rule the world.” The people never listen, but the demons do.
I don’t know about you but something about this world that
Mark lays out resonates with me—where the people following Jesus never
understand but the demons understand perfectly—because I look at a world today where
nobody seems to understand the Christian faith worse than Christians. I look at
a world where Christians argue for war, align themselves with power, and claim
that faith in God is the secret to accumulating wealth. I look at a world where
Christians want a more Christian government in words but don’t want that
government to do Christian charity. I look at a world where Christians fear
those who are different. I look at this world and see nothing of Jesus’
teachings in it, and that’s why I love the Gospel of Mark, because Mark
recognizes that this is what Jesus-followers always do. They’re always
hypocrites; they never get it. But the demons do.
Why? Why do the demons get it?
Because the demons understand that Jesus represents the
only thing they truly have to fear. The demons know that they cannot be
defeated by any normal means—not by war, or money, or political power. Demons love politics. They love leaders who show how Christian they are by allying themselves
to Christian leaders, because they know that is how the Christian leaders
become corrupted, and they love Christian
leaders who ally themselves with political leaders, because they know that
every ounce of political power they achieve will weaken their focus on the
Jesus they are supposed to be representing. Demons love when faith becomes conflated with ideology, because when you spend
all your time arguing only about right practice, then you will find little time
to live a life of discipleship. The one ideology demons fear is the one Jesus
was espousing, which goes something like this: Serve God, serve your neighbor;
I’ve got the rest taken care of.
That rest—that’s what Jesus is about.
It’s funny, because for all the healing that Jesus does in
the Gospel of Mark—and it’s a lot, by the way; pretty much every chapter has a
healing story, or casting out demons, or both—Jesus is abundantly clear that
the healings are not what matters. After all, Jesus says over and over, “Don’t
tell anybody about this.”
Why shouldn’t they tell anybody? Why wouldn’t they speak
about these miraculous signs?
Because Jesus knows that when people hear about the
exorcisms and the miraculous healings they are going to get the wrong idea.
They are going to see Jesus as a doctor and a wizard, not a Savior. Little has
changed in the year 2020. If you dig under the surface, many Christians see
Jesus as a doctor and a wizard who goes around healing people, casting out
demons, and doing general, cool wizardy things. Cool, fine, but that’s not the
point. Everybody who Jesus heals will eventually die. Every demon that is cast
out is free to go back once Jesus has left. Every healing is temporary. The
reason Jesus doesn’t want the people to go around sharing about his healings is
because those healings are not big enough; they simply aren’t enough. Our world
loves healing, but Jesus didn’t come to heal—he came to save. The Gospel of
Mark is emphatic in its understanding of Jesus’ purpose: Jesus came to save.
All the rest is completely and utterly unimportant.
Meanwhile, the people are drooling all over themselves to
tell anybody and everybody about Jesus the healer. After all, it’s what people
always do.
You see, I’m pretty pessimistic about Christians,
generally. I think we are pretty much the same as people of other faiths (or no
faith at all). We don’t do a particularly good job of following Jesus in word
and action, and we too easily ally ourselves with principalities and powers.
Yet, in this pessimism, I have tremendous hope because even in Jesus’ time his
followers were pretty pathetic, and if Jesus put up with these dunderheads who
didn’t listen to a single word he said, instead assuming they had him figured
out even when he was telling them otherwise to their faces, then I have a great
deal of hope that Jesus tolerates and even loves us himself. If this is the
case (and I think Mark’s Gospel is very clear that it is), then even these
Christians I see on the news who seem to have abandoned their faith to ally
with power are not beyond redemption. After all, there are demons everywhere if
you believe Mark’s account. The mistake we tend to make is in believing that
they aren’t in us.
The secret—the reason Jesus tells everybody not to share
these miraculous things—is that the Big Miracle is the only one that matters.
These little healings? They could just be magic tricks. The exorcisms? Well,
what’s stopping anybody from saying that the demons aren’t real? No, the reason
Jesus wants you to stay quiet about little miracles is because there is only
one miracle that matters. The Gospel of Mark is unapologetically about the
cross. The entire narrative arc is more like a beeline toward Golgotha. In
Mark’s Gospel, even more than the others, Jesus came for one reason and one
reason only: To die.
As we spend the next few months in Mark, I’d encourage you
to think about what that means for us. The little miracles matter, after all.
Healing matters. Freedom from demons—real or metaphorical—matters. Your life
matters. But not compared to the cross. After all, every healed person dies
eventually. Every demon goes back to work once Jesus has passed. We need
something better. Mark’s Gospel begs us to listen to Jesus, to walk the way of
the cross, and to discover what it is that ultimately saves us.
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