Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn

Jesus the Exorcist
Text:  Mark 9: 14-29

NRS Mark 9
14When they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and some scribes arguing with them. 15When the whole crowd saw him, they were immediately overcome with awe, and they ran forward to greet him. 16He asked them, "What are you arguing about with them?" 17Someone from the crowd answered him, "Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; 18and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so." 19He answered them, "You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me." 20And they brought the boy to him. When the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21Jesus asked the father, "How long has this been happening to him?" And he said, "From childhood. 22It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us." 23Jesus said to him, "If you are able! — All things can be done for the one who believes." 24Immediately the father of the child cried out, "I believe; help my unbelief!" 25When Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, "You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!" 26After crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, "He is dead." 27But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he was able to stand. 28When he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out?" 29He said to them, "This kind can come out only through prayer."

            May the Lord keep all your days and deeds in the health and wholeness of our Savior Jesus the Christ.  Amen. 

            In the course of his healing ministry Jesus cured the sick, cleansed lepers, gave sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, raised the dead, and not just coincidentally, cast out demons.  Curing, cleansing, opening eyes and ears, and raising the dead are words that we can identify with, but to our scientific worldview, casting out demons, that is, exorcism, has an odd ring to our ears and strikes us as maybe even a little dangerous, especially given the number of movies and TV shows dedicated to the subject.  Though exorcism may sound exotic and extreme to us, the fact remains that the casting out of demons figures prominently in many, if not most, of Jesus’ healings.   Jesus was, in fact, such a successful exorcist that at one point the Pharisees accused him of being in league with Beelzebul, “the ruler of demons” (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3;22; Luke11:15). 

Modern people, like us, often assume that when Jesus cast out demons he was using that culture’s tradition to cure mental illnesses or neurological disorders, like the epileptic boy in today’s reading from Mark 9.  That’s a good theory, but it doesn’t really hold up.  In first century Palestine demons were understood to be active to varying degrees in all illnesses and injuries, both physical and mental.  Again, looking back to the text from Mark 9, Jesus identifies an evil spirit as the cause of the boy’s seizures and his inability to speak and hear.  In many tribal societies today, injuries that we would call purely accidental are often considered the work of evil spirits summoned by spells and black magic.  Pre-scientific cultures simply don’t make the same hard-and-fast distinctions we do about mental and physical, spiritual and material, organic and inorganic. 

            While the New Testament abounds in references to demons, unclean spirits, or what the apostle Paul calls “the elemental spirits of the world” (Galatians 4: 3), you find little of the same talk in the Old Testament.  My former professor Fred Gaiser writes that there is not even a common term in the Old Testament for what the New Testament refers to as demons (Healing in the Bible, page 128).  From contact with the religions of her neighbors, Israel was certainly familiar with the concept of demons, but the Mosaic insistence on the Lord, Yahweh, as the one and only source of all power kept Israel from ever acknowledging their existence.  Consequently, you never hear or see the Old Testament prophets exorcising demons from the people they cured of illness.  So what happened in the 400 years or so between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New?

            The short answer:  a whole lotta’ bad.  From the Babylonian captivity up through and including the Roman occupation of Palestine, Israel suffered one national catastrophe after another. There were moments of triumph, but overall I think Israel experienced such deep and pervasive trauma that people began to wonder:  Are there other forces at work in this universe other than just God alone?  By the time of Jesus much of Judaism had acquired its own demonology of devils and evil spirits that, while never rivaling the supremacy of Yahweh, still had sufficient power to inflict pain and injury on God’s people. 

            As a first-century man, Jesus certainly had a first-century worldview, which meant that his healing assumed a first-century belief in demons and unclean spirits.  We, on the other hand, have been riding a huge wave of scientific discovery reaching back at least two and half centuries.  If anything, that wave of knowledge is getting bigger and bigger, accumulating a force that grows exponentially by the day if not by the hour.  We are on the verge of unlocking secrets to the universe that ancient man could never have imagined.  Yet for all the science and research and information in which we find ourselves swimming, there persists a fascination with devils and demons and the various rites of exorcism.  You see the ads for the books, movies, and TV miniseries.  The tabloids love to run stories of parents bringing troubled children to exorcists in last ditch efforts to rescue them from drugs and addiction.  Maybe we’re not as advanced as we like to think.  Maybe it’s just morbid curiosity.  Maybe it’s just that Hollywood has discovered that the devil sells tickets faster than sex.  Who knows?  But I do think that there is one sense in which the Bible’s stories of demonic possession still resonate with our own modern experience of illness. 

            This is a very weak example, but I can’t help thinking back to 15 months ago when I got sick while on that mission trip in Peru.  That was the sickest I had ever been in my life, and I think that’s because I became so sick so suddenly and so all over.  It wasn’t just that my head or tummy or joints were giving me trouble, but rather, that my whole body had been – I don’t know how else to say this – taken over.  I couldn’t stand, much less walk; I couldn’t see straight, and even when people were talking to me in English, I couldn’t always follow what they were saying.  It was like something had taken possession of me, and thanks to Louis Pasteur and his germ-theory of disease, we know that’s, in fact, what had happened.  A bacterial infection had overwhelmed my immune system, and the resulting disease had taken over my body.  No demons were involved, but it kind of felt that way.  Because I was quickly treated with antibiotics, within a day or two of my hospitalization I woke up early one morning just floating in sweat.  I mean from head to toe, the bed linens were soaked through.  But I knew that somehow, the fever had broken and the disease had been pushed out of me, it seemed like through my very pores.  I felt terrible, like the proverbial wet dish rag, but I also felt like I had my body back, more or less.  The grip of whatever had been holding me was broken. 

            I’ve heard similar things from people struggling with chronic, life-threatening illnesses.  They experience their cancer, COPD, or kidney disease as though it was an entity taking over their bodies.  I saw this struggle in my own mother’s 14-year battle with breast cancer.  By the time she died in 1982 her body looked like a battlefield, and in a way, it was.  To stave off the disease she had been cut, burned, and poisoned – radical mastectomies, repeated radiation treatments, and massive doses of chemotherapy.  She survived much longer than many other women her age, but both the disease and its treatment took over her life, and not just physically.  Over the years I watched my mom become less and less Ruth Button, and more and more the cancer patient, to the extent that her own self-understanding became almost entirely defined by her disease. 

            In Jesus’ healing, I think we see two things happen simultaneously.  On the one hand, we see the rule of God pushing against illness, conceived as a hostile force (which it is), forcing it into retreat.  And on other hand, we see that same rule of God bringing the sufferer into an open space where not only can the patient recover his or her body, but likewise, recover his or her own sense of self in relationship to God and others. 

            Jesus believed in demons, but does that constrain us to believe in demons as well?  Fundamentalist churches would and do say, “Absolutely!”  To hear some preachers tell it, the world is awash in demons and evil spirits that at any moment can waylay the unsuspecting believer with overwhelming temptation and deadly force.  On the opposite end of the theological spectrum, some self-styled liberal or progressive ministers would have you believe that the light of reason is all that’s required to roll back the demons spawned by ignorance and superstition.  I find myself somewhere in the no-man’s land between these two extremes.  On the one hand, I don’t believe in a devil that’s taking possession of little girls to spin their heads round and make them spit up pea soup, a la the movie, “The Exorcist.” On the other hand, I do believe that there is a reality to evil.  Although very dark and shadowy, more absence than presence, more isn’t than is, this evil is, I believe, capable of clouding the minds of individuals, communities, even whole nations, making otherwise good, moral people into agents of unspeakable cruelty.   Is it madness, group psychosis, a hidden death wish suddenly run amok?  I don’t know, any more than I know what happened in the mind and soul of that U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who went on a killing spree.  But I do remember this verse from a famous song: 

Let this world’s tyrant rage;
In battle we’ll engage!
His might is doomed to fail:
God’s judgment must prevail!
One little word subdues him.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 
Amen.