“They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach” (1:21).  From the shores of Galilee, Jesus and his four new disciples go back into Capernaum.  On the Sabbath, Jesus goes to the synagogue.  It sounds like there is some time in between those two actions: like more than just a few hours.  How do you suppose Jesus and his four new followers spent that time?  We know there will be plenty of powerful healings, cleansings: Jesus speaks, and it is so.  Jesus isn’t just, isn’t even primarily, working continual wonders before those four goggle-eyed, gape-mouthed disciples.  More often, primarily, he is talking with them: about God, the kingdom, the nature, shape, cost, and reward of following.  Most often, Jesus takes those with him into the Word, pointing to all the radiant, holy beauty to be found there, the majesty and the mystery.  They wondered how a man just like them could be so close to God.

Jesus goes to the synagogue, often, because that’s where the people of God gather to pray and to hear the Word of God.  They gathered together under the Word, under the authority of the Word.  In the synagogue, they reaffirmed, witnessed, and experienced their life together as the people of God, a people who live by the Word.  Some gathered from duty, habit; others came and sat there, bored or distracted; still others entered in hopeful expectation, and others in deep need.  I suppose they all, in some way, wanted to encounter God, to have some sense that He was near, after all, attentive, involved.  They hoped for the power of God in the presence of God.

When Jesus taught in the synagogue, no one could say nothing was happening.  Neither were any of them quite certain just what was happening.  Mark reminds us that, “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law” (1:22).  I mention each time that amazement doesn’t exactly mean delight.  Amazement can also mean shocked offense.  There in the synagogue, Jesus was encountering both delight and outrage.  At least it wasn’t indifference!

Now, people are nearly always gracious and polite to pastors, and from time to time, on the way out of church, there’ll be those who say something along the lines of “good message today.”  And that is received in the spirit in which it is offered.  Every so often, there are also those who leave less than happy.  Once in a great while, one of these unhappy ones will leave an anonymous note for the pastor.  The note is never obnoxiously insulting, but it does make plain that the note writer strongly disagreed with and was offended by what the preacher said.  How can you know that?  Where’s the love?  Who are you to judge?  That’s not the Jesus I know!  In the synagogue, among God’s gathered people, there were those listening to Jesus, thinking to themselves, “Wonderful!  True!” and others, thinking, “Who does this guy think he is?!”

But God has an unanswerable way of showing His authority.  “Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out” (1:23).  Before I get to what that possessed man said, I want us to sit with this for a moment: there was a man, in the synagogue, possessed by an impure spirit.  What was he doing there?!  Why would he even want to be there?  How could he get in?  How did the others not notice or know?  An impure spirit—a man dominated by impurity unto evil.  That’s a frightening thought.  That was the world in which Mark and the early church lived.  We aren’t likely to say we believe in demon-possession, these days—that’s superstition, et cetera, of course—yet we know there are people out there who don’t seem to be in their right minds: something has got ahold of them and isn’t letting go, and it’s likely to get that poor person badly hurt, or ruined, or killed.

The enemy likes to know what’s going on in the places of hope and healing, the places of prayer where God’s Word is present, proclaimed.  The Enemy is pledged to undermine the Word, substituting a forgery for the genuine article—fool’s gold.

That possessed man with the impure spirit, hearing Jesus speak, teach, blurts out: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (1:24).  Now there’s testimony!  Who is this “us” the impure spirit mentions?  “Have you come to destroy us.”  Are the spirits also legion in that man?  Does he mean the impure spirits out in the world?  Or is he thinking of the other impure spirits there in the synagogue that Sabbath day?  Beloved, there is impurity in church every Sunday because there are impure people there, people like me, and, I’m presumptuous enough to say, even some of you.

No, we’re not controlled by any demon, but there are times when it can feel as if we’re not exactly in full control of ourselves, especially when we’re about to do something stupid, or hurtful, something we know we’re going to regret even as we’re doing it.  Sound familiar, like someone you know?  Jesus has come to demonstrate—beyond doubt—his power over that power.  Jesus has the authority.  Nothing besetting you or me, nothing troubling or hurting you or me is stronger than Jesus.  Give it to him.  Let him deal with it.  Belief that he wants you to and belief that he can is called faith.

Different people like to hear different things in church.  There are a rock-ribbed few who don’t mind getting walloped every Sunday.  There are some who come looking to have their biases and prejudices—theological and political—affirmed, approved, and celebrated from the pulpit.  These, also, are a minority, and where the Word of God is fully, faithfully, regularly proclaimed, they eventually drift away.  Among the ones who remain are people who mostly just need to hear that everything will be alright, that God loves them, and things will get better soon.  Encouragement.  Tidings of comfort and joy.  Jesus stuff.

That man with the very vocal impure spirit who simply couldn’t restrain himself, hearing Jesus, knowing Jesus was there, finally, really and truly there, shouted out—didn’t just mumble off in a corner or roll his eyes with a big, unspoken Ugh! or yawn a little louder than politeness would suggest—he shouted out: why are you here?!  What are you trying to do?!  We didn’t come here for this!  Those in the vocal minority often want to pad their numbers by saying “we”: as though the one was the spokesperson for a formidable bloc, rather than an isolated malcontent.

Jesus doesn’t respond until the impure spirit names Jesus: the Holy One of God.  “‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’” (1:25).  Who better to recognize the Holy One of God than a spirit, especially an impure spirit?  Impurity cannot tolerate purity.  Darkness cannot abide light.  Wickedness will not put up with righteousness, because the Holy One exposes the truth, reality, in ways that cannot be evaded, avoided, or hidden.  Jesus came to preach by word and deed; the preaching has the power to cleanse and heal—that’s the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus doesn’t drive the man out of the synagogue; he drives out the impure spirit.  The impure spirit cannot abide the true Word.  The man needs help.  The synagogue—the gathering of God’s people, is for those being purified, cleansed, restored.  Christ came to set free, to restore our freedom.  Only those who know their chains can know that, in Christ, their chains are gone, they’ve been set free.

“The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek” (1:26).  That’s scary stuff, especially as, not a moment before, that man looked and acted just like you or me.  Who knew?  We were just eating together, the other day!  We were talking crops and cattle just before the service!  If the man shook violently, that was because the impure spirit had such a strong, firm hold on the man, there in the gathering of God’s people.  Note that it wasn’t the man who screamed out, but the impure spirit as Jesus drove it out of the man.  I suppose you might say that the man hadn’t really been able to use his own voice for a long time, so long as that impure spirit was overruling the man, dictating his thoughts, choices, words, actions.

Jesus and the preaching of God’s Word were there in the synagogue to shine light in the darkness, to bring hope where there had been little expectancy.  Oh, change sounds fine, but you and I know that in practice, change comes hard: the old clings so tenaciously, and the desire for the new, strong as it can feel, someway doesn’t seem to be strong enough to banish the old.  We’ve ordered those impure spirits to leave time and again.  With Jesus, they no longer dominate us, yet we do still somehow allow them to overrule, all too often.

I suppose none of us expects much from eating a tiny cube of bread or taking a sip of sweet juice, nice and all as these are.  It’s a ritual, you know, a community-affirming act.  Beloved, if all these were were bread and juice, there’d really be no point even in having them—it isn’t long until lunch.  There’s nothing magical about the bread and the juice.  There is something mystical about them: a mystery, a promise that bread and juice, by faith, by the healing, freeing Spirit, become a way of accepting and receiving—welcoming—the benefits and blessings of Christ.  We don’t see the Spirit.  Sometimes we have the sense of hearing or even feeling the Spirit.  It is the Spirit that makes us alive, and alive to Christ, alive for God.  Physical creatures as we are, we respond to the physical—sound, sight, touch, smell, taste.

No one came to the synagogue that day expecting much.  They left stunned.  They came hoping maybe to encounter something of God.  They left convinced that the power and presence had been there, with them, among them, maybe, even, in them?  They all left, moved.  Christ is the power that moves us, cleanses us, claims us, uplifts us, feeds us, and presents us to God Himself as one with the Beloved.  Consider all this, today, as you participate.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.