Sunday, January 29, 2012: Mark 1:21–28

My daughter was eating lunch with a friend at an inner-city diner when they saw a painfully thin young woman stagger down the center of street outside, her face and limbs contorted and flailing, her eyes rolled back into her head. Soon a police car pulled up. An officer cautiously approached the woman, whose limbs were moving spastically. After four more squad cars had arrived, police began searching the woman for drugs or other clues to her odd behavior. Finally they handcuffed her, led her to a police car and drove her away. This woman's affliction may have been drug-related or it may have been caused by a physical ailment.

The man in the synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus was teaching had "an unclean spirit." What was he doing in the temple? Had he come to disrupt Jesus' teaching or challenge his ministry? This spirit recognized Jesus immediately, named him Jesus of Nazareth and predicted its own end: "Have you come to destroy us?" Jesus—the "one who has authority," who knows the mind of God and who lives out God's will—commanded the spirit to be silent and to come out of the man. The crowd recognized and commented on his authority.

The dramatic way in which the man is convulsed while being exorcised and the cries that he utters distance us from him just as my daughter was distanced from the woman on the street by being behind a pane of restaurant glass. Both the man and the woman are spectacles, one on the street and one in the temple, and we cannot help but stare, most of us unable to wrap our minds around what it might mean to be demon-possessed or convulsing from an overdose of drugs.