Abstract
What is the gospel? What exactly is the good news?
The writer of Mark’s Gospel says it’s the creation of new life in God. But before this new life can begin, the evil that presently controls the world must be destroyed. This evil is having a devastating effect. It makes people ill and disabled. It makes the world a place of hunger and deformity and separation and death. And it’s parasitic because it lives off what God has created. And destroys it. So what destroys must be destroyed.
An important thing to remember is that the Gospels weren’t written for us. They were written for first-century people coming to grips with the implications of Christ’s ministry—his life, death and resurrection. We need to bear this in mind when we read about the writer of Mark’s Gospel portraying evil in terms of demons, which live in people. It’s his way of talking about all that can go wrong inside us. It’s demonic, he says. The work of demons. So they must be destroyed. And Jesus is the one who will destroy them. Once they are destroyed and evil is overcome, then God’s new life can take hold.
Mark gives these demons a voice. The first one to speak (1:24) makes it clear what Jesus has come to do: ‘You have come to destroy us’. And the demons get it right. God’s rule will destroy them. It will destroy those who destroy. What’s more, this particular confrontation happened in a synagogue. So we understand that Jesus will confront the demonisation of any law, even religious law, which creates hurt through exclusion and division—between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, males and females. Jesus has come to end all this. He will build a new temple. Not even religion will get between us and God.
But how will God do this? How will God destroy the evil of this world and eliminate everything that prevents us realizing the presence of God in our lives? How can God get at us to extinguish our demons?
To get the answer we have to change the way we think. We have to accept that whatever God will do, He won’t do it the way we would because God’s thoughts and ways are as far from ours as earth is from heaven. For a start, God’s idea of power isn’t like ours. Our idea of power is something that dominates and sweeps all before it. But God’s power is the exact opposite. For God, power lies in what we see as weakness. So what happens is that Jesus will destroy the demons, not by means of power as we understand power, but through weakness. He will destroy all that destroys by being destroyed himself.
So, piece by piece, Jesus is stripped of all the things we associate with power—achievement, status, and success. And affirmation. As we hear in the Gospel passage for today, his mother and his brothers declared him to be mad. And so it continued. The Pharisees and Herodians set out to destroy him because they thought he was evil. The scribes from Jerusalem thought he was in league with the devil. His disciples ran away. One of them betrayed him. The one they called the Rock disowned him, to a female slave. The Jewish Council said he was a blasphemer. People thought he was the last—the dregs, the bottom, a deluded mad prophet, a would-be destroyer of the Temple, a deranged healer, a neurotic.
And at the end God didn’t give him anything to say. All Jesus can do is to quote Psalm 22. His last words, according to Mark, were that God had abandoned him. He died with nothing, not even any clothes. He had nothing to call his own. He was a crucified man and a crucified man is a non-entity. And all you can do with a crucified man is to bury him.
We need to know that this is how God sees it and that this is how we must see it too. God’s ways are not our ways. Our way is that we would like to be come out on top, be top people, do well, make a name for ourselves, be a success. This is what we think, but it’s the opposite to how God thinks. Thinking of power in terms of success, accomplishments, and achievements can set us apart, create barriers. Even more, we can become apprehensive of successful people—even frightened of them. They can become for us people to be suspicious of and to stay away from.
Well, there’s no chance of that happening with Jesus crucified. He didn’t hang on to life or good will or self-respect or the allegiance of his disciples or thinking he was superior or anything that gave him power over other people. There’s only failure—failure to persuade anybody, failure to make others see the point of what he said, failure to get the disciples fully to grasp what he doing, failure to get people to hold him in high esteem, or look up to him or respect him or admire him or worship him. Or anything.
He has nothing. But here’s the point. It’s because he has nothing that there’s nothing that can come between him and us. He became weakness so that there would be common ground between us. Weakness is the currency that God has chosen by which we can relate to him. And the power that will destroy the demons is weakness, for it’s when we are weak, says Paul, that we are strong. So we must look to defeat the demons, not through our ideas of power, but though our weakness.
This is certainly how it turned out for the disciples. ‘Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine’, Jesus told them, ‘must renounce self; he must take up his cross and follow me’.
If Christ is to be with us, he will be with us in our weakness, and, here’s the key, the essence of our weakness is our renunciation of self, because the self is the home of the demons.
We can’t be with God if we’re still with ourselves. So we must be transformed, changed internally. We must become new beings, with new hearts, new attitudes, new understandings, new perceptions. To become bearers of the Spirit we must become what He is. And to become what He is, we must grapple with the hardest part of discipleship—making ourselves vulnerable. Letting go of the idea that the most important thing in life is me. With Christ we lay ourselves down, that all may find the One who laid himself down—the Christ, the last, who is first.
To this great God, whose power is in weakness and whose strength is in suffering, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all praise, thanksgiving and worship, today and to the end of time.