Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
28^th of January, 2024

Mark 1:14-20

I hope that you are feeling a little breathless. As I have said before, everything in the Gospel according to Mark happens ‘immediately’, or ‘at once,’ as Jesus, the disciples, and we readers journey without pause from the Jordan to Jerusalem. We are still within Mark’s very first chapter, and already John has appeared in the wilderness baptising; Jesus has been baptised; then driven into the wilderness and tempted; has proclaimed the coming of the kingdom at Galilee; and has called his first disciples. Now, in today’s reading, we get the beginning of what seems to be a typical day of ministry for Jesus, a day of teaching and healing.

The ways in which each of the four evangelists begin Jesus’ ministry in their versions of gospel tells us what is of most importance to each of them. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses and even greater than Moses, so in his version of the gospel Jesus begins his public ministry with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 5-7) For Luke, Jesus is the one who brings good news for the poor, so in his version Jesus initiates his ministry with the ‘Nazareth Manifesto,’ reading the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue. (Luke 4:16-21) For John, Jesus is the pre-existing glorious Word of God that became flesh and lived among us, and the Johannine Jesus begins his ministry with the miracle at Cana, where he turns a frankly ridiculous amount of water into wine. (John 2:1-11)

In the Gospel according to Mark Jesus begins his public ministry by showing that he is, in the words of John the Baptizer, ‘the one who is more powerful’. (Mark 1:7) Mark tells us that Jesus is teaching in the synagogue, but he does not give us the content of his teaching. We are simply told that people were astounded by it. This is because for Mark the content of Jesus’ teaching is the liberating power of Jesus himself. Mark shows us Jesus’ teaching in action. We are to understand it through its impact; this is teaching with authority that sets people free from everything that binds them. It heals them. It challenges and defeats evil. No oppression, no forces of evil, can stand against this new teaching.

One of the things I try to do in January, when life is quieter than usual, is read a book that demands my concentration. Over the past few weeks I have been slowly making my way through Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Hermann. One of the roles I have played in the past and hope to play again in the future is that of an emergency chaplain who provides psychological first aid after natural disasters, and in the second part of her book Hermann describes many useful tools for that work. But the reason I am talking about this book today is because of a connection an early chapter makes between the aftermath trauma and demonic possession.

Demons are everywhere in Mark’s version of the gospel. The world that he describes is filled with hostile forces, spirits that alienate people from themselves, their community, and from God. In today’s reading Jesus is in the very place in which the people of God gather to hear God’s word, and yet even here he is confronted by an unclean spirit. The unclean spirit knows who Jesus is, ‘the Holy One of God,’ and so it is afraid. ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?’ Unlike the unclean spirit, the people in the synagogue do not yet know who Jesus is, and so they are unprepared for what happens next: Jesus’ demonstration of his authority by exorcism. The time has come, and the Kingdom of God has come near; all those imprisoned by the world’s hostile forces are being set free. Presumably the man with the unclean spirit had sat in the synagogue week-in and week-out, listening to the scribes expound scripture and then going home unhealed. But in Jesus the unclean spirit is faced with the power and presence of God, and leaves the man with a loud cry.

We do not believe in demonic possession in the Uniting Church. Ministers do not receive any training in exorcisms at theological college. But we do believe that people can be held captive by forces that prevent them living abundant lives. Sometimes these forces are external: racism; sexism; poverty; a refusal to make services and spaces accessible for people with disabilities. Sometimes these forces are internal: fear; anxiety; low self-esteem; an inability to forgive those who have hurt us; an inability to trust others or ourselves. It is some of these internal forces that the book Trauma and Recovery addresses. It begins by looking at the treatment of traumatic disorders in recent history: ‘hysteria’ in the late 19^th century; ‘shellshock’ in the First World War; and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among veterans of the Vietnam War. The author argues that all of these are examples of the same syndrome: a complex post-traumatic stress disorder that also occurs among political prisoners, Holocaust survivors, the survivors of acts of terrorism and of natural disasters, and the survivors of rape and family violence. All these people have experienced traumatic events that have overwhelmed ‘the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning’.[1]

The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825 –1893), sometimes called ‘the founder of modern neurology,’ treated many women and some men for what was then called ‘hysteria’. He argued that ‘hysteria’ offered a medical explanation for stories of demonic possession, witchcraft, exorcisms, and religious ecstasy.[2] In 1880 one of Charcot’s followers said of the people Charcot treated that: ‘Among the patients locked away in the [public hospital] are many who would have been burned in former times, whose illness would have been taken for a crime’.[3] It makes sense to me that symptoms that the medieval church saw as evidence of witchcraft and demonic possession: eating disorders; uncontrollable emotional outbursts; the inability to behave ‘properly’ as one’s community expects, were the result of trauma. I am sure those who were accused of witchcraft or demonic possession had experienced a lot of trauma before those accusations were first made. Charcot was being a rational nineteenth-century Frenchman, determined to undermine the power of the Catholic Church when he made this argument, but his biases do not mean that he was wrong.

There are a few arguments that I am not making by connecting today’s reading from the Gospel according to Mark with my January reading of Trauma and Recovery. I am not arguing that the man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue in Capernaum was someone suffering from complex PTSD; that is well beyond the limits of biblical exegesis.

Nor am I arguing, when I talk about Jesus as the liberator, the one who is stronger, that following him will save us from experiencing trauma or from breaking under it. In another of my January reads Jarel Robinson-Brown, Methodist preacher, theologian, and Honorary Chaplain at King’s College London, writes: ‘We exist in a time when people are supposed to be unbreakable, and if they break, rather than calling them human we deem them weak. Resilience has become a requirement of this age, and only a handful have the wit or courage to ask of the times why resilience is necessary.’[4] I am not arguing that following Jesus makes human beings unbreakable.

Finally, I am not arguing that if we do experience trauma, do break under it, and then suffer from complex PTSD all we need to do is turn to Jesus and we will be healed. While the Uniting Church does not believe in demonic possession and does not train ministers as exorcists, it does respect the work of psychologists and psychiatrists, and ministers are trained to refer people on where they need more help than we can give. We are not a church that gives ‘Jesus’ as the simplistic answer to everything.

The argument I am making is that if trauma has left people feeling abandoned, worthless, uncared for, unable to trust in others or in their community; if, as human beings, we have broken; then, sometimes, if shared with sensitivity, the story that the church tells can contribute to healing.

The story that the church tells is that every human being is made in the image of God and is of immeasurable worth. So highly does the Creator of the cosmos value humanity that the Son of God became human in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus came to liberate humanity and the whole creation from everything that keeps us isolated from one another and from God, and so nothing that happens to us and nothing that we do can separate us from the love of God. Life is full of difficulties, and tragedies, and it always ends in death, but it is never meaningless, and in nothing that we experience are we alone. As a United Church of Canada Statement of Faith often used in the Uniting Church puts it: ‘We are not alone, we live in God’s world … In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.’

In the Gospel according to Mark we see teaching with authority that sets people free from everything that binds them. It heals them. It challenges and defeats evil. No oppression can stand against this new teaching. What was true for the man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue in Capernaum two thousand years ago is true for us. Jesus has come not to destroy us, but to liberate us. I want to encourage us to allow the story of liberation that Mark tells to become part of our own stories. Let us always remember that we are loved by God, never left alone, and set free to live. In the name of Christ the Liberator. Amen.

[1] Judith Hermann, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2015: Basic Books), p. 33.

[2] Hermann, Trauma and Recovery, p. 15.

[3] Hermann, Trauma and Recovery, p. 16.

[4] Jarel Robinson-Brown, ‘A Letter to My Nephew,’ in Ruth Hunt, ed., The Book of Queer Prophets (2021: Williams Collins), p. 100.