"What Have You to Do With Us?"

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

In the gospel these are the words of a demon, speaking from within a possessed man who was accustomed to hang around the precincts of the Capernaum synagogue. The man appeared suddenly and challenged Jesus immediately, before Jesus had said a word he cried out in hostility against him. Jesus silenced the demon and exorcised the man. There was a lot of shouting, which attracted a crowd, and the crowd was mightily impressed by what they called Jesus’ “authority.” They conjectured that it might be a new, authoritative teaching, and in any case began the usual gossip that spread his reputation and eventually made it impossible for Jesus to function in that district. The demon knew better than the crowd what was going on, and that this was not just a new authoritative teaching but rather the Holy One of God Himself come into their bailiwick to set their prisoners free. The crowd knew only the category of teaching, which one can take or leave as one pleases, the demons knew that this is it, the time to pay up or shut up, to fight or to run. They ran!

So the answer to the urgent question, “What do you have to do with us?” is, “Everything, because now is the hour and your life is on the line. Either you shut up and listen, or you go!” They chose to leave rather than submit, to continue their unhappy interference with the work of God wherever else they might find opportunity. And the crowd thought that this was a matter of a different teaching, a disagreement about interpretation, while the demon knew that it was a clash between the almighty rule of God and the doomed and despairing rule of Satan.

The Gospel of Mark presents the work of Jesus as one long conflict, beginning with the explicit confrontation in the wilderness with Satan himself, then moving to the battle against Satan’s minions, the demons, then with Satan’s powers that inflict sickness, hunger, and death, and culminating in the most powerful Satanic agents of all, the human beings who represent religion, the Scribes, Pharisees, and Priests. One after another the stories in the Gospel present the opposition, devious and relentless, gossiping, accusing, misrepresenting, and plotting, until their apparent triumph in the Crucifixion, where the opposite of our gospel event today takes place, the humans silence Jesus and drive him out. So the first point to be made is that the coming of Jesus is always a confrontation with the powers of evil which protest and resist. There is no peace for the Prince of Peace in his work to rescue us from the power of the demonic and bring in the Kingdom of God. For this reason Mark’s Gospel especially emphasizes the doings rather than the sayings of Jesus, and what Jesus does is to make the Kingship of God present in his own self. For that reason the kingdom of Satan resists him, and the demons cry out.

We could pause here to speculate on the nature of the demonic, asking questions like, “Is there really a Satan and his demons, and if so what precisely are they?” We could canvas alternative explanations of their reality, - they are angels who turned to the dark side and exist out there somewhere and also in here and work always to destroy or mar the creatures of God. Or they are mythic symbols of human experience that has psychological and sociological but not metaphysical reality. We could take up all out time with such theoretical questions, but I do not think we should do that today, perhaps another time. Today I want to take the question “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” as our cue and ask for its existential rather than its metaphysical truth, that is, I want us to hear that question as if it came from yourself and myself. In the course of thinking about this matter in terms of the story I believe that an important aspect of the nature of the demonic will become evident.

Do you ever respond so defensively to Jesus when he draws near?   Have you ever been so aware of his proximity and his demand that it has provoked a deep, defensive hostility in you? Let’s imagine the scene. There is a troubled man who hangs around the synagogue. He’s a part of the scene, sometimes he joins in worship, but mostly he is just there. Those of us in the ministry can all recall such people. They are often harmless, frequently a burden in demanding clergy time to listen to their troubles –also unaffectionately known as “black holes,” - and sometimes they are actively destructive to the community, sowing discontent and hostility. Then Jesus comes on the scene and the pathetic man’s problem reaches a crisis. Jesus can cleanse and heal him, but he resists; he does not want to be cleansed and healed if it means letting his demons go and letting Jesus take control of his life. He responds to Jesus’ presence from the other place in him, the strange place within, where his other self reacts in panic to the prospect of getting well. Jesus speaks not to one but to two or more persons in that one resisting, defensive man. The grammatical number of the pronouns is revealing. “What have you to do with us (pl)? … Have you come to destroy us (pl.)?.…I (sing.) know who you are?” Who is speaking here, many or one?  The poor man cannot keep it together; he slips back and forth from one identity to another. He is many and he is one, and he is afraid.

Instead of proposing explanatory templates from modern psychology, like multiple personality syndrome, or satanic abuse syndrome, or brain lesions, or chemical imbalances, I propose that we treat the man as spiritually wounded but otherwise mostly intact. Let us regard his fragmentation into several persons, his estrangement from himself self, his inability to control his own will, as symptoms of spiritual sickness rather than merely mental health problems. They certainly are the latter but those problems may be the lesser manifestation of disease. Self estrangement is far more telling of spiritual disorder, and an extreme allergy to Jesus shows that his sickness is the sickness unto death that underlies every other suffering in the world. He does not know the seriousness of his problem before he meets Jesus and then he sees that his estrangement from himself is merely the register of a far deeper and direr estrangement, the estrangement from God. The NT is full of this testimony that only God Himself can show us our alienation from God, our true wretchedness and need, and to see that wretchedness and need by the light of God is to be half way home to healing.

So I urge you today to listen to the Gospel. Jesus comes to you and you say defensively, “What do you have to do with me? Go away and leave me alone! I am fine! I have grown used to my pain! I would rather go to hell than admit that I am spiritually maimed and need you to take charge of my life!” Jesus replies, “Shut up and come out of him/her!” “And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him (vs. 26).”

We do not know precisely what is going on here, but we do know that Jesus is cleansing and healing a man, and if he did that then in the synagogue of Capernaum he will do that now in the sanctuary of Woodside Village Church. We don’t need to know precisely what demons are because we know that whatever they are they are real in our experience. We all know what it is like to live apart from oneself, with rooms in our selves that we dare not enter, where the wild things are, and the sad things. We all know what its like to present one face to the crowd, another to the family and a shame face to oneself. (In South Africa the traditional figures of demons are always two-faced).

I leave you with this reference to our passage from the Apostle (1 Corinthians 8: 1-13). There are many gods and many lords, but for us there is only one God present as one Lord, Jesus Christ. These other gods are the nothings that haunt our lives, the idols, of self-esteem, flattery, power, avarice, lust, envy, and so on and so forth. When the one God comes to you, joyously receive Him and allow him to silence the false gods within, whom you worship and thus allow to fracture your self fatally. Like the pathetic synagogue drone, receive the one God, one self, one love, one destination, and one joy.

Amen.