by James Martin
DURING MY JESUIT PHILOSOPHY studies at Loyola University Chicago, I studied Greek. My first course was Introduction to Ancient Greek, taught by an energetic young Greek professor and archaeologist named Paul Rehak; the second was a one-on-one tutorial focused on the Gospels, taught by Wendy Cotter, CSJ, a Catholic sister and New Testament scholar. Gradually, I learned the brand of Greek called koinē, or common Greek, used in the New Testament.
One of the first passages I translated with Wendy was from the Gospel of Mark: the electrifying story of Jesus healing a man in the synagogue at Capernaum. (In Luke, the story takes place immediately after the Rejection in Nazareth.) Buried within that story was an unusual phrase that has stayed with me, almost twenty-five years after first encountering it.
Jesus and his disciples enter Capernaum, after having left Nazareth. The small town will now be his base. (Matthew calls it tēn idian polin, “his own town.”4)
On the Sabbath, Jesus goes to the synagogue euthus, immediately.5 He has decided to begin his ministry in the place of teaching and instruction. Once again Mark’s use of euthus gives Jesus’s life a breathless, urgent quality. The impression is of a man who felt he had a great deal to do, and perhaps not a great deal of time in which to do it.
Immediately before this, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has just called on Peter, Andrew, James, and John by the Sea of Galilee. It’s easy to imagine the scene: the erstwhile fishermen, still unused to the role of disciples, trying to keep pace with Jesus; the curious onlookers in the synagogue wondering what their new neighbor will say; and others trying assiduously not to pay undue attention to this upstart. At the time, anyone with sufficient learning could be invited to teach in the synagogue; one needn’t have had any sort of formal ordination or official credentials.6
So the fact that Jesus spoke in the synagogue indebted no one to show him any special honor. But ignoring Jesus will prove impossible. As in Nazareth, those in the synagogue in Capernaum are “astounded” at his teaching. (The Greek word exeplēssonto is variously translated as “struck with panic,” “amazed,” “astounded,” or “overwhelmed with astonishment.”) Such a dramatic response is another characteristic of Mark’s portrait of Jesus. Surprise, wonder, fear, awe, astonishment, amazement, or similar reactions from the crowds and the disciples occur again and again in his Gospel. Donahue and Harrington note that this establishes a rapport with the reader, who would also be amazed by what he or she was reading.7
What it felt like to be in the presence of Jesus is difficult for the Gospels to convey. But Mark tries. People are amazed not simply by his miracles, but by what he says. Such descriptions and the frequent use of words like “astounded” give us a glimpse into his incredible charisma.
Then, euthus again, something dramatic happens. A man with an “unclean spirit” enters the synagogue or makes himself known to the crowd. In the Jewish tradition, “unclean” is one way of speaking about the demonic. It means something out of place in a spiritual sense, not in order, and in this case something opposed to the holy.8 Mark will also use the word “demon,” the Greek way of speaking about the same reality.
The possessed man sees Jesus and cries out, Ti hēmin kai soi, Iēsou Nazarēne?
It’s a mysterious mix of words about which translators differ. A strictly literal translation would be: “What to us and to you?” It is sometimes rendered as “What have you to do with us?” Another translation has, “What is there between us and you?”9 Or, “What have we to do with you?”10 Or perhaps, “Who are you to us?” The use of the plural “us” is also a frightening tipoff to readers, indicating that the man is possessed by many demons, like the Gerasene demoniac in a later chapter, who shouts at Jesus, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”
When I first read this passage with Wendy Cotter, I was immediately taken by the force of that hard-to-translate question, as if the jumble of words reflected the man’s incoherent rantings. This striking phrase reminded me of times when I was so angry I could hardly speak, could barely get the words out. The possessed man virtually spits his words at Jesus. Even his use of “Nazarene,” which some translate as “you Nazarene” captures some of his contempt. “Who the hell are you to us?” could be a modern translation.
Then, strangely, the possessed man says, or shouts, something sensible. “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Here, in the first chapter of Mark, someone speaks the identity of Jesus. “Have you come to destroy us?” The demons who inhabit the man intuit something essential about Jesus.
The onlookers must have been baffled. They must have asked themselves, “Yes, who is this?”
On a retreat years ago I wondered if perhaps the demon was trying to tempt Jesus through pride—that is, “I know who you are: the Holy One of God. Tell everyone else who you are.” If this is so, Jesus, as in the desert, rejects this temptation.
Jesus confidently rebukes the spirit and orders him to leave the poor man. “Be silent,” he says (literally, “muzzle yourself”), “and come out of him!” The spirit throws the man on the ground and with a great cry comes out of him.
The people are again “amazed” and give voice to what they were probably wondering all along: “What is this?” They marvel at the exorcism and Jesus’s teaching, which, the crowd says, comes “with authority.”
The teaching and the healing are inextricably connected. Jesus’s deeds lend authority to his words, and authenticate them: someone who can drive out demons is surely someone to listen to, and what he says must be true. And his words help to explain his deeds; since his preaching is about the reign of God, his healings must somehow be a manifestation of the coming of that reign. As Raymond Brown writes, “Teaching and an exercise of divine power in healing and driving out demons are united in the proclamation of the kingdom, implying that the coming of God’s rule is complex.”11
The crowd also must have marveled at the way the exorcism was accomplished: without any of the complicated incantations or rituals that other wonder-workers used—without even a touch. This man did this with just his words. Jesus’s speech is more powerful than the demonic power. And his words effect what he says.
No wonder they were amazed.
HERE IS A CRITICAL question to ask about the Gospels: How is an intelligent, rational, modern-day person to understand tales about possessions? For healings and exorcisms are an important part of Jesus’s ministry. As Meier says in A Marginal Jew:
The statement that Jesus acted as and was viewed as an exorcist and healer during his public ministry has as much historical corroboration as almost any other statement we can make about the Jesus of history. Indeed, as a global affirmation about Jesus and his ministry it has much better attestation than many other assertions made about Jesus, assertions that people often take for granted.12
To understand what Jesus is doing we have to examine what he’s confronting. Who does Jesus encounter when meeting someone with an “unclean” spirit or possessed by a “demon”?
William Barclay proposes two sensible possibilities. Either we relegate demonic possession to the realm of primitive thought and conclude that this was a way of understanding illness in a prescientific era, or we accept the action of the demonic both in the New Testament and today. And, notes Barclay, in the case of the former, we still need to plumb Jesus’s actions. Did Jesus know more about such things than did the people of his time? On the one hand, Jesus is fully divine and so may have enjoyed an awareness unknown to any of his contemporaries—or to us. On the other hand, if we say that he somehow understood more about science and medicine than others, we’re contradicting the belief that Jesus was fully human, with a human consciousness, and that he needed to be taught something before he could know it.
Here’s one way to think about it. First, some of the possessions in the Gospels seem rather to be the manifestation of physical illness. I’m not speaking about Jesus healing someone who is truly under the sway of demonic forces, but about the healing of those called “possessed” who ar
e in reality suffering from a purely physical ailment. There is, for example, the compelling story of a distraught father, told in all three Synoptic Gospels, who brings to Jesus a boy who is called epileptic.13 The father’s love for his son and his anguish over the boy’s illness will resonate with anyone who has seen a child suffer.
Desperate, the father kneels at Jesus’s feet and describes the condition: “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he says, “for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; he often falls into the fire and often into the water.”14 But when the boy is healed, Jesus is described as giving a “rebuke” to “the demon,” which came out of him “instantly.”
So here the ancient mind attributes to a demon what we now attribute to a physiological condition. It conflates possession with illness.15 That would be an example of Barclay’s first possibility.
Still, Jesus heals the boy of a terrible condition that has caused great suffering to him and his father, which is the point of the story. It remains miraculous.
But there are some Gospel stories that still, two thousand years later, do not lend themselves so easily to scientific explanations—stories in which the demon is able to identify Jesus as the Messiah at a time when others around him (including his closest followers) still have no clue; stories in which the demons speak of themselves, oddly, in the plural, as when they identify themselves as “legion”; stories in which the demons enable people to do frightening physical feats, such as bursting through chains. These accounts still have the ability to send a shiver up our spines, for there is something decidedly otherworldly about them.
In our own day too, there are some credible stories of possessions that defy rational explanations. Since entering the Jesuits, I have read about and heard reports from rational and reliable witnesses who have assisted at exorcisms and who have seen terrifying things that defy logical explanation. Perhaps someday we will have further scientific explanations, but to my mind the possibility of possessions is not hard to believe. Understanding it is quite another thing.
From an infinitely less threatening vantage point, I’ve done enough spiritual counseling to witness the effects of evil in people’s lives—evil that is more than something from within them and that seems to exhibit similar characteristics from person to person. That is, there is a certain sameness to the way that people describe this force. St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his classic sixteenth-century text The Spiritual Exercises, once delineated the three ways that the “enemy of human nature” acts: like a spoiled child (making a person act childishly, selfishly, refusing to take no for an answer), like a “false lover” (tempting the person to conceal bad motives or sinful behaviors), or like an “army commander” (attacking a person at his or her weakest point). Such descriptions ring true for those who have experienced them.
I believe in the presence of evil as a real and coherent force opposed to God and one that can sometimes overtake people, but not necessarily in the popular conception of the devil. As C. S. Lewis said, when asked if he believed in the devil, “I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is, ‘Yes, I do.’”16
No matter how you envision the power of evil, there is an important theological point in this Gospel story. Jesus enters into a struggle that goes beyond his healing of the boy. Harrington writes, “Jesus is engaged in a battle with cosmic significance. He struggles against and overcomes the chaotic forces of nature, Satan, sickness, and death. In this respect his acts of power are part of his mission to proclaim and make present the kingdom of God.”17
And no matter how you understand some of these possession stories, the point is that the crowds saw a man named Jesus heal a person who was either sick or possessed. Either way it’s not surprising that Mark describes the crowds who have witnessed the exorcism as ethambēthēsan, amazed. It was amazing and still is.
DESPITE PEOPLE’S LACK OF direct experience with exorcisms these scenes prove surprisingly easy for people to meditate on. To begin with, they are easy to imagine. People have seen enough dramatic portrayals to concoct an image of the violent person spitting imprecations at Jesus. Also, almost all of us feel at some point that we would like God to rid us of our “demons.” We’re not “possessed” like the poor man in the story, but we desperately want Jesus to rid us of whatever seems in opposition to God’s desires for us. We feel that something is not in the right place, out of order, opposed to the holy.
On one retreat, I imagined the enthusiastic new disciples entering the synagogue in Capernaum and jockeying for position. Suddenly the demoniac enters—from outside the synagogue—racing in and throwing himself before Jesus. The crowd is terrified. Since the disciples are new, they probably are too. Jesus is not.
The incident seems a harsh, almost violent, one. The demoniac spits out his curses at Jesus. Jesus shouts, “Be silent, and come out of him!” and with a loud cry the demon immediately throws the man on the ground. In response, the astonished congregation bursts into loud shouts of praise, of confusion, of wonder, all the while talking and gesticulating, trying to understand what they have seen. It is a noisy scene.
But maybe it wasn’t that way at all in Capernaum.
At one point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart.”18 So perhaps in the synagogue that day Jesus acted more quietly than we suspect. Isn’t it possible that when Jesus saw the terrible force that consumed the man, he first paused in silent pity, as any compassionate person would do when faced with such torment? Maybe Jesus simply turned to the man and said quietly, “Come out of him.”
That passage from Matthew may also give us a glimpse into Jesus’s inner life. Despite his fiery preaching, his passionate opposition to oppression, and, yes, his physically tossing the merchants out of the Temple, Jesus describes himself as “gentle.” Another translation uses “meek.” So perhaps when confronting the unclean man, Jesus was calmer than we normally picture him.
During another retreat, I imagined Jesus slowly removing his prayer shawl, standing up, and approaching the man in utter silence before ordering the spirit out of him. Some of the most effective responses to anger and violence can be a confident peace and a quiet trust in God. Maybe that’s what astonished the crowds.
“WHO ARE YOU TO us?” was the English-language translation that Wendy Cotter and I finally settled on during our tutorial in New Testament Greek. Who is God to us? One answer is compassion, forgiveness, and mercy, even when we feel we deserve them the least.
Jesus’s healing of the man in the synagogue was immediate. Our own healings, however, usually don’t happen euthus. And this is a source of sadness for many of us. We desperately long for something as instantaneous as what Jesus offered to the man. And I’m not talking simply about physical healings.
For many years I’ve struggled with a variety of sinful patterns and selfish attitudes: pride, ambition, and a selfishness that is masked as self-care. And I’ve worked hard—through prayer, spiritual direction, and even therapy—to rid myself of, or at least to lessen, these “demons.” But moving away from deeply rooted tendencies is a long process that takes work and requires patience. Conversion takes time. Most of all, you must trust that God wants you to change every bit as much as Jesus wanted to help the man in the synagogue.
Yet I still sin. I try to avoid vanity, but I find myself vain, despite myself. I try not to be mean-spirited, but sarcastic words fly out of my mouth as if of their own accord. In prayer I wonder: Where does this come from? Why am I still like this? When will these demons leave me? St. Paul’s words return to me: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”19
Once I was so frustrated about an unhealthy aspect of my personality that I knelt on the floor and begged God to change me as quickly as Jesus had changed the man. As in the case of the unclean spirit, what reason would God have for not exorcising that part of me? Why wouldn’t God do this euthus? After an hour, waiting, I rose from the floor, the same person as before
.
A few months later, I was speaking to a spiritual director, lamenting this. Why wouldn’t God heal me as quickly as Jesus had healed the man in the synagogue? Who was God to me, if God couldn’t do this?
The spiritual director pointed to a tree outside his window. “See that tree?” he said.
I nodded.
“What color is it?”
I knew he was leading me to an obvious answer that I couldn’t yet see.
“Green,” I said. “It’s a green tree.”
“In the fall it will be red,” he said.
And I knew this. I had seen that very tree in the middle of a New England autumn. It was a glorious scarlet.
“And no one sees it change,” he said.
Conversion happens most often in a slow, deliberate, and mysterious way, like a tree changing colors in the fall. And often you can’t see the change in yourself.
But change comes. About ten years after I entered the Jesuits, I realized that I no longer was as envious of others as I had once been. Certainly I still fall prey to that tendency, but before entering the Jesuits, envy was something I confronted daily—sometimes hourly. Over time, with prayer and reflection that led to greater self-understanding, it had evaporated. One day I noticed it simply wasn’t there. It was grace, and it had as much to do with God’s desire to heal me as it did with my “working” on it. For if we open ourselves to the workings of grace, God will heal us of whatever prevents us from living fully and freely. To me, this is the meaning of conversion.
Ti hēmin kai soi? “Who are you to us?” We can ask that question of God today, just as the man in the synagogue asked it of Jesus centuries ago. And we can hear the same answer, spoken in the language of faith: God is the possibility of healing, conversion, and, most of all, of new life.
* * *
THE HEALING OF THE MAN WITH THE UNCLEAN SPIRIT
Mark 1:21–28