Well, today’s readings take us on quite a journey, and perhaps take us to places we’re not entirely comfortable with.
In Deuteronomy we have a prophet promised, a text we might interpret as referring to Jesus, and then some uncomfortable reading about the fate of false-prophets.
From Revelation we have mystical, mysterious and mythical verses. John’s writing in this book can never be taken at face value, but again our interpretation would be that this poetic birth refers to Jesus.
And then in the Gospel we have Jesus beginning his ministry, he’s been baptised, spent his time in the wilderness and now he’s ready to go public. Mark’s account of this, as we heard this morning, includes a demonic possession and exorcism, and whilst our contemporary interpretations with our modern, scientific minds would try and interpret demonic possession as something more worldly, we do a disservice to the gospel when we don’t acknowledge that the world we’re shown here is one that does believe in demons, there’s 4 exorcisms in Mark even though it's the shortest of the gospels. This probably leaves us, like those present in the synagogue, asking “what is this”.
But I’m not, you’ll hopefully be glad to hear, planning on analysing the nature of biblical possession this morning. I must admit when I read the texts for today I was thinking, like the synagogue congregation, “what is this” and more pressingly, what does this say to us today, on this final Sunday of Epiphany as we come to the end of the Christmas season?
The mystery and joy of the Incarnation and of the Christmas story are intimately woven through these readings. We have Moses promising a prophet from amongst God’s own people, our very human Messiah, but then we have John’s poetic, mystical retelling of God being born of a human woman, a child who escapes evil and returns to God.
The Gospel reading brings these two things together and shows us the reality of what the incarnation means as Jesus stands up to publicly declare his ministry has begun, and is immediately confronted with something we’d interpret as evil. An evil which immediately identifies who Jesus is, and an evil which Jesus immediately overcomes.
The possessed man is restored to who he was or who he should be, which is what I think a relationship with Jesus, the incarnate God, does for us. We each have a concept of God the Father, or the creator, whichever language you find the most helpful, and for me that aspect of God is awesome and endless and everywhere, so vast and entwined in everything, for all time, that it can be hard to comprehend.
In Jesus God becomes knowable, relatable, and we have a person with whom it becomes more comprehendible that we can have relationship with them, a relationship God wants to have with us, the ultimate goal of which is for God to delight in us and for us to delight in God. It’s a relationship of healing and restoration where, as it deepens, we get closer to seeing ourselves as God sees us, and move closer to fulfilling our potential as the people the creator created us to be.
Jesus restored a demon-possessed man to his true self. Our demons might not be quite so literal but this is God’s deepest desire and yearning for our lives. Whilst we might not believe in evil as it’s presented to us in today’s gospel there’s many things in the world and in our lives we would perhaps call evil.
There’s the big things like war in the Middle East, child soldiers, institutional racism and misogyny, human trafficking and climate destruction, all huge evils in our world, but what I’m reflecting upon today is more personal, more everyday. Things which touch us personally. What are the evils in our everyday life that interfere with our relationship with God?
Each of us have to deal with things which can prevent us from fully leaning into our relationship with God. Things that are preventing us from being the “us” God knows we can become. Some are bigger than others, such as addiction or illness, chronic pain or mental health concerns. But there’s also the more mundane, the things we think are a barrier between us and God, and because we believe they are a barrier, they are.
Short tempers, bad parenting choices, bad financial choices, sexual shame. The evil in these things can be how our less than ideal choices make us feel about ourselves, or how we judge others we see exhibiting them. A bad choice doesn’t make us a bad person, but we can convince ourselves that we are, and that makes the barrier between us and God.
One of the things Huw wanted to instil in us when he arrived is that it’s ok to be vulnerable and it’s ok to make mistakes. It’s all part of being human, and in many cases it’s how we grow and learn. I can’t help thinking about how in today’s gospel Jesus expels evil from within a congregation, a community which probably had complexities, relationships and came together in ways not too dissimilar to our own.
The life Jesus models for us – the life the Trinity models for us – is one of community. We’re not just called to be vulnerable and break down the walls between ourselves and God, but also with each other. To grow as God intends is to grow personally but also communally.
Growing together is how we work towards a world where those bigger evils simply cannot exist, to model a way of living and being in the world that rejects evil by accepting each other, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies, knowing that with Jesus as our companion through life we’re standing with the source of all love and all power, we stand with a God who chose to come and stand here, with us, and share our lives, to live as we live.
As these last few days of the Christmas season pass by and we head so quickly this year into Lent, we go from Jesus standing by us in our wilderness, negotiating day-to-day life, to us standing by him in his wilderness, along with all the evil he was confronted by. This is what it means to be in relationship, to journey together, to share the highs, lows, sadness and celebrations, and as we live and grow, with Jesus and each other, we move ever closer to that revelation of hopefully seeing ourselves, and each other, as God sees us, fully ourselves, fully loved by God and knowing there is no evil that in that relationship, the eternal dance of love, cannot be silenced and cast out.
