His Ministry Begins:
Jesus Encounters
an Unclean Spirit

by BJ Brown
Pastoral Associate

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of superhero movies. I guess I need to keep seeing the triumph of good over evil. But I’m not watching the multi-episode Marvel or Justice League franchises; I prefer stand-alone stories. I want to see evil overcome in a single story arc. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of today’s gospel. It’s Jesus’s first public appearance after his baptism and after calling two sets of brothers as his first disciples. In his very first act of public ministry, Jesus casts out an unclean spirit with two short, sharp exclamations: “Quiet! Come out of him!”

But in truth, there’s more to the story that this passage of Mark’s gospel tells than a one quick, dramatic moment.

Today’s gospel (Mark 1:21-28) is the first of a three part series. Casting out this unclean spirit is immediately followed by part two, Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-29, next week’s gospel). Then after a very brief interlude for prayer, in part three Jesus heals a leper (Mark 1:40-45, the following week’s gospel). And so we have one of those scriptural sandwiches, a series of three stories with the middle one being the most important, the one that sheds light on the two stories that precede and follow it.

You might think then, that these twenty-four verses should be read all at once, as a single Sunday’s gospel, since they are meant to be understood together. But whatever committee composed our Sunday lectionary decided to read the three stories that make up Jesus’s first day of public ministry over the course of three weeks. They must have thought that each episode was worth lingering over, that each one on its own had something important to teach us. But what?

It’s certainly not anything that Jesus taught in these three stories, because the stories are all about action. Today’s gospel tells us twice—once at the beginning of the story and then again at the end—that the people of Capernaum were astonished at his teaching, amazed that Jesus taught with authority. There is nothing at all in this passage about what Jesus actually taught the astonished crowd. In fact, the crowd’s reactions to Jesus are told in such a way that they create another scriptural sandwich, with the crowd’s reaction bracketing and drawing our attention to Jesus’s encounter with the unclean spirit in the middle. So the center point, the climax, of today’s gospel is not what Jesus says, it’s what he does when he encounters evil. And that’s what we need to pay the most attention to.

In Matthew’s gospel and in Luke’s, the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry is preceded by his meeting with Satan alone in the desert. Mark tells the story of Jesus’s first face-off with evil differently. Those differences make all the difference for the disciples Jesus will later send out with “authority over unclean spirits” (Mark 6:7) and for us.

First, notice the way evil is described: it is an “unclean spirit” that possesses the unfortunate man. With an unclean spirit, the man would not be welcome in the synagogue; he would be kept firmly separated from his community. This is how evil divides the human family, separating us from each other. By casting out the unclean evil spirit, Jesus draws the man back in where he belongs. Jesus restores the man once again to his community.

Second, Jesus’s encounter with evil doesn’t happen alone in a remote place in the desert. It’s public, in the synagogue, right in the middle of ordinary life. This is an especially important point, because our own encounters with evil are seldom lonely or dramatic. We most often encounter evil right in the middle of our ordinary, everyday lives.

It’s tempting to think that we can, as Jesus does in this story, eradicate evil with a single command, a landmark Supreme Court ruling, one or even a hundred executive orders.  But rooting out the evil that permeates our common life is much more like dealing with dandelions—uproot them in one place only to find them sprouting up and flourishing across the yard. Outlaw discrimination in public transit and the workplace only to find the countless silent ways that prejudice precludes access and inclusion in so many aspects of public life. Grant the right to vote, and onerous burdens of identification and distance will prevent poor people from exercising their rights at the polls.

Finally, in Mark’s gospel there are no temptations, just Jesus’s quick and clear mastery of evil. But that observation should not become a temptation to us. While today’s gospel may be the first, it is not the last time that Jesus—or his disciples—will cast out unclean spirits. Our own resistance to evil must be long and painstaking, one step, one day at a time—neither a single command nor a single story arc. Overcoming evil must be as familiar and frequent as our prayer to “deliver us from evil.”

Today’s gospel plots the arc of our own story of overcoming the evil we encounter. We must refuse to yield to the unclean and destructive forces that divide us. We must know that our resistance will not be a single dramatic act, but must become, to borrow the Jesuit phrase, our ordinary way of proceeding. And we are reminded that we do not act alone, for from the first act to the last, evil will be driven out by Jesus, the Holy One of God.