“Evil” is the opposite of “live” (Mark 1: 21-28)

I’m always a little nervous whenever I use the word “evil” in church, because I start to imagine the responses I’ll get if and when I do. Will people ask themselves, and each other, if this means we’ll get into public faith healings at the front rail, or will they scrutinize the message with an ear not to what is being said, but what they want to hear? In the United Church of Canada, we have moved away from naming “evil” as such, and while I’m not advocating we start bringing this term back into our services with great gusto, perhaps it is good to occasionally call it what it is – a blight on our society’s life – so that we never forget just what it is we as Christians are called upon to battle against in the world.

There are many forms of evil. We frequently paint world dictators like Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot as evil personified. But evil wears many faces, and not always human ones. For example, a few years ago my home computer was infected with a virus that wiped clean everything on my hard drive; my computer was essentially obliterated by some faceless person somewhere who’d taken the time and trouble to write a program whose sole purpose was to randomly destroy other people’s property. I don’t know who created that virus and I never will, but I had to live with the consequences of his or her malicious actions and the rather heavy financial burden of getting my computer repaired. So I call what that person did, a form of evil.

Evil has always existed, and will continue to exist in the world. In today’s Gospel story, we read about how Jesus confronted evil during His earliest ministry. Mark recounts how Jesus strode with confidence into the Capernaum synagogue and began teaching, a remarkable feat in those days as Jesus was not yet recognized as a teacher, a rabbouni, and therefore had no authority to do that. But then He was called out by a demon, demanding to know what business Jesus had here. The demon even went so far as to call Jesus, “the Holy One of God”, effectively spilling the secret truth about Him before Jesus had a more opportune moment to do it Himself. The demon was trying to infect people’s minds with doubts and confusion over Jesus’ true identity and thus, destroy His mission.

Simply using the word “demon” is sufficient for us to agree that its actions – indeed, its very presence – denoted evil. But that would only be a surface assessment of what the demon stood for. A closer reading of Mark’s Gospel indicates that the demon symbolized complacency, an effort at trying to protect the status quo from the intrusion of the Messiah into the world. That’s why it demanded that Jesus tell the people what He was there for in the first place: was it to destroy the people’s faith in the synagogue, it hinted? The demon was trying to plant suspicion and fear in the hearts and minds of the people so that they would not listen to Jesus and would thus not recognize just how much damage the demon was doing to their faith every day. That was the evil.

Fear, suspicion, mistrust… just like our New Testament ancestors, these are the things with which we must all deal, sometimes on a daily basis. They have, unfortunately, become an all-too-common reality in our lives. We have been taught from an early age to be wary and to be aware; this is good advice, but it can easily become corrupted into an overpowering fearfulness if we let it. Fear is everpresent, and it chokes all the good out of living. We are warned not to enjoy ourselves too much, because someone might come along and take it away from us. Evil exists in the emotions of fear, suspicion and mistrust; therefore, evil is the direct opposite of both life and living.

To return to my example of my wrecked computer, that was actually the second time in six years that an emailed virus had wiped me out. Now there are some who would point that out and then exclaim that this is proof that it’s too dangerous to be connected to the Internet; they fear what might happen if they went online. Or as another example, look at international terrorism. It has made some people too scared to travel; they’re afraid of being killed by Muslim extremists.

But perhaps the most insidious example of fearful living is right here in our Christian churches: we’re afraid to speak about Jesus Christ outside of the church building for fear of what others might think or say about us if we do. They might think we suddenly “got all religious” and are now trying to convert them, so we keep our faith and our beliefs to ourselves. Staying silent appears to be the safer route to be on, except… that’s the same path the demon who confronted Jesus tried to extol as being best. The demon’s outburst was an attempt to convince the others in the synagogue that staying right where they were – essentially, living in complacency – was far better than hearing Jesus teach them new things about God’s love.

That, of course, is a lie. A life lived in fear and/or complacency is not much of a life, as it has succumbed to a form of evil, the evil of not wanting to look outside whatever boundaries have been set up. Thankfully, that is not what Jesus was proclaiming. Jesus preached the Good News of God’s love for all, and of justice and salvation for the poor and oppressed. Jesus preached an all-inclusive love that has no boundaries. So when the demon tried to plant suspicion and fear in the minds of the congregation, that was when Jesus told it to shut up and get out. He would not allow it to suck the life out of the people, for Jesus came to proclaim new life to all. He came so that people could live and live freely as God’s beloved children! Jesus’ message to live is the exact opposite of the evil espoused by the demon.

Best of all, after Jesus exorcised the demon, the people in the synagogue realized the truth behind His teachings: that Jesus wasn’t some sort of magician, but a speaker of both wisdom and truth. They had been freed from their enslavement to fear and from the complacent (and incorrect) notion that because they were God’s Chosen People, they could do almost anything at all and get away with it because God would love them and only them. The people could now see that staying where they’d always been mentally as well as spiritually, was actually choking the life out of their faithful living; this was what the demon had tried to capitalize on, and had failed. Was it any wonder the people felt liberated enough to start spreading the news about Jesus far and wide? Just like the possessed man after his exorcism, they had been freed. They were now alive!

Likewise, we have also been freed, freed from the various other demons which haunt our daily living. In our society, the possessed man from the synagogue can easily be representative of those people who slough off religion and church with the words, “It’s my choice not to go. I’m comfortable with who I am and with what I have. Leave me alone with all your Jesus talk.” Those are the possessed today, yet those are the same ones into whose lives Jesus comes. His is the power of new life, not of staying the same. Jesus was, is and shall always be the one to silence the demons, to offer hope instead of fear, to allow us the opportunity to enter into a new relationship with God.

Of course, any such talk of something new, will always be met with violent opposition, just as it will also be met with a sense of curiosity. There will be people who will resist change of any sort, just as there will also be people who will muse on the possibilities for good that change might bring. Jesus split the synagogue crowd into two camps: on one side, there were the scribes and church authorities who feared losing their power base; on the other, there were those who saw in Jesus’ teachings the truth of God’s love and who were now excited about what it could mean in and for their lives.

Evil wants to keep us shackled to fear, to not want to go on the Internet, to not want to travel, but especially to want to keep silent about God. Jesus on the other hand, wants us to live and enjoy all the fruits and bounties with which God has blessed, and continues to bless us. Lives lived in Christ are ones lived in newness, ones open to experiencing exciting ways in which we can be transformed as God’s servants, ones freed from suffocating fear. May we always be open to Christ’s transformative power in our lives, and then transform someone else’s life with the same news that Jesus brought. Thanks be to God. Amen.