The Banality of Evil: Capernaum and the Unclean Spirit
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Year A: Mark 1:21-28
This brief but crowded anecdote is the first episode in the public ministry of Jesus. Characteristic of Mark, a great deal is stuffed into a few verses, with only the broadest of details given. This sketch contains a kind of digest of Jesus’ mission.
While the combination of teaching, controversy, and healing or exorcism seems like a lot, there is a single theme: Jesus is introduced as the authoritative teacher and healer, who announces the alternative reign of God in word and deed to characters who are either subject to the existing reign of sin and evil, or who personify that reign. Jesus is not coming to teach a better life or to talk about religion, but to liberate Israel from the forces of evil.
Here we will find aspects of life that seem very different to us—political, religious, moral, psychological, medical—all treated as a single whole. If “sin” is a useful concept here, it is as this whole complex reality of alienation and oppression, that binds the soul and body, the individual and the nation. Evil has Galilee and Judea—and the world— in its grip, and Jesus has come to contest it.
Geography, or topography, are always worth attending to in Mark. It can help to imagine this Gospel as though acted out on a simple stage. One of the most important scene changes, a sort of axis across the whole Gospel, will be the contrast between Galilee and Jerusalem. Here however there is a simpler change or setting of scene, a less extreme version of that contrast, where Jesus moves from the lakeshore where the first disciples were called into the human community of Capernaum.
Generally speaking, Jesus will enter into conflict with the established order in civic settings; this can mislead readers towards a false romanticism opposing nature and society, where Jesus happily communes with nature to charge his batteries before dealing with pesky humans. Remember though that the temptation story we skipped shows that the wilderness is also a place of spiritual conflict. The world as a whole, the cosmos, is in need of liberation here; all is enemy territory, but some sites are more problematic than others, as places where malign influence is exercised directly over the people.
So at Capernaum on the Sabbath, Jesus enters the Synagogue and begins to teach—for the first time. The Synagogue itself is not more problematic than the rest of the town, but it seems to be under the control of the scribes, who represent a form of opposition before they have shown us why. “They” who are astounded at Jesus’ teaching are not identified, but seem to include both the scribes and the people generally, and also more explicitly demonic forces too.
We are told nothing of the content of the teaching of Jesus here, just that its effect is dramatic, because he “had authority unlike the scribes.” There is something very Markan about this puzzling presentation. There is no useful understanding of Jesus’ teaching that does not start with his identity and authority. He has come to overturn the forces of evil, and that is the point. He has the power to do so, and his mere presence constitutes a threat to the other order.
The emphasis on Jesus’ person and power (rather than ideas) is then underlined by the appearance of a “man with an unclean spirit.” Mark uses this language of “unclean spirits” about equally with “demons,” and they seem equivalent terms. Uncleanness or ritual impurity is about place more than anything; uncleanness was a common occurrence, but excluded presence in the Temple, where such states of being were unacceptable. The spirit’s “unclean” status thus reminds us that spiritual forces are here in disorder, exercising authority in places and people where they should not be. Jesus and the demon have a territorial dispute.
The unclean spirit asks Jesus “what have you do with us” (or perhaps “what do we have in common”), speaking not just on behalf of the demons, but on behalf of the order into which Jesus has intruded. Jesus, he implies, has no place here. “Have you come to destroy us” implies this is more than one random imp; the demonic forces hold sway here. The demon represents the power that holds sway there, and reveals that the very banality of the place—the lack of teaching with authority or power is the only symptom offered — is not just from the mediocrity of the scribes, but the result of demonic powers.
The unclean spirit is the first character in the Gospel (other than the divine voice at his own baptism) to recognize Jesus, threatening to reveal his identity. This “secret” will recur; suffice to say that here Jesus does not want to have his presence advertized in enemy territory, and also that this type of acclaim in Mark always represents a kind of misrecognition. Demons and disciples alike may at times identify him formally speaking, but they reveal in those moments their lack of understanding—or here, their active rejection—of what that identity means.
While stories of biblical exorcisms often have modern readers scurrying to equate ancient experience with modern psychology or other clinical explanations, here at least this is to miss the point. There is nothing to suggest the possessed man is presenting symptoms of illness, mental or otherwise. The demon is manifest only in the identification of Jesus, and its exchange with him. It seems better to assume that the host is presented as normal, part of the mediocre and compliant establishment at Capernaum. While the demon has sought to unmask Jesus, the reverse is the result.
This is Mark’s diagnosis of evil. Aspects of its reign will be more spectacular or more poignant in chapters to come, but evil does not consist merely of the obviously malicious or the painful. It can function as much by naturalizing or normalizing evil, turn oppression into common sense. Foreign occupation, physical illness, moral compromise, religious infidelity, teaching without authority, are all of a piece here, but now the authority of Jesus will confront them.
Thanks. We are DEFINITELY reading the same gospel.