Much like these United States in 2024, Capernaum of Galilee at the time that our Lord came into it long ago was not a happy place. It was, as our story today shows, the haunt of demons, lurking even within the houses of worship. The region of Galilee lay in the dirt-poor hinterlands to the north, racially and religiously divided, occupied by foreigners with the local rich folks in cahoots with them, the poor, living off the land, taxed up to the gills for little in return. “North of Richmond” territory! This Galilee of history is a living emblem of the human predicament: a place oppressed by the absence of God, ungodly, godless, a place ruled by other, anti-divine powers: idols and demons in the imagery of those times, compulsive greed and insatiable envy in our language today. Greed for far more than one’s fair share, envy toward whatever little success or status any another had acquired. No freedom, no community, little love but for self and one’s own. All this misery we need to have in mind when we hear from Mark the Evangelist today that Jesus and the disciples “went into Capernaum” of Galilee.
Jesus came into Galilee. Not imperial Rome with its splendid marble monuments built on the backs of slave labor. But Jesus came into Galilee, not Jerusalem recently rebuilt in lavish imitation of Rome’s splendor by the collaborator King Herod. Jesus, we might say today, came into backwoods Appalachia, poor, ignorant, backwards, fentanyl addicted, hurting with a world of hurt.
We heard last week the story immediately following Jesus’ entry into Galilee proclaiming the nearness of God. It tells about the calling of Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, then the sons of Zebedee, James and John. We might think that leaving our jobs, our places in society, with our thick web of responsibilities and obligations and duties, is what is being asked of us here. In past ages, hermits thought that way. They thought that to be a true Christian, one had to leave the world after the model of John the Baptist. Perhaps even today some are still called to enter into intentional communities of Christian discipleship in such a way. But we would miss the crucial point that it is Jesus, not John, who calls us to follow Him, into Galilee, then, not out of it. Nor then is discipleship something special and extraordinary, for elite Christians, for super-dooper believers but rather for working folk, for common people. The deeper truth is that what disciples of Jesus are to abandon is not their workplace. It is something far dearer to and far harder to give up.
What we are to abandon with true repentance is our greed, our envy, our lovelessness. See, that is how the apostle Paul diagnoses the issue of eating meat offered to idols in Corinth. He does not take the idol literally. But he takes the sin of idolatry seriously. He does not demand that Christians abandon the eating of meat, which in those days was only available in the city at the markets of the temples, where animals had been brought for sacrifice. What he demands of those “in the know,” namely, that “an idol has no real existence,” is that they abandon the idolatry in their hearts, namely, their smug self-assuredness and sense of intellectual superiority rather to respect the conscience of the weaker, perhaps ignorant ones, for whom Christ died.
You know, we could only follow Jesus literally if we got into some science-fiction space machine and flew back in time to the dusty by-ways of Galilee some two millennia ago. We cannot follow Jesus at all in this woodenly literal fashion. We follow Jesus, if at all, by His own Spirit, the Spirit poured out on Him at His baptism, the Spirit who drove Him into the wilderness to be tested by the Evil One, the Spirit who now brings Him into Galilee on His mission of mercy in God’s name. It is by this same Spirit, lavished on you at baptism that you too follow Jesus into Galilee, not the literal one of long ago but the one here and now, the Galilee of your own life and times, where also idols enthrall and demons haunt.
By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you give up envy and renounce greed and therefore refuse to go along any longer with the corruption, when you resolve no longer to be conformed to this world which is passing away but rather be transformed by setting heart and mind on the true God, His coming kingdom and true righteousness. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you surrender your apathy and crucify your despair and enter in to the clean, fresh air of faith in God, who wills immeasurably more good for us all than we dare hope or imagine. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you abandon business as usual and go to work in the mission of mercy who is Jesus, this Man for others. When you too include the excluded, when you too encourage the distressed, when you too sorrow with the sorrowing, when you too share bread with the hungry, when you too make peace between the estranged, in all these things and more you too are following Jesus into Galilee, here and now, on the job, in school, within the home, on the playing field, in the market. In whatever Galilee God has placed you in, there you too can and may follow Jesus as once did Andrew and Peter, James and John.
No wonder then that the demon shrieks in recognition: “Have you come to destroy us, holy One of God!?” Did you catch that? The evil spirit, who has taken grim possession of a poor human being, recognizes Jesus as the holy One of God. In other words, its question is: what are you doing here, in our unholy place? It’s like a home invasion from the demon’s perspective. “This is our turf,” it imagines; “these tortured human souls belong to us. What have you got to do with us? I know who you are, holy one of God, you have come to destroy us and set our oppressed ones free.”
This demonic response to Jesus is typical in the Gospel of Mark. Always the unclean spirits recognize Jesus and start to reveal the secret of his identity before Jesus rebukes and silences them. Notice that Jesus never disputes or argues with the unclean spirits, but simply silences them authoritatively with a rebuke before expelling them, releasing the captive human being from their tyranny. You see, this powerful new teaching of Jesus is not merely instruction about the Kingdom of God, which someday will come. It is, in its pronouncement, effectively the approaching reign of God, rolling back the usurpers of the earth, those anti-divine powers that capture and control human lives. The new teaching of Jesus says what it does and it does what it says. That is why the people in the synagogue exclaim, “What is this, a new teaching with authority; He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
The biblical word for such authoritative speech is prophecy, which is authoritative just because and only because it gives voice to the very word of God. In this respect Jesus is the new Moses, as we can see today from the first reading from the book of Deuteronomy. Here the Lord says, "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Such prophecy begins in the household of God. Judgment begins in the house of God. We dare not look down on the synagogue in Capernaum as if it were some other place than our own. The ambiguity of religion , then as now, is that it can be a place where the word of God is spoken and at the same time be a place where demons are in hiding waiting to ensnare and captivate. Entering into the troubled world of Galilee, it is striking but also revealing that the first encounter of Jesus with an evil spirit takes place in the sphere of religion. Maybe that should not surprise us. The theologian Paul Tillich once wrote that "the battle for the kingdom of God first of all takes place in the churches which are its representatives."
Our story today foreshadows something that Jesus will say in a few chapters: no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus binds the strong man by rebuking the demons, expelling and exposing them for the unholy usurpers they are. This is the Holy Spirit’s struggle of good against evil as Mark represents it in his telling of the beginning of the Good News of Jesus. What is that beginning? Galilee is not just literally an ancient place on the earth. It was the ancient place on the earth in which the Good News of Jesus began. But at the end of the Gospel of Mark the angels pointedly instruct the women at the tomb that they are to tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. See, Galilee is not just a literal place defined by its physical boundaries in distinction from other places, it is every place where demons lurk and spread darkness and tyrannize and oppress into which the risen Jesus continues to go that we may follow. Such then is the beginning of the Good News according to Mark. Speaking new teaching with authority, Jesus has entered into Galilee.