The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin ’s
January 29, 2006
Epiphany 4 B
There’s a demon in the synagogue.
That’s a detail I’d never noticed before – and it opened up a whole new window into the interpretation and meaning of this passage. There’s a demon in the synagogue – the last place anyone hearing this story for the first time would expect a demon to be. We had better be vigilant and pay attention, because if there is a demon in the synagogue, then the boundaries between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between the blessed and the cursed are not rigid and impermeable after all.
Jesus calls his first four disciples – Peter, Andrew, James and John – in Capernaum, a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. The first place they go is the synagogue – their regular place of worship – a place as familiar and well-known to them as their own homes.
The synagogue was a house of prayer and study. It grew out of the need for a place of worship after the Jews were exiled and dispersed when the invading Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ. The temple could only be in the Holy City, in Jerusalem, but a synagogue could be anywhere in the world ten Jewish men gathered.
By the time Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, the Temple had been rebuilt in Jerusalem, and was once more the center of sacrifice and ritual worship – but the synagogue persisted as a local, deeply personal place for the study of the Torah and for daily prayer. As in all aspects of Jewish life, the synagogue had strict rules for ritual cleanliness – for things that could and could not come into the synagogue, and for the things the faithful had to abstain and fast from in order to enter the synagogue. It was as if the synagogue stood within a circle of holiness and purity, and nothing unclean or unholy could penetrate that circle.
And in addition, it’s the Sabbath – when the men inside the synagogue would have been even more scrupulously prepared and the circle of purity would be as strong as it could possibly be.
But the circle is breached – there’s a demon in the synagogue –the rigid boundary between the holy and the unholy does not hold. The men in the synagogue marvel at Jesus’ teaching; they don’t know him – they don’t know anything about his credentials, his background, his purpose – they only know that he teaches with an authority they’ve never seen before.
But the demon knows him. Jesus may be a stranger to everyone else, but the demon recognizes him: “I know who you are,” the demon says. It’s downright creepy.
> Demon language is hard for us to hear and hard for us to use. It sounds too archaic and unscientific – we are sure we know better – this so-called demon is really mental illness or some other still-to-be-discovered medical condition. And it sounds too melodramatic and hysterical – too much like bad movies and Stephen King novels. If the Jews believed that ritual purity could keep demons out of the synagogue, then we believe that scientific knowledge and good taste banish demons from our world.
But really, whether we believe in demons or not is irrelevant. We may have banished demons from our world, but we certainly have not banished evil. Whatever this demon is – wherever it comes from and whatever it symbolizes – the meaning is still the same. Something unholy has crossed a boundary meant to keep it out. A sacred space isn’t a place where we are protected from conflict and confrontation, but the place where God, and that which is in rebellion against God, meet.
The conflict between Jesus and the demon isn’t played out on some lofty, abstract spiritual plane. They are not arguing about ideas and concepts; it is all very specific and concrete. When Jesus proclaims that the Kingdom of God has come near, he’s not talking about some airy hope of heaven – he means that right now, right here – the power of God is at work to restore and heal what has been broken. The demon knows that – it cries “Have you come to destroy us?” The synagogue and all its ritual strictures are no barrier against the demon, but Jesus – with just a word – casts it out. He is himself the embodiment of the Kingdom. Where he is, demons cannot be.
It may seem that this dramatic, archetypal gospel confrontation has nothing to do with Paul’s prosaic advice about whether or not Christians can eat meat that has been offered to idols. There are no demons in Corinth – just a Christian community trying to figure out how to live in the midst of a hostile, pagan culture. And moreover, a Christian community that’s having an awfully hard time managing itself – a community that’s arguing internally about status, about right behavior, about what it means to follow and obey Christ.
But like Jesus and the demon in the synagogue, Paul is concerned with the concrete and the specific. Christian faith means particular choices about how one lives in the world. Spirituality is not a private, but a public enterprise. Christians are called themselves to embody and incarnate the Kingdom.
So what IS all this about eating meat that has been offered to idols? Corinth and the Galilean village of Capernaum could not be more different. Where Capernaum was homogenous, a Jewish community with the synagogue at its center, Corinth was pagan, cosmopolitan and heterodox. The city was an important port on the Peloponnesian isthmus between the Ionian and Aegean seas, and home to people from every part of the known world. It was full of pagan shrines and temples – and full of daily sacrifices to that vast pantheon of gods and goddesses. One scholar has speculated that it would have been impossible to buy meat in any butcher shop in Corinth that had NOT been first offered to an idol. The goats, sheep and calves that made up the sacrifices didn’t get thrown away – they were carved up and sold to be eaten.
Most of the conflict in the Corinthian church came from a group that considered themselves to be more spiritually advanced than the others, and therefore entitled to make their own rules. Paul loves to use the phrase “puffed up” to describe them – they are puffed up with their conviction that they are superior to everyone else. Clearly, the Corinthian self-styled elite has decided that it’s just fine for them to eat meat that has been slain on pagan altars – after all, “no idol in the world really exists.” Anyone who has a problem with meat that came from a temple, well – that’s a sign of just how retarded that person’s spiritual development really is.
Paul hoists the Corinthian snobs on their own petard. “You’re right,” he says – you are way more advanced than the others – you may very well be able to eat idol meat with no problem – but guess what – you have a responsibility to those who are not as far along as you are. Those who are weakest in the faith need to be treated the most tenderly. Just because it’s OK for you doesn’t mean it’s OK for them – they are still new at this Christian life thing and they need help and support as they figure it all out. If you are as advanced as you say you are, then you must limit your freedom in order to nurture the faith of those you consider beneath you. Just because you may do something doesn’t mean you should. Take care that this liberty of yours doesn’t become a stumbling block to the weak.
The demon is in the synagogue. Faith communities are not refuges from the challenges of human life, they are where we wrestle with them. The church isn’t a sanctuary for the perfect, it’s a hospital for the imperfect.
People who aren’t part of a faith community sometimes say that they hate church because “it’s full of hypocrites.” Well of course it is – where else are the hypocrites going to go? Where else are the liars, thieves, adulterers, gluttons, addicts, misers and misanthropes going to go? Where else can we go with our sin, our sadness, our hurt, our broken heartedness but to that place where Christ speaks – so that we can be healed.
The church always gets into trouble when it tries to protect its purity. It has always ended up doing terrible harm in the name of keeping itself free from any worldly taint. Every time we think we’ve succeeded in keeping all the demons outside, we learn that we’ve only succeeded in bringing in fiercer and more formidable demons. Every time the church has ever pronounced that demons are in “those people” and thrown “those people” out, demons of arrogance, violence and oppression have invaded the church in their place. We make a dreadful mistake when we think, like the Corinthian elite, that we have it all figured out – and all we have to do is fill the church with people just like us in order to have an earthly paradise.
The demon is in the synagogue. The Jews in Capernaum thought that they could keep the demons out – that they were safe from demons as long as they stood within the purified sacred circle. The elite Corinthian Christians thought they could withdraw into a circle cast by their own spiritual superiority and ignore everyone who stood beyond their self-designated boundary. Neither group understood that faith communities are much messier than that and that rigid boundaries are no protection against those powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.
We include a confession of sin in just about every celebration of the Eucharist. It’s pretty easy to sort of gabble one’s way through these familiar words – after all – we say them day in and day out and they may not have as much power for us as they should.
What if we use the words of the general confession to name our own demons? What if we use the confession as a way to identify those deepest places in our own hearts and souls that rebel against God, that thrive in secrecy and resist being brought out into the light? What if we dare to acknowledge that the demon is in the synagogue, and invite Christ to cast it out and fill us instead with the light and the power of the Kingdom?
That’s pretty scary stuff. It is wildly incongruent with how we view ourselves and our universe. Either we are like the Corinthians and think that all this demon-talk is for the spiritually primitive, or we are like the men in Capernaum and we think that we ourselves can create a space that is spiritually pure, and free from any demonic taint.
Where Jesus is, demons cannot be. The church is not the place where we come to escape from our demons, but the place where we confront them, name them and offer them up for healing and reconciliation. And the church is not a place where we can draw rigid boundaries to keep out people who look, think or act in ways that challenge or disturb us. The church will always be full of people struggling in different ways with the demons that keep us from living the authentic, fully realized faithful life that is our baptismal birthright. That’s what the church is for.
Holiness is always going to be God’s gift to us, and not something we create for ourselves. Healing is always going to come from God’s hand and not from our own. The demon is in the synagogue – allow it to be named and cast out by the power and authority of Christ.
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