Sermon at Parish Mass, 4th Sunday of Epiphany 2012

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

Mark 1:21-28

Which teachers do you most remember from school? There’s one I remember for whom I’m particularly grateful. There was a time when I was falling a bit behind, and that can be a dangerous trap for a child to be caught in. Your feeling of self-esteem and capability can plummet, and then your performance does too, so you feel even worse. It’s a vicious circle. But this teacher noticed. And quietly, without fuss, without showing me up in front of the other boys, he helped me, gave up his time, coached me – in his own subject and others – and helped me get back on track. Good teachers don’t just tell you things you need to know, they change your life.

Teaching is about so much more than imparting information. It’s about growth, development, and transformation. Good teaching is relational, and helps you to grow by opening you to the truth.

The people in today’s Gospel reading are said to be astonished by the teaching of Jesus, it makes a deep impression on them. This is interesting as Mark doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus has taught. All we have is its result, given in a symmetric sequence of the kind that Mark likes: the people are impressed, a man described as possessed by an unclean spirit is delivered, and the people are impressed again.

It is as though the presence of Jesus is in itself his teaching. It is his presence which is transformative, which opens people to the truth. This is because Jesus is not imparting truth as an abstract concept, rather he is the truth in person. To be taught by Jesus is to enter into relationship with him, to be opened to the truth.

The reading we heard from Deuteronomy is important for understanding this. Moses promises the people of Israel that God will send them a prophet like himself who will teach them everything that God commands. The prophet like Moses is not any old prophet. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the others aren’t in the same league. The prophet who will be like Moses is unique, just as Moses uniquely delivered the law to the people on Sinai, so this new prophet will uniquely make known everything that God teaches.

An important thread running through the Gospels is that Jesus is this new prophet, the prophet like Moses who discloses the whole purpose of God. This is why we can see so many parallels between Jesus and Moses – but in all of them Jesus exceeds what Moses did. Moses divided the waters and walked through them, Jesus walks on them. Moses fed the people in the desert with manna that lasted a day, Jesus feeds the five thousand in a desert place and tells the disciples to keep what remains, pointing to the Eucharist, the food which endures to eternal life.

And where Moses delivered the law, the Torah, on Mount Sinai, written on stone tablets, Jesus is presented as the law in person. The Torah of the Messiah is not instructions you have to learn, it is a person with whom you need to be in relationship.

So in today’s Gospel reading we have the teaching of Jesus, which is astonishing, and different from the teaching of the scribes, because it is an encounter with a living person.

At the centre of this encounter, in which the teaching of Jesus is Jesus himself, we have the healing of the man described as possessed by an unclean spirit. This is not talk we are used to, but it is clearly of vital importance in this story.

Now in fact only Matthew, Mark and Luke in the whole Bible talk about people being “possessed’ in this way, and they are saying something important about the powers which hold human beings in bondage. Matthew, Mark and Luke are concerned to show the Kingdom of God breaking in to, and putting right, a human society which is radically disordered by powers which are actively opposed to that Kingdom. There is both a social and a cosmic dimension to these stories of possession. They reveal something about what is wrong beneath the surface of human society.

The two great oppressive social powers at work in first century Judea, as it is portrayed in the gospels, were the occupying Romans and the Temple. The Romans were unclean gentiles who ruled by keeping everyone in their place, often very brutally. The Temple had failed to be a house of prayer for all nations and had become a centre of power and privilege, amassing ever more money, wealth and prestige to feed its insatiable sacrificial cult, crushing the poor and excluding the supposedly imperfect and unclean. So you have these two oppressive forces bearing down on people from different directions.

In an oppressed society, who speaks? Who dares say what is wrong? It is often voices from the edge, and often distorted voices, which nevertheless speak something of the truth. In the Gospels, those who are described as possessed seem to have something of this function. The spirits of possession are described as “unclean”, meaning that they speak from a place of ritual impurity. They speak from a place where people are not allowed to participate in what human society is meant to be. Through being “demonised” these people personify the powers of oppression which harm society as a whole.

So it is very significant that Jesus heals people who are described as possessed, and that this happens as a result of his teaching. Jesus restores human society to what God intends it to be by defeating the cosmic powers of evil. And he does this because he is the truth, the full revelation of God, in person.

Today we don’t tend to talk about people literally being possessed by demons. But we can still be disturbed by voices from the edge, distorted voices perhaps, which nonetheless tell us something of what is wrong under the surface of things.

I was thinking this week of the Occupy Protest outside St Paul’s. Could we perhaps see them as people who have been “possessed”, captivated, fixated, by the way in which the giant corporations seem to have the whole of human life under subjugation?

Or consider the way in which tabloid headlines or lazy statements by politicians can demonise people. This week in relation to the Government’s cap on benefits we heard talk of “scroungers” and the “feckless”.  But the rich can be scapegoated as well, as Sir Philip Hampton, the chairman of RBS, now deprived of his bonus, may be reflecting. There is something far more fundamental than individual greed at work here. The desire to exclude, to draw boundaries and say those people over there are not like me, is part of the deep flaw that runs through our natures, that the Church calls sin.

The brokenness of human society needs to be healed and forgiven. And that is what Jesus does, in the world today, in and through his Church. This requires our own healing and forgiveness. Today as in the first Century it is through relationship with Jesus that we are opened to the truth. It is in him that we recognise our complicity with the powers of oppression precisely as we are being freed from them ourselves. Sin is what we are leaving behind.

For us and for the world, today as in the first century, the good news is Jesus. His teaching is himself. He is the truth in person, the truth of the love of God for every person, the truth that he excludes no-one, the truth he wills to be known in the right ordering and flourishing of all human society.