Transcript:

This passage goes like this: “Just then, there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit and he cried out what have you to do with us, jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are the Holy One of God. 

I think it’s important firstly to understand unclean no-transcript. Now, there were various reasons for such regulations, and a person who broke these ancient regulations was declared unclean and had to avoid social contact. It was especially important that they not contaminate the places deemed holy because of God’s presence. Now, the separation of what is holy from what is unclean led to lands other than Israel being called unclean, and the same for their inhabitants. So a person who separated themselves from God by sin was thought of as being like one who is unclean, being like one who is unclean.

And by the time of the New Testament, popular imagination thought of the unclean as being outside the protective power of God’s holiness and therefore subject to the influence of unclean demons or unclean spirits. And so it’s not without some significance that Mark, in his gospel, locates this unclean spirit in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Both symbolize the center of power of the scribes, and so Jesus is determined to exorcise the evil that is corrupting and diminishing the religious establishment. Now, the teaching of the scribes ought to have revealed God as liberator and saviour. It ought to have been an instrument drawing people into communion with the Holy One. However, it kept people in the area of the unclean people.

In the area of the unclean, it’s not physical illness that is a barrier to receiving the good news. The evil that has to be exorcised is a spiritual nature, and as soon as Jesus appears, the evil spirit feels the heat, as it were, of his presence and the threat from Jesus to try and exert control over the evil spirit. So the evil spirit names Jesus. What have you come to do for us, jesus of Nazareth? The evil spirit names Jesus in a last-ditch effort to gain the upper hand and attempt to control Jesus and stop him meddling, interfering in the synagogue. Yet it’s no match for the one who has come to overthrow evil in all its guises, and so this story helps us to understand that Jesus has come to liberate, to unburden, to free people and to bring them to new life.