Homily – 4th Sunday in Ord. Time (B)
Dt. 18: 15-20; 1.Cor. 7:32-35 & Mk. 1: 21-28
I am sure you will remember that in last week’s Gospel, we heard Mark’s account of
the call of the first disciples. Up at St Benet’s, our preacher, Fr Gabriel, encouraged us to
reflect on what it was about Jesus’ call, what it was in those encounters by the lakeside that
made four hard-headed fishermen drop everything at once to follow him. In a certain sense,
perhaps in today’s gospel we start to see something of an answer. Today’s reading follows
on immediately after last week’s passage; indeed Capernaum sits right on the very southern
edge of the Sea of Galilee, where Peter’s family lived. Here we see Jesus teaching for the
first time in the synagogue. Mark does not record what he taught – though in Luke we hear
him offering the “mission statement” for his public ministry in that great passage from
Isaiah 61 on which he comments. But what Mark does tell us is that his teaching “made a
deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority”
(Mk.1:22). And, as if to back up this statement with evidence, Mark immediately recounts
the first of Jesus’ miracles – the healing of the man possessed – and the reaction of the
crowd. They are astonished and surprised – here is a new and authoritative teaching, a
teaching with power. So where does this authority, this power come from?
Well, in the first place, there is a very obvious and straightforward answer which will
come in no way as a surprise. In Mark’s gospel, or at least in the first half of it, there are two
different groups who actually know who Jesus is. The first group are the “unclean spirits”
who recognise him at once, as in this morning’s Gospel and again in the story of the
Gadarene demoniac. They know that Jesus is the “holy One of God” (Mk 1:24), the “Son of
the Most High God” (Mk 5:7) – and Jesus immediately silences them. Not until Peter’s
confession “You are the Christ” at Caesarea Philippi in c.8, more than halfway through the
Gospel, does anyone else recognise and acknowledge him, despite the signs and wonders.
But there is also a second group who know Jesus’ identity – and that is those who read or
hear Mark’s gospel, the audience, as it were, of the “messianic drama”. They know from the
outset, for the very first lines of the gospel make it clear: “The beginning of the good news of
Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1) – a line which, somewhat strangely, is never read in
the Church’s liturgy. For Mark’s first hearers, then, for those early Christians who first heard
his story, there would be no misunderstanding. Jesus has authority and power because he is
the Son of God, and the whole of the gospel is witness to his divine Sonship. Jesus has
authority and power because he is that “prophet raised up from among his brothers” of
whom Moses spoke in Deuteronomy, that prophet promised by God who would speak and
act in His Name and with His power, and to whom the people must listen. He is that Word to
whose voice we must listen with open hearts, as the psalmist says, and not with the
hardened hearts of the Exodus people who tested God again and again in the desert.
But there can be a difficulty here. We can, and do, acknowledge all this to be true
about Jesus – at least intellectually. But there is a risk that this early portrait of Jesus in Mark
can make him seem very distant, almost “alien”. He can appear as a “magic being” –
appearing out of nowhere and doing spectacular miracles; he can appear as a “demi-god” –
a  – like Heracles or Aesculapius in Greek mythology, divinised for their deeds on
earth – but that is not the Jesus we honour as Lord. Equally, we might ask what is wrong
with our discipleship, since we do not seem to share these “magic powers” which the Lord
had.
Well, think again of Mark’s words: he taught them with authority. The word he uses
for authority –  – means just that, power or authority, and comes from the verb
 – to do that which it is possible to do. If you will excuse a little contorted logic,
perhaps, though, that word  also suggests a shade of meaning akin to “that which is
drawn (ex) from being (ousia)”, that power which comes forth from the very nature of the
one exercising it. If you are a King, that is not simply what you are called – it is what you are,
and your authority, your , springs and is drawn from that kingly nature. Jesus’
contemporaries saw and heard and touched a man just like themselves – yet the miracles,
the authority, reveal his true hidden nature as Son of God, the one “in whom the fullness of
God was pleased to dwell” (Col.1:19) in Paul’s beautiful words. And the two are not in
conflict, but in perfect integrity – with that perfect integration we call the mystery of the
Incarnation. This is not magic, but a power which springs from the fullness of God’s nature
alive in Jesus Christ, both God and man.
So why am I going on about this? Well, this year the Church celebrates the gift of
Consecrated Life, and tomorrow is the annual day of prayer for all those in Consecrated Life.
In “Church-speak”, Consecrated Life is the shorthand term for the many varieties of religious
life within the Church, a necessary “catch-all” for all those men and women who have
dedicated their lives to God in a particular way, by a public act of consecration through vows
or promises. In a sense, though, this restricted us of the term is a bit of a pity, since – by
Baptism – every Christian disciple is a “consecrated person”. Every Christian, through the gift
of the Holy Spirit has been set apart from the world and joined to Christ. Certainly, as Paul
suggests in the second reading, we religious have the privilege of living that consecration in
what is – at least potentially – a more concentrated and less distracted way, though
personally I sometimes wonder whether I use that privilege as well as I should. Equally, I
strongly suspect that there will be many single or married men and women who have been
faithful to Christ amidst the hurly-burly of the world and family cares, who will be zooming
into Heaven well before me. Nevertheless, no matter which state of life God has called us
to, all of us are set the same challenge – that is, to attain that perfect integrity of life we see
in Christ. We are all called to integrate the seed of divine life planted in us through grace at
Baptism into the warp and weft of our daily lives, just as Jesus learned to integrate his divine
Sonship with his human nature. Our very being, that core of us from which our power of life,
our  emanates, has been and is being radically transformed each day by Christ –
we are no longer ours, but we are God’s. Our “new being”, drawing its power from God’s
grace, is radically reinforced whenever we choose right over wrong, whenever we choose to
act generously, whenever we choose to pray, whenever we choose to read the scriptures,
whenever we choose to receive the sacraments and especially the Holy Eucharist – so that
we too may become, like Christ, the sons and daughters of the Father, his tools for
recreating our fallen world. We may not yet be able to do miracles – but, if we are faithful in
co-operating with God’s plan to conform us to Christ in perfect integrity, it may be that the
evil spirits of our own day – those spirits of power, greed, domination, abuse, lust, which are
so alive in our world – may recognise who we truly are, just as they recognised who the Lord
truly was, and – threatened, not by us, but by the God who has chosen to make his dwellingplace within us – may quake and fall silent in our day as they did in his. Amen.
1.2.15