JESUS IN THE IMPERATIVE: BE SILENT!
Texts: Mark 1:21-28

Today’s imperative: “Be Silent!” is part of an exorcism, the casting out of an unclean or evil spirit. Exorcisms lead to healing, but they are not pretty. Sometimes we need to be delivered before we can be healed.

I

This exorcism is the first of four in Mark’s Gospel. They are part of Jesus’ ministry as a healer. The prophet Jeremiah asked plaintively: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:22). Jesus is the Balm of Gilead. Not just prophet and teacher, he is a physician, too.
The exorcism happened in a synagogue. There is something “real” about this. Our troubles don’t end with church membership, do they? We bring our need of healing to church.

Jesus begins his ministry in Capernaum by teaching in the shabbat service. After he spoke, the people, amazed at the power of his words, said, “He teaches as one with authority - - not as the preachers and professors.” (Loosely translated from 1:22)

There is a kind of authority that comes with rank, position, academic degree – which sometimes results in “rankism” and the “lording it over” another.

Jesus had a different kind of authority: The authority of truth and wisdom, authenticity and understanding. It was the power of Spirit: God’s and his in concert.

His words not only had the power to teach but also the power to heal. Early on psychoanalysis was called the “talking cure.” The analyst helped us “talk out” our neurosis. The man in the synagogue had an unclean spirit. Jesus talked it out of him.

The whole business of evil spirits and exorcism seems strange to us - - though in parts of the world today exorcism is still practiced as a form of healing. Evil itself is no stranger to us; we witness it on a personal scale or on a massive scale: Rape, murder, torture, slavery, genocide.
Perhaps we should not rush too quickly to understand or to dismiss. L. P. Hartley in his novel The Go-Between writes:

The past is a foreign country.
They do things differently there.

So let’s engage this strange text today, and let it engage us. Let’s circle around it and try to discern what God might be trying to say to us in it.

II

Traditional Hebrew teaching said that each of us has a good impulse, yetzer hatov, and an evil impulse, yetzer hara. Spirituality is the cultivation of the good impulse. Abraham Lincoln spoke of our living according to the “better angels of our nature.” Cartoons used to picture us with a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. Call one kindness, the other cruelty. Who will win?

To use psychological terms, we can struggle with compulsions and addictions, ideas or behaviors which threaten to take over our lives. Sometimes deliverance is in order.

Physicians today treat mental illness with a combination of drug therapy and talk therapy. Our minds can play terrible tricks on us, and we need a physician. “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” God and God’s healers come to those with marked suffering to lessen their suffering and to heal.

The text says that when Jesus passed the man with the evil spirit, the evil spirit called 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.”

The spirit speaks in the plural. Was he talking of himself and the man, or of a gang of spirits inside the man? Remember the demoniac at Gerasa. “Legion” was the name of the demon - - or “Mob.” Have you ever felt like there was a mob of voices inside you? That you were “many,” not “one.” Sometimes the psyche experiences disintegration. Healing comes with integration. Becoming one again, whole again. It is the recovery of integrity, being one, not many.

III

Jesus speaks his powerful imperative. “Be silent! Come out of him.” (Reynolds Price translates: “Silence! Come out of him.”) He spoke it to the spirit. The man, at least temporarily had lost his moral agency, his ability to choose, what Martin Luther called “The bondage of the will.”
What Jesus speaks to us are his words, “Be silent. Quiet yourself.” I cannot think of a more needful word - - and one more healing.

We live a 24/7 world of nonstop babble, a never-ending barrage of talk, words, information, images. Our world is a broken kaleidoscope of colliding images. We take pride in multi-tasking. We sit with a lap top, a cell phone, a note pad and the TV on. The world has become a world of noise, a cacophony of sounds, and the noise has moved inside. How noisy are our hearts!

The desert fathers and mothers, abbas and immas of the fourth and fifth centuries, heard God saying: “Flee, be silent, pray always, and you will be saved.”1 And they left the cities and went to the Egyptian desert to be alone with God.

In their fourth-century psychology and spirituality - - the Greek word for soul, psuche, is the root of our word “psychology” - - we were bombarded by “passions” or “desires” which threatened to overtake us.

When we hear the word “passions” or “desires” we think “sex” because our Western Christian culture has been obsessed with sex, meaning, afraid of it, making it the great enemy and the great sin. Dorothy Sayers, the famous British philosopher and mystery writer, was lecturing and mentioned the classical category of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” A young man came to her afterward and said, “You mentioned the Seven Deadly Sins. Pray tell me, what are the other six!”

Well, there are seven. We might rename them “The Seven Deadly Compulsions” - - and they cover the spiritual and ethical landscape: Pride, Sloth, Envy, Anger, Greed, Gluttony and Lust.
When C. S. Lewis was on his way toward conversion, the Spirit of God revealed to him his real self, not the idealized self he had imagined for himself. It was not a pleasant epiphany, but it was a necessary one. He wrote:

For the first time I examined
myself with a seriously practical
purpose. And there I found
what appalled me: a zoo
of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions,
a nursery of fears, a harem
of fondled hatreds. My name
was Legion.2

So we have these compulsions, what I would call compulsions of the false self. Paul lists them as works of the flesh or sarx - - which I translate “false self.” Here they are:

porneia (sexual immorality)
uncleanness
licentiousness
idolatry
sorcery
enmities
strife
jealousy
anger
quarrels
dissensions
factions
envy
drunkenness
carousing
and things like these....
Galatians 5:19-21

“Things like these” - - meaning this list is suggestive, not exhaustive.

You could probably add a few, from careful observation of others, of course.

Then Paul contrasts these with the way of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit (or of the true self) is:

love, joy, peace
patience, kindness, goodness
faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Galatians 5:22-23

Did you notice how noisy the first list was: Porneia, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing!
And then how quiet the ways of the Spirit:

love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

One way to discern the right path from the wrong, the right action from the wrong is: Does it come from a noisy place or from a quiet place?

Be silent! Jesus says. Quiet yourself. Find a space within, build a habitat where silence can happen and quietness be cultivated. Sometimes this happens for me on a hike, or on a run. Sometimes in the study, when I’m writing, sometimes in prayer, sometimes in worship, sometimes in song.

How noisy is your heart? How many voices are there in there? What power do you give to them? Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” speaks of the need to banish all the other voices so you can listen to your own, the one that so easily gets lost:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice - -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
...little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do - -
determined to save
the only life you could save.3

Sometimes the competing voices inside are good voices, but they distract you from your own true voice. Quaker spiritual teacher and educator Parker Palmer writes that in his search for “way,” his own true calling, he for years tried to imitate people he admired, heroes like Martin Luther King, until he discovered he had to “listen to his own life,” not imitate another’s.

There’s the old rabbinic story of a rabbi named Itzak who kept praying, “Make me like Abraham! Make me like Abraham!” God replied, “I do not know why you pray this prayer. I already have an Abraham. I need an Itzak!”

Be Silent! The words are a call to forms of Christian “practice” where we find the space, create the habitat where we can be alone with self and with God. And then frequent it!

Finally, I would say this: There is a dimension of being quiet which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams describes as “taking time.” Being quiet means slowing down. It means giving yourself the gift of the time it takes to become whole, to fulfill your calling, to be you. Everyone has different capacities and different time tables. Williams writes:

The desert fathers and mothers might
say to young people today, “What’s
the hurry?” They would be
amazed to see the way
our culture values speed....
It is all right to take time.4

I’m not talking now about “finding time” in your busy schedules, but “taking the time” you need to become what God is calling you to become. Williams quotes Wittgenstein as saying that the most important thing a philosopher can say to another is, “Take your time.”

Some of you are tormented by time. You live with a tortured urgency to get where you want to go, to be who you want to be. “Why haven’t I gotten there yet?” is the self-recriminating cry.

Jesus says, Take your time. Let yourself be. Trust God with what you are to become.

Do you think God has a wristwatch? Does it have a second hand? Is that a stop watch in his hand? That’s the way we live.

Take time. The best orchestra is not the one that can play Beethoven’s Fifth the fastest. You are a human being, not a human doing. Take time to be.

I once spent a week at a retreat center in their “Quiet House,” a cabin set aside for people to go and be alone. Cross-stitched on the wall in the entry way was this arrangement of Psalm 46:10:

Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know
Be still
Be.

It is there the compulsions of the false self begin to fall away.


1 This summary statement is found in Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), p. 15.
2 Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcount, Brace, 1955), p. 226.
3 Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 14-15.
4 Rowan Williams, Where God Happens (Boston: New Seeds, 2005), p. 53.