An unclean spirit in Jesus’s synagogue.

by K.W. Leslie, 30 July 2023

Mark 1.23-28, Luke 4.31-37.

This happened right after Jesus went to synagogue one Friday night… and didn’t teach like the scribes. We don’t know what he taught. Probably something profound and life-changing. But despite his amazing, world-rocking message, the only words we have from his entire lesson was Φιμώθητι καὶ ἔξελθε ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ/Fimóthiti ke éxelthe ap’ aftú, “Shut up and get out of him.”

Lousy evil spirit.

Mark 1.23-26 KWL
23 Next, a person with an unclean spirit
was already in their synagogue,
and he screams out,
24 saying, “Who are we to you, Jesus Nazarene?
Do you come to destroy us?
I know who you are. God’s ‘holy one’…”
25 Jesus rebukes it, saying, “Shut up and get out of him.”
26 Convulsing him and shouting with a loud voice,
the unclean spirit gets out of him.
 
Luke 4.33-35 KWL
33 A person is already in the synagogue
who has a spirit, an unclean demon.
It screams out in a loud voice,
34 “Whoa! Who are we to you, Jesus Nazarene?
Do you come to destroy us?
I know who you are. God’s ‘holy one’…”
35 Jesus rebukes it, saying, “Shut up and get out of him.”
The demon, dropping the man in the middle of the room,
gets out of him, never harming him.

Movies tend to overdramatize this scene. Your average Jesus movie shows Jesus, peacefully offering koans to a group of fawning students and skeptical Pharisees, when suddenly some wild-eyed madman forces his way into synagogue. Clothes disheveled. Hair unkempt. A little foam on his lips. Looking like Charles Manson after crawling through the desert two days without water. Because movie devils are profoundly stupid, this critter’s ready to pounce on our Lord—the one guy with the power to annihilate it with a word.

Any chance it was like that in real life? Nah; you just read the gospels. Get those movie images out of your brain and lookit the text. And bear these historical details in mind.

Sabbath began at sundown Friday night. Synagogue services began immediately afterward. People would enter the building—men up front so they could ask questions, women in the back where they were expected to not ask questions, sometimes separated by a partition but not always. Once everybody was in, the synagogue president would bar the doors to keep latecomers from interrupting. If you were late, you stood outside and listened as best you could, or you turned round and went home.

So if you were a raving lunatic, you couldn’t burst into the service and interrupt Jesus. All you could do is shout a lot, beat the doors, throw stuff through the windows… but you weren’t getting in.

Got that? Good. So how’d this demoniac get into the building? Simple: He entered along with everybody else. You had to be ritually clean to enter synagogue, and this guy looked clean. Had he appeared out of place, or off, he’d’ve been sent away. He wasn’t. He looked normal.

Entered with everybody else. Stood there in the crowd. Sang psalms. Listened to the scriptures and their translation. Listened to Jesus’s lesson… up to the point he got noisy. Nobody suspected he had a demon in him. Y’see, not every demoniac looks like a madman. Not every madman does either.

Jesus’s demon-plagued world.

Christians tend to notice there are an awful lot of people in the gospels and Acts who have evil spirits. Jesus and the apostles had to do a lot of exorcisms. What’s with this? And should we Christians see just as many exorcisms nowadays?

The reason you see a lot of evil spirits in the New Testament is because the pagan religions of the day regularly, actively sought them out. They believed—same as way too many pagans today also believe—that spirits are inherently good. That they’re here to help! That if you want wisdom and advice from the great beyond, get the spirits to talk to you; have them enter you and talk through your mouth.

More often it was this: Scientific medicine hadn’t been invented, or even really thought of. And if you were ill, and in great pain, you’d settle for anyone who promised a cure, and fall for any quack. (Same as now.) Every witch doctor (ἰατρός/yatrós, KJV “physician”) would offer you some kind of pain-killing physic, or some treatment which they claimed might do something. One of the more popular treatments was to call upon a pagan lesser god, which they called δαιμόνια/demónia—and yes, that’s what “demon” meant back then. Pagans would intreat all sorts of these “gods” to cure you, and apparently could cram thousands into you. Lk 8.30 The critters might feign wellness… for a time. But really they’d make you sick, because having them inside you is simply not natural nor right. Hence they’re “unclean spirits.”

So the reason Jesus encountered so many people with demons? Because so many people get sick. Not all of them turn to quackery and charlatans, but sometimes people get desperate. That’s when people—including good Jews!—went to witch doctors, because there were plenty of pagan Syrian Greek cities in the Galilee where you might find them. That’s how they got demonized.

And make no mistake: Witch doctors still exist. I’m not just talking about people in less-developed countries which still have religions with helper gods. You’ll easily find ’em here in the United States, offering “eastern medicine” or “alternative medicine,” encouraging us to not trust scientists, who supposedly want to keep us sick so they can make money off us. Yeah, this statement is likely true of for-profit hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, which is why it works so very well. But I defy you to show me an “alternative healer” who tells people they’re fully cured and no longer needs their treatment. My medical-school-trained doctors have done that many times. Witch doctors, not so much.

So do we need to keep doing exorcisms at the level Jesus and the first apostles did? Probably.

And where are we gonna find these demon-plagued people? Well, if your first thought is of psych wards and people with unexplainable ailments, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Same as this dude in Jesus’s synagogue, they look like anyone. They’re people who, same as the people in Jesus’s day, felt unwell, went to the wrong person for help, and got demonized. They’re not gonna act out till you do something to trigger them.

That’s what happened in synagogue this long-ago Friday night.

Hiding in synagogue in plain sight.

It may very well be this guy didn’t even know he was demonized. Might’ve gone to synagogue all his life. Acted just right. Convinced every Pharisee he was legit. Covered up his lack of spiritual growth with pious fakery, as plenty of hypocrites still do.

And when Jesus presented his lesson, no doubt he taught the sort of thing which cuts right to the heart of such fakery. He does that, y’know. Nothing irritates Jesus like hypocrisy, and he has plenty of things to say about it in the gospels. Stuff which would’ve rubbed a lot of Pharisees the wrong way—and something which really outraged this demoniac. Rather than respond in humility and repentance, he reacted with several typical works of the flesh: Offense. Fury. Anger. Indignation.

Standing there, getting more and more pissed as Jesus went on, till he could take no more and snapped. Not to interrupt the rabbi with an angry question or bitter rebuke, but with screaming rage. The foul being inside him boiled over.

And up to this point, betcha nobody knew he was possessed. Even Jesus may not have known. (’Cause knowing Jesus, I expect he’d’ve singled this guy out before the service, quietly led him to a back room, threw the devil out, told him to repent, told him not to tell anyone what just happened, and that’d be that. No public display necessary.) But everyone sure knew now.

From time to time we get demoniacs in church. Seriously. But Christians don’t always realize that’s what they’re seeing. We think it’s just someone acting out. It’s not. It’s the critter in them acting out—telling preachers to shut up, telling everyone to shut up, to stop preaching the gospel, and they don’t make a lot of sense as they’re ranting and raving. People just think they’re drunk, or off their medication. Nope; it’s a devil, terrified it’s been exposed, and trying to intimidate us Christians into leaving it be. How dare someone come into their church, their hiding place, bringing the actual Holy Spirit? And often the demoniac is just as furious: “How dare someone tell me I’m not following Jesus?—that my lifestyle sucks, or my faith is small, or my works won’t save anyone, or my hypocrisy is obvious? I spent years building myself a comfort zone. How dare you knock it down and expose the devils within?”

This unclean spirit’s statement in both gospels, Τί ἡμῖν καὶ σοί, Ἰησοῦ Ναζαρηνέ;/Ti ymín ke sí, Yisú Nadzariné? which I translate “Who are we to you, Jesus Nazarene?” is a Greek way of saying, “We have no relationship.” It’s probably the gospel authors’ euphemism for what the unclean spirit really said—the Aramaic equivalent of “Get the f--- away from me.” The spirit wanted Jesus to stop talking.

The unclean spirit’s next statement regularly confuses Christians. Many an interpretation claims the spirit is actually trying to bollix Jesus’s ministry… by telling the truth, that Jesus is the son of God and more than he appears. And Jesus shuts him up because he doesn’t want the truth to get out. Which isn’t just nuts, but inconsistent with the scriptures:

John 18.37 NASB
Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this purpose I have been born, and for this I have come into the world: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.”

Jesus didn’t come to earth to hide anything, but to reveal everything—to expose the mystery of the kingdom of God, and tell us it’s here and available to everyone. And he repeatedly states in the gospel of John that he’s the son of God; that he’s more than he appears. He wasn’t hiding any of this. He was so open about it, it kept getting him in trouble.

Nah; the issue was who was saying it. Devils regularly tell the truth… but they mix just enough untruth, just enough deception, so that they sound plausible, but still lead people astray. Like Athanasius of Alexandria pointed out, Jesus didn’t want truth coming out of evil spirits, “lest under pretence thereof they should mingle with it their own malicious devices”. Bishops of Egypt 1.3 Best to shut them up, instead of foolishly thinking you might learn something from them, or gain power over them, by interrogating them. Too many stupid exorcists try that, and need to stop tangling with them and get them out of there immediately, same as Jesus did.

Truth is Jesus’s weapon, not the devil’s.

The exorcism.

Again, the movies get it wrong. Jesus wasn’t trembling from the intensity of spiritual battle. All the power was on his end. No cosmic struggle. He said “Get out,” and it got out.

Mark 1.25-26 KWL
25 Jesus rebukes it, saying, “Shut up and get out of him.”
26 Convulsing him and shouting with a loud voice,
the unclean spirit gets out of him.
 
Luke 4.35 KWL
Jesus rebukes it, saying, “Shut up and get out of him.”
The demon, dropping the man in the middle of the room,
gets out of him, never harming him.

Not only was Jesus not teaching like a proper Pharisee scribe, he didn’t do exorcisms like proper Pharisees either. Because Pharisees did throw evil spirits out of people. Mt 12.27 But, as usual, they had a whole list of things to do to get the critters out of a person. They had special incantations, like “In the name of God and the holy angels,” which were a big deal to them. Jesus didn’t do that. Didn’t invoke God, angels, holy things, holy beings, or anything. He only said, “Shut up and get out of him.”

Jesus threw it out. Himself. By himself. And it left.

I’ve heard Christians talk about how to do exorcisms… and no surprise, they repeat the very same practices the Pharisees did. You gotta “bind” it, and make it submit to you in Jesus’s name. You gotta demand it tell you its name, how long it’s been in this person, the circumstances of how it got in, and what it’s been up to. You gotta address it this way, tell it these things. You gotta repeat these words as you cast it out. Don’t forget to invoke Jesus’s name with every command you give it. And so forth.

As if the evil spirit isn’t gonna be lying to you the entire time. As if “in Jesus’s name, tell me the whole truth” is gonna block it from outright lying—because declaring “in Jesus’s name” doesn’t work on humans that way, so what makes you think it’ll automatically work on spirits? Yes, every Christian miracle oughta be done in Jesus’s name, but it’s not a magic spell! Stop treating it as one.

In contrast, Paul did exorcisms pretty much the very same way Jesus did.

Acts 16.16 NASB
16 It happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave woman who had a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing great profit to her masters by fortune-telling. 17 She followed Paul and us and cried out repeatedly, saying, “These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you a way of salvation.” 18 Now she continued doing this for many days. But Paul was greatly annoyed, and he turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out at that very moment.

Christians who tell us to use Jesus’s name to interrogate evil spirits, are just trying to show off to everyone else: “Check me out! Jesus gave me the power to bind evil spirits!” It’s like a 12-year-old whose dad gave him a handgun, and now he’s waving it around in front of his friends; nevermind that something tragic might happen because that thing is deadly and needs to be put away. The very same thing is true of evil spirits. You don’t bind them, then pretend you’re Jack Bauer in 24 and supernaturally waterboard them; you get them out of here just like Jesus did. Stop being idiots. Stop talking to them and exorcise them.

The reaction.

So now the demoniac is cured. Might need some followup; certainly needs to get some Holy Spirit in him. But he’s cured.

But everything Jesus just did falls way outside the Pharisee experience, and those who witnessed it had no idea what to make of Jesus. Everything he did in this story was inappropriate. He assumes authority which no proper Pharisee would. Yet he nonetheless could order an unclean spirit to get out of a person—and didn’t have to battle with it for hours, praying special prayers, desperately calling upon God. Just “Shut up and get out of him,” and it did.

Mark 1.27-28 KWL
27 Everyone is stupefied—
leading them to argue with one another,
saying, “What is this?”
“New teaching—with power?”
“He commands the unclean spirits?”
“They obey him?”
28 The rumor of Jesus next spreads everywhere
in the whole region of the Galilee.
 
Luke 4.36-37 KWL
36 People become dumbfounded over all this,
and are speaking with one another,
saying, “What is this message?—
for it’s with authority and power.”
“He commands unclean spirits
and they come out?”
37 The noise about Jesus comes out
to all the land in the region.

So here’s where rumors about the controversial new rabbi spread all over the Galilee. How could he flout tradition like that? Yet how could he do anything if he didn’t somehow have God’s favor? Jn 3.2

Sort of a question Christians need to go back to asking whenever we discover an out-of-the-ordinary Christian who nonetheless can cure the sick and throw out evil spirits. Okay, this Christian may not be exactly like us: Doesn’t follow our customs, doesn’t care about our traditions, doesn’t use the same clichés, preaches some weird stuff. Yet the Holy Spirit empowers this person, mighty things get done, and good fruit gets produced. Shouldn’t this answer all our questions?

Sure. But just like Pharisees, it doesn’t always. We hold our traditions much too highly. Far more so than God’s clear involvement.