“And the Devil Drew First”

Mark 1:21-28

As a boy growing up in America during the fifties and sixties Saturday night was my favorite tv night. That’s the night my two favorite shows came on: Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel. At some point in almost every episode there was a showdown between the good guy and a bad guy. The one who drew his gun fastest and got off the first shot, killing the other, was the winner. Invariably the good guys always won. Yes, the story lines were violent. Yes, there was a quite casual attitude toward gunplay. And yes, such shows today would be politically incorrect.

So why am I about to portray Jesus as a gunslinger? First of all, Jesus was taking on the baddest of the bad guys, Satan himself. Jesus possessed the power and righteousness of God. He used it to heal diseases and cast out demons. He was bringing God’s Kingdom into being and knew that evil had no place in that Kingdom. By word and deed he confronted it throughout his ministry, ultimately defeating it on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Today’s text occurs very early in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus was teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath, and as the text makes clear doing a bang up job of it: “They [his listeners] were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority…” From the very beginning of his ministry, love him or hate him, it was clear that this Jesus guy from Nazareth was something special.

As the text progresses we see that he was only getting warmed up. In comes a man possessed by a demon, a lackey of the Devil. Even the demon recognizes Jesus for who he was; not just special but the very Son of God. He knows that he is face to face with the One sent by God to rid the world of his kind. So the demon says, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know you are the Holy One of God.”

As you can imagine the situation was getting tense. But it doesn’t last very long. Jesus essentially tells the demon to shut up and get out – you just can’t be polite to demons. Although he didn’t go very quietly, the demon shut up and got out. He no longer afflicted a child of God. God one; the Devil zero.

Here’s the interesting part, the part that really impressed those looking on. The demon knew Jesus’ name. In that culture knowing someone’s name gave you power over them. The demon was already one-up on Jesus before his skirmish with him even started. Returning to the language of the wild, wild, west the demon drew his gun first. If the script played out as it was supposed to he would have gotten off the first shot. Jesus didn’t follow the script, at least not the one the Devil wrote. He took the only shot. The Devil, by way of his demonic little friend, never had a chance.

Some may criticize me for being simplistic. Maybe so, but living in a world where the line between right and wrong, good and evil, is increasingly blurred, a world of ethical tap dancing, I have an urgent need to deal with things in black and white. There have to be some boundaries established between good and evil. And every now and then the good guys have to win. We have to know that we are on the side of righteousness.

Jesus was always on the side of righteousness. He was, after all, his Father’s Son. Jesus always did the right thing, the good thing, the Godly thing. One way or another he always defeated evil in whatever guise he found it. Evil couldn’t trick him or fool him or tempt him. And as today’s text makes very clear evil most definitely couldn’t defeat Jesus head on. As was demonstrated on the cross evil could brutalize, even kill, Jesus but it could never destroy him.

Evil’s ultimate destruction is assured. Jesus took care of that a long time ago. But as Peter warns us in his first epistle, “… keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith…” Evil still exists. Its very purpose is to oppose God’s will. So evil in the person of the Evil One prowls the earth, bringing pain and misery into our lives, stirring up hatred and bigotry, using disease and disaster as weapons, preying on our doubts and fears.

And we must never forget that the Devil – Satan - the Evil One – just plain old evil – is seductive. Why else the term “silver tongued devil?” That lion described by Peter likes us to think that it’s a sweet, cuddly, little kitty cat. There are some demons who wear the face of angels. And some of evil’s most deadly forces hide behind the status quo, tradition, party politics, well meaning do gooders, patriotism, financial prosperity, and religion.

Abolish slavery – no, that would wreck our economy. End segregation – no, that would tear apart the social fabric, damage the economy, trample on our proud heritage, and force us to give up our romanticized memories of the past. Speak up for the Jews – no, that would threaten the fatherland, upset this nice economic applecart we’ve got going, and threaten our notions of racial superiority. Let the coalminers unionize – no, we have to have a cheap source of labor, men and women willing to remain trapped in a system that makes them no more than indentured slaves, people who really do owe their souls to the company store.

To quote Rosalind Banbury in a recent article in the Presbyterian Outlook: “Putting the healing of people or neighborhoods first has threatened the conventional economic wisdom in every age. In the late eighteenth century in this country Sabbath Schools were established… they were originally designed to keep poor children off the streets and, thus, away from a life of crime. The schools taught the children to read, write, do math, and learn the catechism. Civil and church leaders denounced the schools and [their] organizers as disrupting the economic order. The poor would no longer ‘accept their place’.”

Evil can be so rational. It can make such good economic sense. It can quote Scripture to accommodate almost anything we want it to: slavery, segregation, child labor, sweat shops, the inferiority of women, and so forth, and so on. Pick a social evil and there will be somebody out there who will find a verse of Scripture, always out of context, to support it. The worst part of this is that often evil just has to sit back and lets good Christian people absolve themselves of their own sins. Or as Jimmy Buffet puts it, receive absolution without accountability.

In today’s text the demon essentially tells Jesus to mind his own business, in other words to tamely coexist with evil. Jesus didn’t do that. His response to evil was to confront and defeat it. Going back to my earlier wild west theme, would Marshall Dillon have ever let some bad guy tell him to mind his own business, to just stand quietly by while the villain took care of whatever nastiness he had in mind? Well of course not. He would not passively have coexisted with such wickedness. He would have chased it out of town or dropped it in its tracks.

We are the Body of Christ. Our Lord’s mission is our mission. We are not free to mind our own business in the face of evil, to go along in order to get along. And we’re especially not free to assist evil in carrying out its goals. Fairly deep in the twentieth century the old Southern Presbyterian Church, the PCUS, followed a policy of letting the church be the church. What that meant was that the church would stay out of social issues such as segregation, in other words mind its own business. The Body of Christ would not address evil because it wasn’t –now get this – a spiritual matter.

Baloney! Ultimately everything is a spiritual matter. All business is a Christian’s business because there is no business that is none of God’s business. One of the problems of the modern church is that it has forgotten its own history. Listen to these words from Jim Wallis’ book The Politics of God: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It: “… evangelical and fundamentalist reformers led battles for the abolition of slavery, for child labor laws – even for women’s suffrage… many of the most progressive social movements in American history – anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, the fight for child labor laws, and the civil rights movement – had overt religious roots and motivations.”

I would dare say that much of what is right about our nation has its roots in Christianity. Because faithful Christians refused to mind their own business ours is a much better society than it otherwise might have been. Beyond our borders there are some historians who credit the social reforms instigated by John Wesley and others with preventing a socialist revolution in England similar to that which occurred in Russia. I’m sure that the Wesley brothers and their compatriots were told more than once to mind their own business.

Just so you know on the eve of the socialist revolution the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were oblivious to reality. Even as the nation stood on the brink of violent revolution they were busy debating the number of jewels should decorate their pulpit Bibles. They were definitely minding their own business. Unfortunately they were ignoring the business of God.

Mind our own business. That’s what the Devil wants us to do. Did Jesus listen to such claptrap? Of course not. Then why should we? Amen.