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THE FIRST VICTORY OVER THE POWERS OF EVIL

Mark 1:23–8

There was in the synagogue a man in the grip of an unclean spirit. Immediately he broke into a shout. ‘What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?’ he said. ‘Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – you are the Holy One of God.’ Jesus spoke sternly to him. ‘Be silent,’ he said, ‘and come out of him.’ When the unclean spirit had convulsed the man and had cried with a great cry it came out of him. They were all so astonished that they kept asking each other, ‘What is this? This is a new kind of teaching. He gives his orders with authority even to unclean spirits and they obey him.’ And immediately the report about Jesus went out everywhere over the whole surrounding district of Galilee.

IF Jesus’ words had amazed the people in the synagogue, his deeds left them thunderstruck. In the synagogue, there was a man in the grip of an unclean spirit. He created a disturbance, and Jesus healed him.

All through the gospels, we keep meeting people who had unclean spirits and who were possessed by demons or devils. What lies behind this?

The Jews, and indeed the whole ancient world, believed strongly in demons and devils. As the German scholar Adolf von Harnack put it, ‘The whole world and the circumambient atmosphere were filled with devils; not merely idolatry, but every phase and form of life was ruled by them. They sat on thrones, they hovered around cradles. The earth was literally a hell.’

Dr A. Rendle Short, the professor of medicine, cites a fact which shows the intensity with which the ancient world believed in demons. In many ancient cemeteries, skulls were found which had been trepanned. That is to say, a hole had been bored in the skull. In one cemetery, out of 120 skulls, six had been trepanned. With the limited surgical technique available, that was no small operation. Further, it was clear from the bone growth that the trepanning had been done during life. It was also clear that the hole in the skull was too small to be of any physical or surgical value; and it is known that the removed disc of bone was often worn as an amulet round the neck. The reason for the trepanning was to allow the demon to escape from the person’s body. If primitive surgeons were prepared to undertake that operation, and if people were prepared to undergo it, the belief in demon-possession must have been intensely real.

Where did these demons come from? There were three answers to that question. (1) Some believed that they were as old as creation itself. (2) Some believed that they were the spirits of the wicked who had died and were still carrying on their malignant work. (3) Most people connected the demons with the old story in Genesis 6:1–8 (cf. 2 Peter 2:4–5).

The Jews elaborated the story in this way. There were two angels who forsook God and came to this earth because they were attracted by the beauty of mortal women. Their names were Assael and Shemachsai. One of them returned to God; the other remained on earth and gratified his lust; and the demons are the children that he fathered and their children.

The collective word for demons is mazzikin, which means one who does harm. So the demons were malignant beings intermediate between God and human beings and who were out to work harm.

The demons, according to Jewish belief, could eat and drink and beget children. They were terrifyingly numerous. There were, according to some, 7,500,000 of them; everyone had 10,000 on the right hand and 10,000 on the left. They lived in unclean places, such as tombs and spots where there was no cleansing water. They lived in the desert where their howling could be heard – hence the phrase a howling desert. They were specially dangerous to the lonely traveller, to the woman in childbirth, to the bride and bridegroom, to children who were out after dark, and to those who voyaged at night. They were specially active in the midday heat and between sunset and sunrise. There was a demon of blindness and a demon of leprosy and a demon of heart disease. They could transfer their malign gifts to people. For instance, the evil eye which could turn good fortune into bad and in which all believed was given to an individual by the demons. They worked along with certain animals – the serpent, the bull, the donkey and the mosquito. The male demons were known as shedim, and the female as lilin, after Lilith. The female demons had long hair and were the enemies of children. That is why children had their guardian angels (Matthew 18:10).

It does not matter whether or not we believe in all this; whether it is true or not is beside the point. The point is that the people in New Testament times did. We still may use the phrase Poor devil! That is a relic of the old belief. When a man believed himself to be possessed, he was ‘conscious of himself and also of another being who constrains and controls him from within’. That explains why the demon-possessed in Palestine so often cried out when they met Jesus. They knew that Jesus was believed by some at least to be the Messiah; they knew that the reign of the Messiah was the end of the demons; and those who believed themselves to be possessed spoke as demons when they came into the presence of Jesus.

There were many exorcists who claimed to be able to cast out demons. So real was this belief that by AD 340 the Christian Church actually possessed an Order of Exorcists. But there was this difference – the ordinary Jewish and pagan exorcist used elaborate incantations and spells and magical rites. Jesus with one word of clear, simple, brief authority exorcised the demon. No one had ever seen anything like this before. The power was not in the spell, the formula, the incantation, the elaborate rite; the power was in Jesus, and people were astonished.

What are we to say to all this? Paul Tournier in A Doctor’s Casebook writes, ‘Doubtless there are many doctors who in their struggle against disease have had, like me, the feeling that they were confronting, not something passive, but a clever and resourceful enemy.’ Dr Rendle Short comes tentatively to the conclusion that ‘the happenings in this world, in fact, and its moral disasters, its wars and wickedness, its physical catastrophes, and its sicknesses, may be part of a great warfare due to the interplay of forces such as we see in the book of Job, the malice of the devil on one hand and the restraints imposed by God on the other’.

This is a subject on which we cannot dogmatize. We may take three different positions. (1) We may relegate the whole matter of demon-possession to the sphere of primitive thought and say that it was a primitive way of accounting for things in the days before more was known about the human body or the working of the mind. (2) We may accept the fact of demon-possession as being true in New Testament times and as being still true today. (3) If we accept the first position, we have to explain the attitude and actions of Jesus. Either he knew no more on this matter than the people of his day – and that is a thing we can easily accept, for Jesus was not a scientist and did not come to teach science. Or he knew perfectly well that he could never cure the person in trouble unless he assumed the reality of the disease. It was real to the person concerned and had to be treated as such or it could never be cured. In the end we come to the conclusion that there are some answers we do not know.