For the writer of Mark’s Gospel, the whole world is crying out from bondage. It’s caught between two kinds of powerful energy: God’s energy of healing and Satan’s energy of destruction. For Mark, one or the other is constantly erupting in a flash of power, trying to subdue the other. It’s into this world of conflicting powers that Jesus bursts onto the scene, like a toddler into an unexplored room. In the sick whom he cures, in the teaching that he offers, in the demons that he challenges, Jesus wields God’s healing power like nothing anyone has seen before. Unlike the other teachers and healers who circulate around Capernaum, Jesus truly shakes up the balance of power in the world. He turns everything upside down! People are amazed, and at the same time, frightened. Who is this man who speaks and acts with such authority? Even his family doesn’t know what to make of him. Others worry how to tell whether Jesus is full of God’s power, or full of the power of God’s adversary, Satan.
Today, passages like our Gospel lesson can be troubling. As Episcopalians, we don’t like to talk about Satan. We think in terms of medicine, psychology, and sociology, rather than in terms of personified cosmic forces. We don’t see our universe as engaged in a pervasive battle between God and the Devil. When I saw the readings for today, my heart sank. “Ugh,” I thought. “We have visitors this Sunday. We have a baptism for a cute little boy. Why do we have to hear about Satan today?!” Like the crowds around Jesus, I wished for a story where Jesus was acting just a little less wild. And then I remembered the renunciations and promises that Henry’s parents will make for him right after the sermon. Yes, in just a few minutes—we will renounce not just our own waywardness but also “Satan, and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” and “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” Even our final song is about the devil! We can’t just seem to get away from Satan today!
Part of me wonders if all this devil talk is just outmoded imagery that we need to modernize. Deep down in my heart, though, I have trouble letting go of the living character of the evil that I have myself encountered in this world. I’ve led a pretty sheltered life. I’ve visited prisons but never been incarcerated; I’ve been in arguments, but not in wars; I’ve had health issues but not suffered from a debilitating sickness. Yet I have seen the creatures of God bound and shackled by powers that seem to have a life of their own. I’ll never forget, for example, walking away from my beautiful Gothic college campus at Sewanee, Tennessee, going through the woods and down a dirt path to the settlement of shacks that sat on church-owned land, less than a mile from my academic paradise. I’ll never forget looking into the innocent, intelligent blue eyes of three-year-old Jenny, a little girl at the Headstart Center there. I’ll never forget the chill that ran through me at the thought of the brightness of those eyes clouding over with a despair born of poverty, of the poverty right on my doorstep. Weren’t the chains that bound us each to our separate worlds an evil power that destroys the creatures of God? Didn’t Jesus come to free us from that power?
And what about the sweet, frail lady that I would visit at the hospital when I did my pastoral care training. Entirely alone in the world, without resources, wasting away with disease, in pain—this patient would lie there week after week, knowing that she would either die alone or return alone to an anonymous nursing home bed. Weren’t the chains that bound her to her solitude and sickness an evil power that destroys the creatures of God? Didn’t Jesus come to free her from that power?
And today, now that we have seen the knee on the neck of George Floyd, or the children in cages in ICE detention … How can we deny the existence of complex forces that keep us bound to racism and fear? How can we explain the pervasive denial of the humanity of those who differ from us? How can we explain our seeming inability to recognize and to honor the “eternal weight of glory” that is inside every single one of God’s creatures, beyond all measure? Aren’t those cords, wrapping us in fear of one another, an evil power that destroys the creatures of God? Didn’t Jesus come to free us from that power?
Evil is a power, I think, just like Love is a power. All of the myriad variations of our bondage to sin and death are powerful forces beyond our control, powerful forces worthy of the name of Satan, which really just means, “the Adversary:” the Adversary of the goodness and wholeness that God intends for creation. Jesus explains in our Gospel that this strong adversary, this “Strong Man,” can be bound with the even greater power of the Holy Spirit. Like a thief in the night, Jesus enters our world with this Holy Spirit power of Love and Healing. Binding the Strong Man, Jesus says, “Now, follow me.” Jesus asks us to follow him into the courageous work of freeing the captives and bestowing health and wholeness in our hearts, homes, and neighborhoods.[1]
Today, Henry is starting off on this journey with Jesus. When we mark Henry’s forehead with a sign of the cross, I will remind us all that he is sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever. No evil power can bind him any longer, ever again. May he always follow Jesus in a joy-filled, curiosity-driven toddler way: throwing himself into Love with abandon, hurtling over prejudice and fear with courage; and burrowing headlong into caring relationships with the sick and lonely. And may we, his family in Christ, always be there to catch him when he falls. May we surround him not with restraints, but with the story of Jesus, the Powerful One who binds the Strong Man—the story of Jesus, who sets us free to do the work of love in the world.
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