A Reflection on the Gospel Reading from the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

“Immediately there was a man in the synagogue with an unclean spirit. And he cried 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.” Mark 1:23-24

“You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe, and shudder!” James 2:19

The terrible dictator Josef Stalin had a daughter named Svetlana, who lived a fascinating and, at times, terrible life as the daughter of one of the most wicked rulers in human history. In the 1960s Svetlana shocked the world by applying for asylum at a United States embassy in India, leaving the Soviet Union under a cloud of intrigue. She even settled, for a time, in Scottsdale, Arizona of all places, and died at a nursing home in Wisconsin in 2011. Of more interest, in my opinion, is the fact that Svetlana was baptized as a Christian in the Russian Orthodox church in the 1950s, and spent her life in America worshipping in Eastern Orthodox and Episcopal Churches. When Svetlana was asked how she learned about the Christian faith, she said the knowledge of the faith came from a chilling and unlikely source: she learned it first from her father.

One day as a teenager, Svetlana was studying atheistic Soviet propaganda for a required class on “religion.”  She started to tell her father what she was learning about Jesus, the Bible, and so on; and much to her surprise her father pulled New Testament commentaries, systematic theology textbooks, and devotionals that he kept hidden away in his library down from a shelf. Stalin’s surprising advice to his daughter about Christianity was to take what she was learning in her Soviet school with a grain of salt, even going so far as to say that Jesus was who he claimed to be because the Bible was a trustworthy document. Few people know that Stalin had been a candidate for ordination in the Russian Orthodox Church before becoming a violent radical in the Bolshevik movement. He had the entire New Testament memorized in two languages, Russian and Greek. Yet, Stalin, a man who no doubt would have run laps around your clergy in a Bible Study, was, directly and indirectly, responsible for unspeakable suffering and death for millions of innocent people.

So too does a demon recognize exactly who Jesus is in the Gospel of Mark, the Son of God. Like Stalin, the demon who torments a man in the temple can see Jesus with a remarkable clarity unmatched even by Jesus’ closest friends. Yet, this demon does not receive the news of God’s entering into the hopeless situation of humanity with joy or relief, he does not receive this true news as good news. The Gospel of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ must be received for what it is, good news, and not just any good news, but the good news.

For a man like Josef Stalin, the news of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ that he knew so well from years of devoted study to Scripture, the Gospel was not good news. Modern visions of utopian societies, the Communism of Stalin’s time being one example, have a remarkable capacity for sounding very Christian. The Church described by the Book of Acts was a Church that shared all things in common, and the City of God described in the Book of Revelation is a city without ethnic, social, or economic distinction. Yet, that Church and City can only be reached by way of the cross. Someone who adopts the visions of a good life found in Holy Scripture, but seeks to enact that vision by a way other than Christ, is someone who has aligned himself with the forces opposed to God. For the theologically attuned demon and the Biblically literate Stalin, Jesus Christ and his ways are a nuisance and an obstacle. He is bad news.

I can not help but wonder if an honest assessment of our own belief in Christ would not reveal a faith that is much like that of a demon or a dictator. Do we, like St. Peter, go so quickly from “yes, Lord, I believe” to “I will not let you die on the cross,” only to be rebuked by Christ as one who is opposed to God’s designs? The life of the Christian is a life of daily following after the Crucified God, not a life of fitting what we like about Jesus into our own systems of living and belief as we deem appropriate. Thy kingdom come and thy will be done can not be prayed or believed separately, they must be held together as God’s will and God’s kingdom exist together. In short, the news of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ and bringing us back to God by way of the cross is not news, it is not only good news, it is the only good news we have.

Fr. Matt