The 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 | 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

 Keep your family safe, O Lord, with unfailing care that relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace they may be defended always through your protection.  We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. 

One of the fascinating things about the Gospel of Mark that we are focusing on during this liturgical cycle is the way in which he reveals a part of Jesus that’s fascinating.  The fascinating part was his relationship with demons.  The fact that Jesus knew them and they knew him, what does that teach us?  What does that say?  I will put this whole idea of Jesus dealing with demons in the context of one of the core teachings that Jesus came to reveal, and it’s the incarnation.  God of the Old Testament was the God of the Father.  He was the strongest, most powerful figure who ever could exist, and he had a side to him that was demanding in a sense.  God the Father was the one who said, “This is what I ask of you.  This is what I expect of you.”  He got disappointed at times at his whole creation.  He at one time wanted to destroy all humanity and then found one family, Noah’s family, and said, “Okay, I’ll work with them.”  But there’s a hardness, in a way, to God the Father when he’s demanding that we become what we’re intended to be, and we’re having such a hard time with that throughout Old Testament times.  So there was always this conflict between the God who says, “Do this,” and you don’t, and so he says, “Okay, I’m going to destroy you.”  So think of that as not the fullness of God but the beginning of human beings, who have strong egos, coming against something that is greater than they are, and it’s asking that they do certain things in order to receive God’s favor, God’s protection.  But then there’s something more that God had planned to reveal.  He isn’t just that God.  He’s also a God that is human, and there we get to the heart of the mystery of who Jesus is, this image that he is the one that comes to reveal the fullness of who God is, and God is both human and divine.  How can that be, God being human and divine?  But that’s who the Son of God is. 

So we have God the Father who worked with us and then God the Son who is part human.  So what’s the difference?  Well, the image is that this fullness of God is so much more sympathetic and empathetic about what it’s like to be human.  His whole notion of who he is, is, “I want to be a part of your life, and when I see your faults and your weaknesses, I’ll take care of those for you.  I’ll get rid of those.  Those are the things that kept you from my Father, but I am going to take care of that so that you don’t have to think about that.  Just trust me to be a part of you.  Let me come and be in you.”  The ego has a really hard time with that, that this God is the God who wants to come and be a part of us, because the thing about humanity is — and you can learn this from the book of the Old Testament, the Genesis book where it says, “This is what human beings did when God said, ‘I’d like to join you and be a part of you and take care of you,” and they said, “Well, we like that idea.”  But basically the story of Adam and Eve is human nature, when it’s told, does it want to do things on its own or does it want someone to help them, they say — the ego just knows to say, “I can take care of this.”  So the great sin of our original parents, in a sense, is the sin of saying, “I as a human being can deal with all that God requires and all that God asks, and I myself, I will be able to accomplish it.”  But that’s not God’s plan.  God made human beings, in a sense, incapable of becoming who he intends them to be without his indwelling presence, a great mystery.  God had to reveal himself as one who has the potential to live inside of you and me, and in that indwelling presence, he offers the ego a balancing agent.  It’s called God’s favor — God’s favor.  What does that mean?  Imagine that there is someone that meets you in your life, or you meet someone, and you fall in love with them, and you want to be there for them.  You want to be with them.  You want to know everything about them.  You want to be a part of them.  That’s God’s favor.  That’s a good description of God has the same intense desire to be in an intimate relationship with every single one he created, and he does that, not because he decided that would be a good idea, but because human beings are made in such a way that, without that, they become like Job in the first reading. 

The story of Job is fascinating, because it’s a deal with the devil and Job where the devil comes and says, “You love God, and God is such a good God because he gives you everything he wants, and he gives you everything you need.  So the reason you love him is because he gives you everything you want.  Is that really love?  Would you love God if he didn’t show his favor to you and give you such a beautiful family and such success in the world?”  And Job says, “Yeah, I think I can.”  But the interesting thing about the story of Job is, when you see him without God’s favor, even though it was a very materialistic way of favor-showing in that story, he’s depressed.  He’s anxious.  He’s sleepless.  He’s in bad shape.  He doesn’t do well without favor, and that’s a beautiful image of human beings who are made for this gift of God’s indwelling favor.  When we’re left with just the ego, the ego has two directions it goes in.  It knows how to achieve and be the best.  At the same time, it looks at our humanity and accuses us of being the worst possible creatures we could ever be.  The ego either is building us up into these incredibly powerful, perfect people, or we’re trash.  And when you think about it, human beings are not made to live in that kind of tension.  They’re made for a partnership with love, with favor, with some Spirit that’s inside of him taking care of him.  So that means to me that the essence of the revelation of God in Jesus is that human beings are destined to be in a relationship like Jesus where they have God in them, and they also have their humanity in them.  And the two of them remain separate, but they have to be one.  They have to be in union.  They have to be in communication.

So let’s go back then to the work of the devil, the evil one.  The evil one is so opposed to the work and plan of God, and if the plan of God is that he lives within us and is the source of the balance that we need to be able to achieve the role that we have in the world — and that role is both for us and for others — he wants us to be in this world and enjoy it.  He wants peace and joy to be part of who we are in this world.  He’s not interesting in us being in pain, yet pain is part of it, because pain does this mysterious thing of deepening us and changing us.  But no, he wants us happy.  He wants us full of the joy of this beautiful thing God has given us, even though it’s flawed and broken and has all kinds of evil in it.  Fundamentally the world that God has created is beautiful and good, and we are destined to participate in that and be reflections of that, to be good, because we have this incredible gift of God’s favor that overcomes our ego’s, what I call it, duality that either throws us into perfection, and we become egomaniacs, or we’re wallowing in the same thing that Job, in the first reading, is wallowing in.  So for balance, we need to integrate divinity.  So the devil’s plan would be to keep those two things separate.  So Jesus comes into the world, and when he starts driving demons out, they have this interesting way of saying, “Wait a minute.  I know who you are.  You’re the Son of God.”  And Jesus said, “Shut up.  Don’t say that.”  Why didn’t Jesus want people to know that he was the Son of God?  Because he was the Son of God, but what he did, it says in scripture, he pocketed his divinity.  He didn’t play the divine card.  He played the human card.  He wanted to show people what it’s like to live with God in you, God’s favor as a human being, and so it was essential for him to say, “When you see me, you see who you are meant to be.  You see who you’re supposed to become.”  Now, we’re never going to become God like Jesus was God, but we participate in divinity.  So he didn’t want to come onto the scene and act like a God, meaning he could have changed every — he could have destroyed everybody who was in his way.  He could have done spectacular things.  He could have done miracle after miracle and got everybody to believe in him, and they would have believed in a miracle worker, that they were supposed to be like God.  And we’re not destined to be like, in that sense, God.  We’re destined to be in a connection, in a deep, intimate union with divinity that balances our humanity and makes us these incredibly valuable, in a way, joyous, at the same time, struggling human beings.  So when the devil is screaming out, “Hey, claim your divinity,” Jesus says, “No.  No, I won’t.  I can’t do that, because I will not be able to effect the change in people if I act like God, because they’re not going to be gods, but they’re going to be filled with my favor.  And I’m acting as if a human being — that I’m a human being filled with God’s favor.  So I’m going to be able to deal with all the struggles, all the disappointments, all the pain of life.  I’m going to take it on and show you there’s a way to deal with all that pain.  If you have God’s favor in you, you can do it.  So then there’s a — look then at the devil saying, “Okay well, if I can’t get divinity to be the obstacle to you connecting with Jesus, then maybe I’ll work on you.”  So what he does — and the devil’s voice is constantly pounding us with the same kind of thing.  Instead of saying, like the devil said to Jesus, “You’re God.  You’re God,” you know what he says to us?  “You’re human.  You’re just nothing but a human.  You’re a broken, stupid, ugly human.  That’s all you are.”  It’s called shame.  If he can get us to think only about our humanity, then he’s doing the same thing with Jesus, who is a man.  He’s saying, “Play on your divinity.  Do the divinity thing.”  No, it’s got to be divinity and humanity.  Jesus was, as a man, tempted to use his divinity to be spectacular, but he didn’t.  It was one of the first temptations in the desert.  “Do spectacular things.  Turn stones into bread.  Everybody will believe in you.”  He said, “No, I’m not here to do that.  I’m here to feed people the truth, to be fed on the truth.  The truth is I’m divine and human.  I want human beings to be that, both.”  So the devil attacks our union with divinity by telling us we’re not worthy.  He tempts God to say he’s more than human.

How do we deal with this mysterious thing of integrating humanity and divinity inside of us?   You do it by simply acknowledging two very simple things.  What’s God’s plan?  God’s plan is that we live a full, wonderful life here, but in our humanity, we can’t accomplish that on our own.  So his plan is that he will enter into us and give us a sense of what it’s like to live in our brokenness, experiencing it, being depressed at times but knowing, believing that, in all of that, there is this power, this mysterious power that can lift us from the depth of depression and shame and anger and bitterness, and it’s called favor.  It’s called love, believing that there’s this divine power inside of you, inside of me that’s saying over and over again, in the midst of our experiencing nothing but our failures, he’s saying, “You’re loved.  You’re forgiven.  You’re redeemed.  You’re my beloved.”  It’s amazing what we can do with our broken humanity and that divine, incredible affirmation.  It balances.  It brings life and peace.

Father, it’s amazing. You’ve given us something to do that’s beyond our capacity, to integrate two things that are very different, separate in our mind, to imagine that they’re one. Our mind understands separation. Our heart understands unity. Move us to our heart so we can embrace a mystery as profound as your divinity living inside of our broken humanity, and help us to be consoled by this mysterious presence of your affirmation, your love, your favor. Without it, we’re dangerous. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.