Fourth Sunday after Epiphany; 28 January 2024; Epiphany 4B (RCL); Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28.
Burton Mack points out that Jesus’ first public act in Mark’s Gospel is the exorcism of a demon from a man in the synagogue. This sets up the struggle between Jesus and the synagogue at the very outset of the Gospel, and shows Jesus as a man of power, more effective than the power of the synagogue. This might have been good for propaganda in the ancient world, but tragic ever since.
Demon possession appears to be a phenomenon connected to marginalized cultures or subcultures. When a dominant culture has foreclosed all possibility of sociality, demon possession makes its appearance. In our day, we often treat street people the way the ancient world treated the demon-possessed. Think of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; gay men with AIDS were “demonized.” It seems to me that the point Mark is making is that the synagogue has been taken over by corrupting powers (the Roman Empire, and the compromises the Temple and synagogue had to make with Rome for survival (remember, Mark is writing after the destruction of the Temple, so he can lump synagogue and Temple together ahistorically)), and is ineffective at restoring sociality. Jesus, on the other hand, is on the scene to establish a new Empire and new kinship, and healing the demon-possessed by restoring them to functioning community.
Jesus, like Moses, speaks with authority, that is the capability of bringing what he says to reality, and establishing a new community, just as Moses did in the desert. The sea-crossing and feeding miracles reinforce the comparison with Moses, and the drowning of the demon “Legion” in the sea in a herd of pigs comically parallels Moses’ drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea.
Paul, writing before the destruction of the Temple, is engaged in a contest over which set of social relationships will give identity to his community. Meat, in the ancient world, served as a sign of social cohesion and status and as a political lubricant. Feasting, eating meat, indicated social class, and was almost always done in public, at a banquet or a sacrificial feast. Temples, even the Jerusalem Temple, had public dining rooms, where the sacrificial meal would be eaten in the sight of all in the Temple. The issue was not just to which god the meat had been sacrificed, but the solidarity established with the devotees of that god.
Sacrifice provided the social glue and classification of the ancient world. It was the sign of status and wealth and political connection. Most of us buy our meat wrapped in plastic film at a supermarket, so sacrifice no longer serves that purpose in modern world. Money or wealth probably provides the closest equivalent. Paul today would be asking us to think about where we earn our money and how we spend it. Be careful about how you display it, and with whom you display it. Like access to sacrifice then, wealth today stratifies society. Several times in the Corinthian correspondence, Paul addresses the question of stratification. In chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians, he scolds those with enough leisure to be able to show up early for the Corinthians’ common meals of eating all the good stuff and drinking all the good wine before others can arrive. Eat at home, he says, which defeats the purpose of public eating — the display of status.
Many of our social institutions have lost their power of creating solidarity to the corrosive influence of money. Jesus might well show up, casting out a demon at a bank, or on Wall Street. Our currency is a debt-based, interest-bearing, fiat currency. When the government issues money (the central bank, by fiat), it issues debt, in the form of bonds (a promise to repay). That debt is then serviced by banks. The dollar bill in your wallet (or the figure on you bank statement) is backed by someone’s mortgage, or the government’s promise to repay someone.
And because the money you put in the bank earns interest (which means you must pay interest on money you borrow), the consequence is that there is never enough money in circulation to repay all debts with interest. It is a necessary consequence of the way our currency works that someone must go bankrupt. We’re just careful to make sure that those who do are socially marginalized, in other words, demon-possessed.
Communities thrive on a different kind of currency; asset-based, demurrage currency. Demurrage implies that the currency devalues over time, rather than increases in value. Think of the favors we do for one another in a community. Those favors build up a fund of goodwill on which members of the community can call in times of need. However, the longer you are away from the community, the less value you will have stored in that fund. True poverty is having no favors to call in, nothing of value to share in the communities that give us our identity and being.
The whole of the Old Testament legislative agenda is to build up that fund of goodwill within the community (which fund Paul calls righteousness). But we use the righteousness of the law to stratify and exclude, rather than include people in that fund. Paul is instructing the more privileged of his community (those likely to receive invitations to a banquet at a Temple) to make sure they keep in mind those more likely to be marginalized, and to share their position (I will never eat meat, if that’s what it takes, says Paul). Jesus announces a new Empire, and casts out the corrosive demon from damaged institutions.