The Authority Of Jesus
THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS
MARK 1:21-28
Jesus shows his authority by driving out an evil spirit.
The scene which follows the calling of the fishermen is very different in character, but is equally important in showing us at the outset the nature of Jesus’ mission. If the preceding story told how men responded to the authoritative call of Jesus, this incident shows how his authority extended even to the world of evil spirits.
Jesus had gone into the synagogue and received an invitation to preach such as might be given by the leaders to any man whom they considered competent to address the people (Acts 13:15). All the emphasis lies on the fact that Jesus taught (ie preached) with a note of authority which was not characteristic of the other religious teachers of the day; what has survived of the teaching of the scribes or rabbis shows that they loved to quote their predecessors. The congregation’s amazement at this prophetic type of utterance turned to astonishment and alarm as a man with an unclean spirit loudly interrupted the proceedings by challenging Jesus to his face (cf. 1 Kings 17:18 for the words). Jesus rebuked the spirit and called it to come out of the man.
To modern people demon possession is one of the most difficult things in the Gospels. Several times Jesus was confronted by men suffering from what we would be inclined to diagnose as some kind of mental or psychosomatic illness, and he cured them by a word. But demon possession differs from mental illness in that the possessed showed uncanny insight into the true identity of Jesus as the holy One (Psalm 16:10; John 6:69) or Son (Mark 3:11; 5:7) of God.
Now stories of similar phenomena are found in pagan sources, and the temptation of the critic is to dismiss the Gospel stories as having been modelled on these pagan patterns. But is this so? Reports of demon possession in the biblical sense sometimes occur today, and some modern thinkers are coming to realize the existence of a world of evil that transcends the world of men and exercises a baleful influence upon it. We may also ask with regard to the biblical stories whether there may not have been a concurrent activity of unclean spirits in the mentally ill to give them their strange insight into the identity of Jesus just as we speak of the concurrent activity of the Holy Spirit in the minds of the inspired writers of Scripture.