This week’s Gospel reading comes from the Gospel of Mark. It’s one of my favorites. As it unfolds, the narrative positions us as listeners in one of those places where God’s arms, as it were, reach across time and space to embrace us – especially those of us who know pain because society’s configuration of power leaves us feeling so often defeated. In a special way, God’s arms embrace those of us who – whether in our parishes, in our schools, or in the doctrines we are commanded to obey – experience these same destructive forces within the very Church that we want we love. In a phrase, in this Gospel passage, God embraces those of us at the margins: those subjected to the menacing forces of homophobia and transphobia; to racism and xenophobia, to sexism and misogyny. And we know the list does not end there. 

The story is, of all things, an exorcism – the first one in the entire Gospel. We are in a synagogue, on the sabbath, and Jesus has already emerged as an impressive teacher. “They were astounded at his teaching,” we read, “for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes” (1:22). As if to dramatize this realization that Jesus’s identity is special, someone at the synagogue steps forward. He’s possessed. But he’s not asking for an exorcism. Instead, the demon speaks through him: “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” (1:24). The story ends how we might expect it to:

“But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be quiet and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. [All those looking on] were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching – with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him’” (1:25-27). 

The story is fascinating from a Biblical studies perspective. As the famous late New Testament scholar Raymond E. Brown notes, this story represents the very first instance of the use of Mark’s most distinctive literary device, the “Messianic Secret.” The secret is this: everyone seems to know Jesus’s true identity as the Son of God, except the main characters in the Gospel – folks like Jesus’s disciples, as the reader will come to learn. These folks realize Jesus is the Messiah only after Jesus’s crucifixion.The demons know who Jesus really is; many of Jesus’s would-be and actual followers throughout the Gospel of Mark, do not. 

I believe there is a challenging message here for us, but to see it clearly we will need to reframe how we typically read a story like this. We typically believe that demons are bad. And there’s some sense to this, since demons typically pose a threat to the health of the host. But what if people who are cast as demons really aren’t demons? 

In our contemporary climate, both in the church and in the wider society, we know the folks who, rather than being themselves demons, are instead demonized – members of the LGBTQ+ community; people of color; migrants; the poor, and these are just a few. But those of us who are demonized and marginalized because of who we are, because of who we love, because of what side of the U.S. border we found ourselves born on – we know the secret. We know that Jesus does not condemn us or confront us with endless interrogation wrapped in esoteric theological distinctions because we are, say, gay or lesbian, trans or gender nonbinary. No, we know the secret. We know that Jesus is the Holy One of God, and that the message he brings is one of acceptance, of love, of reconciliation, of justice. And far from destroying us, Jesus calls us out of strictures and situations of confinement – whatever those strictures and situations may be – into freedom. 

Jesus calls us out from the various confining spaces we find ourselves in, not because we are problematic demons in the Church and society, but because we are being problematically demonized in those very places. What might be seen from one angle as an exorcism is actually, in truth, an act of liberation. Or, to use the words with which I began, it is actually an embrace. 

As you read these words this day, I encourage you to ask yourselves: into what spaces of freedom is God calling you? Whose arms, like Jesus’s, are open to you? And will you take up Jesus’s offer? After all, you know the secret. 

Today and in the days to come this week, I invite you to ask in prayer: where is Jesus calling you out in order to liberate you from the strictures and structures that bind? 

I invite you, today and in the days to come this week, to look for those little moments where, despite how confining the ways of the world are, God is inviting you to renewal, to creative uses of agency, to new ways of resurrecting life in the relationships around you. 

For those of us who know that we have been demonized by the world – and perhaps even by those same forces operating in the Church – I invite you, today and in the days to come this week, to linger a little longer with God. To believe a little more deeply that, in this vast wide world, God still knows our need, and that God accompanies us in it. 

My prayer for all of us is that even when the Church and the World fail to recognize God’s call to justice; we will still heed the voice of the Messiah who beckons us onward – through prayer, toward liberative action; and through liberative action, toward a better world. 

After all, we know the secret.