Mark 1:32-34

Mark 1:32-34 – General Healings and Exorcisms

The crowd waited until sundown when the Sabbath ended. Mark perhaps assumed that as well as his exorcism Jesus’ deed of healing had become generally known. Mention of the whole city alerts us to the love of writers of the time to exaggerate in order to stress a point. The streets of Capernaum, and of all similar towns and cities, were quite narrow. A crowd big enough to fill the street need not in fact have numbered too many.

The Cultural Meaning of Sickness

According to the religious culture of the time, illness was interpreted as a sign of the displeasure of God. It was an indication of sin, the deliberate or indeliberate transgression of some law, either by the person or the person’s close family. To be chronically ill was to carry the burden not only of incapacitating sickness but of judgment. Unable to earn, they were at the mercy of others and undoubtedly at times went hungry. If they were the former breadwinners, their incapacity would have severely affected their dependents. Their condition was not necessarily occasion for compassion. Often it led to ostracism.

Jesus apparently responded readily and compassionately to the need of the sick and possessed. He engaged with them, and they in turn seem to have trusted him. It was no doubt true at that time, as it is today, that the incidence of illness was frequently a factor of poverty. Poverty in its turn is consistently a factor of injustice and oppression. From his own experience in Nazareth Jesus was only too well aware of the burdens under which so many of the marginalised laboured. Theirs was not the experience of the Kingdom!

Mark commented that Jesus did not allow the demons to speak because they knew him. The forces of evil, as it were, had so much to lose. They were keenly alert to the presence of danger in their midst. The stronger one had arrived. Evil so often is adept at misusing truth for its own purposes. The volatile and largely ignorant Galileans could so easily have misunderstood the role and mission of Jesus. Jesus needed to lead people gradually into the fuller meaning of his redemptive mission and how it would be fulfilled in practice. People needed to convert, to change their assumptions and to question the accepted wisdom, if they were to understand him and the Kingdom he would introduce. Jesus needed to keep strictly in check the destructive conclusions of the forces of evil; so he insistently silenced the demons.

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