Mark 1:21-28 (Or the whole Gospel of Mark, really)
I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Somewhere deep in my basement, I have a box of journals full of half-written stories, terrible poems with forced rhymes, and self-indulgent reflections on the dramatic emotions of a preteen. As I grew in my skills as a writer, or at least, I hope I’ve grown, there is one piece of advice I learned early on and have tried to be true to stick to ever since. The piece of advice was “Show. Don’t Tell.” It’s considered the “golden rule” of writing, and it basically means that when we write, stories, concrete examples, sensory illustrations and literary techniques like similes and metaphors go a lot further in conveying our ideas than just sheer exposition. Entering in to an experience is so much more powerful than just talking about it. So, for example, if, say, I wanted to express to you my exhaustion, I could say something like, “I was really tired.” Or I could show you how tired I was by saying, “I was so tired I put the baby in the bathtub with his socks still on.” Now you have a clearer idea of how very tired I was. Or, how my husband says, “I love you,” every day, not by just saying “I love you,” but by making the coffee, pouring it into a mug, and presenting it to me bedside. See? Show don’t tell.
This is an important rule for most of life. Saying “I love Jesus,” doesn’t have quite the impact as, say, serving a meal at a homeless shelter. Saying, “I care about my kids,” doesn’t have the same weight as taking out loans so they could all go to college. If you’re trying to tell your boss that you’re a hard worker, you’ll be much more convincing if you show up to work than if you just said, “Hey. Believe me. I’m a hard worker.” As the saying goes, “Talk is cheap.”
During the time that the Gospel of Mark was written, there’s all sorts of cheap talk going around about who this Jesus character might be, or might have been. Was he just a guy who was a pain in the butt to the religious elite? Was he an insurrectionist that was executed by the Roman government? Was he a miracle worker or a great physician or just some Jewish peasant that duped a lot of other Jewish peasants into thinking there was some hope in this world? The Gospel of Mark sets out to answer this swirling question. Who is - or was - Jesus of Nazareth? But strangely, Mark doesn’t seem to want to tell us. Or at least, Mark presents us with a Jesus who doesn’t want us to know.
There’s this motif throughout the Gospel of Mark that scholars call the “Messianic Secret.” If you sit down and read the gospel all the way through, and I really encourage you to do it sometime, you’ll start to notice that each time someone publicly identifies Jesus as the Messiah, he tells them to be quiet. He shuts them down. This starts with the “unclean spirits” in our reading today. And this is fascinating to me, because the demons, or spirits, or whatever we want to call them that are tormenting this man get the Jesus question right. In this the first miracle recorded in this Gospel, this is Mark’s chance to tell us who Jesus is. And instead of telling us of Jesus’s greatness and holiness and set-apart-ness, he gives us the answer from the mouth of a demon. And then Jesus shuts him up.
And instead of one of the disciples or the most faithful or the truest followers of Jesus being the ones to tell us who Jesus is, Mark has them wandering around consistently getting the question wrong. There are a few exceptions, but they’re all private encounters. God tells Jesus that he is God’s son as he is baptized, but Mark presumes that Jesus is the only one to hear it. God announces Jesus’s sonship at the transfiguration, but only three disciples hear it. Peter confesses it in a moment of fleeting brilliance, pretty much the closest that any human comes up to now to naming who Jesus really is, but then it’s immediately followed by a failure and a startling rebuke from Jesus.
In Mark’s Gospel, the supernatural beings have an understanding of who Jesus is, but the humans are, for the most part, completely clueless. Why does Mark do this? Why does he give the “right” words to the wrong spirits? And anytime anyone gets it right, Jesus prohibits them from telling a soul. If Mark’s goal is to tell us who Jesus is, why does he spend most of the Gospel hiding it from us? Why does Mark depict humans as complete failures to get the Jesus question right, or, at best, the humans only partially or imperfectly seem to understand who Jesus is?
If Mark’s goal is to show us who Jesus is, what’s up with this Messianic Secret Motif that he plays throughout the gospel?
This is just a guess, but it has me thinking. My guess has something to do with the difference between showing and telling.
The demons tell us who Jesus is.
But the story shows us.
The unclean spirits tell us who Jesus is.
But Jesus wants to show us.
It’s one thing to confess that Jesus is the Son of God.
And it’s another thing to experience his healing in your life.
It’s one thing to get the answer right.
And it’s another thing to live the love of God for yourself and for others.
Mark uses the messianic secret to show us that just because we get the answer right, doesn’t mean we really understand. And just because we struggle to understand, doesn’t mean that we’re left out in the cold. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Jesus wants to keep his identity hidden throughout the Gospel of Mark, but he is quite open about the suffering he must undergo. Jesus rebukes them when they talk about his glory. But he will shout about his suffering from the rooftops.
Mark takes us on a journey. Mark shows us who Jesus is. Mark emphasizes the importance of a relationship with Jesus, far far more than just giving the right answer to the Jesus question. Even the demons get the Jesus question right. But what the demons don’t do is show us what it means. The unclean spirits are incapable of showing what it means that Jesus is the Son of God. Only Jesus can do that. And he does it in a very strange way. Jesus shows us who he is through his suffering.
Mark tells story after story of folks failing to get Jesus right. Mark tells story after story of the demons getting it right, but Jesus shutting them up as soon as the words are said. And when a human finally does get the Jesus question right, it comes from the person you least expect, exactly when you least expect it. The only full, complete confession of who Jesus is in Mark's gospel comes from the Centurion, at the moment of Jesus’s death on the cross. We are shown who Jesus is, not when he’s fixing everything, or commanding the elements, or defying the laws of nature, but precisely at his weakest moment. Jesus is there, on the cross, bleeding and sweating and breathing his last, and the Centurion guard is the one who finally gets it. He says, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” Jesus shows the centurion who he is, and the centurion is the one who finally gets it.
So what does it mean that Jesus is the Son of God? Well, according to Mark, it means that he will not come riding a flying chariot through the sky, he won’t zap people with lightning bolts from on high, he won’t snap his fingers and make suffering go away. Rather, he will enter in to the suffering of the world, he will become part of the suffering of the world, he will suffer with the world, and when you see that, when you’re shown that, not just told, but really shown it, then you know you’re on your way to understanding who the Son of God is. Mark tells the story where the demons “tell” who Jesus is, but Jesus himself, through his sacrificial suffering on the cross, through his full participation in the human story, shows us who he is.
So this will sound a little crazy, a little counterintuitive, but maybe we need to work on keeping the messianic secret...? Maybe we need to work on showing who Jesus is, rather than just telling? It’s not enough to say that Jesus is the Son of God, even the demons do that. What might be enough is for us to enter in to the Jesus story of suffering and struggle and redemption for ourselves, so that we can show the world what it means that Jesus is the Son of God.
Saint Francis is often attributed as the one to have said, “Preach the Gospel. When necessary, use words.”
In other words, like Mark, “Show. Don’t tell.”
Even the unclean spirits can tell.
But we are the hands and feet of Christ. We are the ones who are invited into the fullness of who Jesus truly is, by entering a suffering world, by suffering with the world, and by participating in its inevitable resurrection. That’s how we show, not just tell, the good news.
Thanks be to God.
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