[ p. 47 ]
THE people were astonished at his teaching, for he spoke as one who himself had direct authority from God, and not as the Scribes. They might well be astonished. Not the Scribes, not Moses himself, had spoken so. “You have heard that it was said. . . . But I say to you.” This was the voice of one who knew the will of God, and claimed it for his own. He declared that he came not to undo the Law, but to complete it: to complete the revelation of God’s will that the Law contained. By thus completing the Law he shattered it, and the nation which was built upon it.
One man alone among his hearers knew what had happened. In the synagogue there was a man with an impure spirit, who cried out:
“What have we in common, with you, Jesus of Nazareth? You have come to destroy us. I know V*” who you are God’s Holy One."
[ p. 48 ]
Jesus rebuked him: “Be quiet, and come out of him!”
The impure spirit convulsed him, and shrieked, and came out of him.
Everybody was astounded, and they questioned one another:
“What is this?”
“A new teaching with authority!”
“He commands impure spirits.”
“Yes, and they obey him.”
The phrase—“a man with an impure spirit”—is strange to a modern mind, but the reality is not. He was a man possessed by a power greater than himself, who did what he ‘would not and spoke what he would not For all such supersessions of the active and controlling personality in Jesus’ day there was a single name and theory : the man was possessed by a spirit or daemon. The spirit could be pure or impure, good or evil. By the pure spirit, which was the Spirit of God, a man was inspired and a prophet; by the impure spirit, which was the Spirit of Evil, he was simply possessed and mad. To distinguish between these spirits was as difficult then as it is to-day. We do not know how to distinguish between the genius [ p. 49 ] and the madman in themselves : the only test we have is that which Jesus himself applied to others and claimed for himself: “By their works you shall know them.”
The decision was easy for the Pharisee, who was convinced that the day of the prophets was past. For him all spirits were impure spirits. It was his sentence upon Jesus, and upon John the Baptist before him. In the eyes of the organized religion of their day, John before, and Jesus after, had each a spirit indeed, but it was a spirit of evil.
That has always been the judgment of organized religion upon those of its children who claimed to be directly inspired by God : for the position of organized religion has always been the same. Because it is religion, God has revealed himself directly to men ; because it is organized, that direct revelation can never be renewed. A new revelation cannot be suffered, for it strikes direct at the heart of authority. It is, and must be condemned as subversive and heretical. Therefore it is held to be the inspiration of the Evil One, and is punished as such.
When, therefore, we read of Jesus’ great power over impure spirits and that those possessed of [ p. 50 ] impure spirits were the first to recognize him, we must remember that deep was calling to deep. The madman is greeting the genius, the genius soothing the madman, in the extremest confines of human personality. A man whose body has broken under the burden of spiritual knowledge is responding to and being strengthened by a man whose body could bear the burden. One who had passed beyond the awful conflict between spirit and flesh, and had been made one again in a rebirth of which the ordinary mind has no imagination, was recognized by others who were lost in the conflict from which he had emerged triumphant and calm; and by contact with him they were sometimes momentarily, sometimes permanently, renewed.
Jesus himself seems to have believed in the direct opposition of the impure and the Holy Spirit, and that he cast out the impure spirit by the Holy Spirit. There is the danger of thinking this a simple or crude belief. In truth, there is no other way of simply stating the mysterious truth ; but it is one which we must seize in its truth, not its statement, for it lies near to the core of the life of Jesus.
Jesus, when he came up out of the water, after [ p. 51 ] being baptized for the remission of his sins, felt that the Holy Spirit descended upon him. Suddenly he was one with God, in an ineffably sweet reunion of son and father, and a great peace and a great power came to him. That was, in Jesus’ own experience, the victory of the Holy Spirit over the Spirit of Evil. Yet what followed? He was driven out by the Holy Spirit into the desert, and the Spirit of Evil returned, a thousand times more potent and insidious, to beset him.
Jesus described his agony in the desert exactly in the after months :
“When the unclean spirit leaves the man, it goes through the waterless places seeking rest, and finds none. Then it says : ‘I will return to my house whence I came out’, and coming in finds it empty and swept and adorned. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits worse than itself, and it enters and dwells there. And the last state of the man is worse thaij the first.”
But Jesus, out of the profundities of his own soul, had fetched the strength to banish these awful visitants forever. The Holy Spirit, that power or part of God which abode with him after his reunion with God, was completely victorious.
[ p. 52 ]
Thus for Jesus the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Evil stood to each other in the terribly close relation of eternal opposites. They recognized each other, and the human soul was their grim battleground. In the victory of one the other found his opportunity, until the final consummation of the triumph of the Holy Spirit.
When the man with the unclean spirit cried out in the synagogue: “Have you come to destroy us?” it was not a devil calling to the destroyer of devils. He was a little prophet acknowledging a mighty one. He was a man speaking, who saw and felt more deeply than the rest what Jesus’ teaching meant, who recognized its source and inspiration and was rebellious against it. He was a Jew, crying out on behalf of Jewry, to warn it of a danger it could not see.
“What have we in common with you, Jesus of Nazareth? You have come to destroy us. I know who you are—the Holy One of God.”
He knew; the others did not On such a man Jesus had power, and used it But the prophetic voice of Jewry had spoken, through a forgotten prophet, words that were not forgotten.