WHAT HAVE YOU TO DO WITH US? – MK 1:21-28
Jesus, you come into a synagogue
and begin to preach the word,
but a demoniac comes forward
and cries out in agitation:
“What have you to do with us,
Jesus? We know who you are!”
But with a simple rebuke,
you respond: “Quiet!”
And the demon leaves the man.
I see in this, my Jesus, an image,
an image of the state of our world—
for we, too, often cry out in resistance
against your word and your presence.
We know who you are,
and have know for two thousand years,
and yet we have lost our reverence
for the mystery of divinity
burning in you as an unquenchable flame.
A “Post-Christian” era, they call us,
a world of “Neo-Paganism”
in which we have begun to worship,
again, so many false gods
in place of the One, the Beloved,
who comes from the bosom of the Father.
Health and wealth and pleasure,
power and domination and control;
or flight or sedation of dullness
in escape from the true, inner reality.
But you never cease to come to us,
to enter into our lives,
gently…yet with power.
But the human heart cries out:
What have you to do with us?
Us? Why does one say us?
Because sin is fragmentation,
grasping the single, unified heart,
the personhood of this beloved child,
and scattering it to the four winds
in superficiality, in fear, in flight.
Then, in sin, I lose the ability
to truly say “I” about myself.
For in my own deepest truth
I no longer truly dwell;
though even sin cannot
destroy this truth within me,
and it remains me in the midst of all.
And here…you call me ever back in love.
As you approach,
do not so many really try to welcome you,
glimpsing the truth of your healing love?
And yet the “we” of their demons
cry out against your presence,
afraid for what they know you do:
you cast the demons out.
The broken heart, this fractured “I,”
is still beautiful to you, my Jesus,
in its brokenness and sin,
and you yearn to liberate it fully
that it may live in the beauty
that you already see and know.
Yes, you see the beauty,
ravishing, amazing,
burning deep within each of us.
And from the place of your unity,
from your repose within the Father,
you reach out to us in our scatteredness
and reawaken the integral truth inside.
Then my “I” awakens in response
to the “You” who lovingly approach.
The “we” of sin and subjugation
is then, Jesus, Jesus, put to flight!
I want this, I want this!
I yearn to be who I am already,
to be a beloved within your arms,
a child in the Father’s embrace,
gently sheltered, now and eternally.
Put them to flight, then, Jesus!
Cast away all that holds me bound,
so that I and You
may meet in complete transparency.
And then, in this vulnerability,
as all that does not belong
at last falls away—
and I stand before you
in my simple, naked truth—
let us be united, We,
together in intimate, undying Love.