Daily Devotional • July 18
A Reading from Mark 3:7-19a
7 Jesus departed with his disciples to the sea, and a great multitude from Galilee followed him; 8 hearing all that he was doing, they came to him in great numbers from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon. 9 He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crush him, 10 for he had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him.11 Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and shouted, “You are the Son of God!” 12 But he sternly ordered them not to make him known.
13 He went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. 14 And he appointed twelve to be with him and to be sent out to preach 15 and to have authority to cast out demons. 16 So he appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter), 17 James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder), 18 and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, 19 and Judas Iscariot, who handed him over.
Meditation
I have a book on my shelf I haven’t read. It’s called Poetic Knowledge, and its author’s Ph.D. thesis. I was assured that it is boring reading, which is probably why I haven’t braved it yet, but I keep it to remind me of its premise. There are things we know because we can see them for ourselves; there are things we know by reason and inference, and there are things, “the best and most beautiful things in the world,” said Helen Keller, which “cannot be seen or even touched—they must be felt with the heart.” Poetic knowledge describes the things we know beyond reason, deep in our bones.
There are only two people who know from the beginning who Jesus is—Mary, who is told by the angel he will be the Son of God, and the demons who cry out, “We know who you are.” And Jesus tells them to be silent. Why? Isn’t the whole point of Jesus’ incarnation to reveal God to us? To know who he is? Why wouldn’t he just say it from the beginning? Why would he stop someone else from saying it—even a demon—when it’s the truest truth? After all, we know that faith comes through hearing, we read that on Sunday!
Yet we also know that mere assent to facts is insufficient. Otherwise the soldiers who guarded the tomb would have been the first converts, and the religious leaders they went to tell would have been next. Faith comes through hearing, but its depths, its reality, come through discovery, mystically, as a gift, calling us not just to know facts but to give ourselves beyond what facts can describe.
Maybe Jesus tells the demons to be silent exactly because he knows that facts will be insufficient, acting even as an inoculation against true faith which must take its time as Jesus reveals himself.
Elizabeth Baumann is a seminary graduate, a priest’s wife, and the mother of two small daughters. A transplant from the West Coast, she now lives in “the middle of nowhere” in the Midwest with too many cats.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Newark – The Episcopal Church
St. George’s Episcopal Church, Fredericksburg, Virginia
