On any given week in church we face the question of whether or not it does anybody any good for us to be here. You might not have asked that question, but a lot of other people have. And the question of whether or not it does anybody any good to be here might hinge on whether or not the scriptures have anything useful to say to us. And that question might hinge on whether or not the Gospel or any other reading assigned on a given day had anything to do with “unclean spirits.” And I would contend that the “unclean spirits” question (which is inextricably linked to the “demons” question) would tend, for most modern audiences to militate against the possibility that there is a message of tremendous usefulness at hand, and therefore also to chafe against the possibility that coming to church on a day like today will do you any good.
You could also, I suggest, hear St. Paul’s exhortation against eating food offered to idols without feeling your heart strangely warmed. And whatever is going on with Moses in Deuteronomy today is probably not the type of thing you want to set to music and sing about.
As a matter of last resort you might turn to the Psalms. And in Psalm 111 you would encounter a well-worn biblical phrase that could also leave you shaking your head: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” These words sound ill-suited to the kind of warm and fuzzy, God-loves-you-as-you-are, don’t-be-ashamed-of-yourself religion that I am often happy to promote here. Should we really be whipping up fear in church? Even the fear of God?
The fear of God, of course, used to be something that you might need to have put into you if you were insufficiently enthralled by the authority, interests, direction, etc of someone who had power over you. The phrase, I am told, had currency in the 19th century goals of colonialism, which sought to put the fear of God into colonized peoples who had not yet experienced it. Lucky them.
So, is the fear of the Lord something to be thought well of? Can any good come from the fear of the Lord? Is wisdom really to be found where the Lord is feared? At times like these, I like to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I’m missing anything.
Fear, as a noun: “a sudden and terrible event.”
“The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some evil.”
“A state of alarm or dread.”
“Ground or reason for alarm.”
Eventually we get to this: “A mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.” That’s something I can work with!
As a verb, it’s pretty much the same scenario as the noun “fear:”
“To inspire with fear.”
“To drive away by fear, frighten away, scare.”
“To deter from a course of conduct.”
“To feel alarmed, uneasy, lest something should happen.”
“To regard with fear, be afraid of a person or thing as a cause of danger.”
And, eventually, pretty deep into it, “to regard with reverence and awe; to revere.”
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Frankly, it’s difficult for us to make any sense of this sentiment since it rests on two things that are in short supply these days: the fear of the Lord and wisdom.
Try now, (with this thought in our heads that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom) to glean some insight from the unsettling encounter, in St. Mark’s Gospel, of this man with the unclean spirit, who nevertheless knows who Jesus is, and, in fact, seems to know quite a bit about him. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” he says. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
It’s a curious thing about this unclean spirit: we are not told what harm the spirit has done to the man it possesses. Here is just a guy who stands up in the synagogue and challenges Jesus. The spirit had not thrown the man into fires, or caused him to convulse (yet), or necessitated chains to restrain him. If there’s a history of this unclean spirit, we don’t know what it is. But there is something we can deduce about this unclean spirit. Although the spirit has enough insight to know who Jesus is, the spirit lacks something very important. The unclean spirit seems to be entirely without any fear of the Lord. That is to say that the unclean spirit cannot sense that a sudden and terrible event is about to take place in its existence. The unclean spirit in no way feels alarmed, uneasy, lest something should happen. The unclean spirit senses no emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger to itself, even though the spirit is about to be cast out of its host, of whom, I presume the unclean spirit is in need. And the unclean spirit, despite its privileged knowledge of whose presence it is in which it finds itself, is aware of no mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.
The unclean spirit knows exactly who it’s dealing with, and yet the unclean spirit has no fear of the Lord, no fear of God. We know this, because there is no evidence of that mingled feeling of either dread or reverence toward Jesus. The unclean spirit, who stands right before Jesus, and tells him, that he knows who he is: the Holy One of God, feels no need to regard Jesus with reverence and awe; sees no reason at all to revere Jesus.
“Have you come to destroy us?” the unclean spirit asks, speaking, I guess, on behalf of either more than one unclean spirit that may possess the man, or at least on behalf of some larger population of unclean spirits. Have you come to destroy us? Again, the only thing we know about this unclean spirit is that although it knows who Jesus is, and presumably also knows what kind of power Jesus possesses (the power to destroy unclean spirits), it stands there with little or no fear of the Lord. All it had to do was keep its mouth shut. Have you come to destroy us?
Fearless, the unclean spirit is no match for Jesus, and now, now that Jesus orders the spirit to “Be silent and come out of him,” now, the spirit convulses and screams out in its last-bid effort to control the man, and to prolong its presence in the world of the flesh.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
I never know what to make of unclean spirits. But I know we live in a society that is largely without any fear of the Lord, by which I mean that we live in a society that, by and large, is possessed of no mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.
It’s important, I think, to remind ourselves, that the fear of the Lord, is quite a distinct topic of conversation from the wrath of God. I think that the two may be connected in many people’s minds, and that the one is thought to be the product of the other: the fear of the Lord might be the reasonable response to the wrath of God.
I, myself, am completely unfamiliar with the wrath of God, except as something I have read about. But I do know what it is to regard God with reverence and awe; to revere the Lord Jesus, and I am quite sure my life is the better off for it. And because I know myself to be a sinner - which is to say that I know myself to be someone who has often chosen what I want over what I suspect God might want for myself - because I know myself to be a sinner, like all human beings. And because I believe that God is the elemental force in the world and the most important force in my life, I am not unfamiliar with what you might call a mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.
I know myself to be far from God’s dearest desire for me every time I hold on to money for myself that I might have given away, or every time I shrug my shoulders in helplessness as I pass a homeless person lying on the street, or every time I eat a Costco rotisserie chicken with zero care for the circumstances that made that chicken so cheap. As if the consequences of my decisions, as someone to whom much has been given, make no difference to anyone else. But they do. And I cannot blame these decisions on an unclean spirit, can I? The chicken, and the homeless person, and my own chronic selfishness are not unrelated to the fear of the Lord. Because solutions exist for all these matters - from the homeless person to the Costco chicken, and for me, too - but such solutions would have to be born of a wisdom that desires to find them.
Absent any mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God, we may never be motivated to seek the wisdom that will inform the decisions that bedevil us, and which have consequences far beyond the fate of a Costco chicken. The more I consider the fear of the Lord, the more I find that I rather approve of the possibility of it, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought I could. It’s not because I think that God should more frequently inspire us with fear, or because I think God should provide a constant ground or reason for alarm in our lives.
It’s because that mingled feeling of dread and reverence has some motivational heft that might actually get us somewhere, when we contemplate the consequences of our own actions, and the awesome power of God in the same breath, and we think that it’s possible that wisdom could actually get us somewhere, if we’d just seek it out.
On any given week in church we face the question of whether or not it does anybody any good for us to be here. You might not have asked that question, but a lot of other people have. I am not here to put the fear of God into you - I’m afraid that’s not my specialty. I’m much too inclined toward the warm and fuzzy, God-loves-you-as-you-are, don’t-be-ashamed-of-yourself type of religion to be very good at instilling the fear of God in anyone.
But I do think we might discover together (if we think and pray about our lives and about what God is doing in us and in the world) a mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God. And those mingled feelings might lead us to regard the Lord Jesus with reverence and awe; to revere him, and his teaching, and his life, and his pure and pristine Spirit in the world today. Learning to discern the power of and presence and grace of God in the world, might lead us into a deeper wisdom than that we are possessed of today. And if you ask me, the world is in deep and desperate need of wisdom. If we want to find it, we could do much worse than to begin with the fear of the Lord.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
28 January 2024
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
