Audio Worship, 8/17/2025, "Teacher, Healer, Sabbath Keeper", Mark 1.21-28

Princeton Presbyterian Church (EPC) Sermon # 1698

August 17, 2025

Mark 1.21-28            Click here for audio worship.

Dr. Ed Pettus

(This is an extended outline, not a verbatim transcript.)

 

“Teacher, Healer, Sabbath Keeper”

 

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.

 

 

  • Worship on the Lord’s Day

 

We often teach and talk about living the Christian life by following Jesus in order to become more like Jesus. We want to live as close to Jesus as possible and seek what He sought, do what He did, and embody His attributes and all this is only possible by authentic discipleship and trust in the Holy Spirit. The Bible teaches us what it means to follow Jesus and become more like Him. Sometimes following is simple and sometimes it may look way out of our league.

Jesus and the disciples come into Capernaum. This was the town where Jesus spent a lot of His time. It is located at the north end of the Sea of Galilee and we know from the gospels that this area was heavily covered in Jesus’ ministry of teaching and healing. Mark, again with the speed of getting straight to the point, uses the word “immediately” to move the story along quickly. Immediately on the Sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and was teaching. It was the day of Shabbat, worship, rest, teaching, and the Jews would gather in the synagogue for a service of worship.

So, one of the first things we learn from following Jesus is something that is taught as far back as the beginnings of the Bible, that people were created to worship God. We follow Jesus’ example every time we enter the sanctuary on Sunday morning for the purpose of worship. Jesus entered the synagogue as every Jew would, to worship God, pray, sing, read the Torah (God’s Word), and hear a teaching. We carry that tradition to this day.

 

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness” (Psalm 29.2).

 

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4.24).

 

One of the greatest disciplines in following Jesus is worship. It is the time of praise and adoration, thanksgiving and confession, song and prayer, reading God’s Word and preaching His Word. This is the time to give ourselves over fully to the worship of God, rejoicing, in spirit and truth. This is not difficult, nor is it a hard calling, but we cannot forsake the worship of God. Hebrews teaches us not to forsake the assembly (Heb 10.25). We are to gather for worship. It is what Jesus did. It is what we do to give glory to God and it is also a witness to the world that the Sabbath is a special day, set aside as holy unto the Lord, for the sake of worship and also for the sake of stopping our normal week for a time of rest and refreshment.

 

8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20.8-11).

 

 

  • Teaching With Authority

 

Jesus entered the synagogue to worship and to teach. This may have been His main purpose – teaching. All the other things Jesus did, healing, driving out demons, multiplying fish, all these miraculous feats were to also teach as well as heal. Jesus had something more about Him than the normal teachers of the day. He taught with an unusual authority like no one else. We look back on it now and find it easy to see because we know Him as the Son of God and of course the Son of God has great authority. But people were not seeing Jesus from our post resurrection angle. They were seeing Him in present time of His teaching. They were amazed that He did not teach the rabbinic tradition like the Pharisees and scribes, but Jesus taught straight out of the Torah, straight from the Law and the prophets.

What was it that set Jesus apart from the scribes? One possibility was that the scribes primarily interpreted the Law for the present, what was permitted to do and what was not permitted in accordance with the Scriptures. They were like lawyers in the sense that they would argue for a particular interpretation and point of view on how to live within the boundaries of the Law of God. Jesus, on the other hand, was offering a fresh interpretation that looked both to the present life of obedience but also to life in the kingdom, the kingdom that had arrived in Jesus. He was not interpreting like the scribes, but as the Author of the Word. The scribes sought to interpret through their traditions. Jesus was the very source of the Word and therefore had the authority in its interpretation. Like having the author of a book speak to a group of readers who had been seeking to interpret the meaning of the author. Now the author could tell the synagogue what the true meaning was and is because He wrote it!

Jesus teaches with authority beyond those who “have the credentials”. Jesus does not have to appeal to the traditions the Jews had established. All their traditions took freedom away from God’s people rather than revealing the freedom God instilled in the Law. Freedom is not being free to do whatever one wants or desires, but true freedom is secured within God’s way of righteousness and holiness. The scribes and other religious leaders had so choked the Law with man made traditions, that freedom itself was choked out. Jesus comes along and preaches the Law in the context of God’s reign, God’s newness, and God’s good news of the coming Messiah.

Mark says that the people were astonished at His teaching. It was like nothing they had ever heard before. Mark does not detail what Jesus was teaching, but we do have many of those details elsewhere in the gospels. He clarified meaning of Sabbath, that the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath. He taught that mercy was greater than sacrifice. He challenged the traditions of the religious elite that clouded the true meaning of God’s Word. These are the kinds of things that astounded those who heard Him teach.

We are also called to teach God’s Word, just as Jesus did, unfiltered by our own traditions, but with clarity directly from the Word. This too is not that difficult. Like worship, teaching is something that we find reasonable and simple to do whether teaching lessons to a child or offering wisdom to one another.

 

  • Healing With Authority

 

Worship and teaching are two aspects of being like Jesus that we are comfortable with, at least to some extent. But the next thing Jesus does in this story we might find out of our league. Jesus had great authority to teach and to heal. In this case it was His capacity to heal, to drive out demons. He showed this authority in many ways throughout the gospels: to calm the sea, to feed five thousand with two loaves of bread and five fish. Jesus’ authority was evident to those around Him and it fortified the His teachings. Jesus desired that people would come to faith, not so much in the miracles, but in the teachings, in the authority of His Word, in the simple trust that He was who He said He was.

Jesus comes into the synagogue, first to worship and to teach, but there is in the midst of the synagogue this man who is possessed with demons.

 

And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him.

 

Notice that the unclean spirit calls Jesus by name at first, Jesus of Nazareth and then identifies Jesus as the Holy One of God. The demons know more than the people who are astounded by Jesus’ teaching. There is more going on in the world than we like to admit or acknowledge. Evil does exist, demons are real, spiritual warfare is a cosmic reality. We tend to blame much of what we see on sin or on medical conditions or on addictions or all the modern scientific reductions that deny the realm of spiritual beings. That is not to say that every human weakness has to be a demonic presence, but it is to say that we cannot flippantly deny the presence of demonic forces in the world. The Bible is extremely clear that we battle against principalities and powers (Ephesians 6). Jesus encountered these demons, usually more than one, and they exhibited great power over those whom they possessed.

Jesus established His authority over the spiritual realm, against the demons and forces of evil. And as we see in other places in the gospels, Jesus established His authority over creation as well, stilling storms and multiplying bread and fish. But this account over the demons demonstrates Jesus as the One with authority, with power, and the One who is known by the demons and yet not yet known by the people. The Holy One facing the unholy demons. This is the Holy One who made His people holy when He gave His life on the cross and rose from the tomb. He has the authority to do these things, to drive out demons, to teach, to save, to establish God’s reign in the Kingdom of God. Just as we are called to worship and teach, we have also been given authority to battle in the spiritual realm. This is where we might stray from the story. Yes we can worship, yes we can teach, but driving out demons seems so foreign to us. And yet the Bible teaches us to put on the armor of God for this very purpose.

 

Ephesians 6.11-12, “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

 

I know that we do not feel equipped for this cosmic wrestling match, but we at least need to be aware that we can pray against those spiritual forces of evil and we can ask the Lord to clothe us with His armor. I believe that the two previous disciplines also help us to be ready to engage in spiritual warfare, to worship and to teach. Take heart that our battle is God’s as well because the Bible also tells us that our weapons have divine power, For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds (2 Corinthians 10.4). As an aside, our Presbytery will be teaching more on this issue of destroying strongholds in a future meeting.

 

  • “What is This?”

 

There is in this passage a simple question of inquiry, “What is this?”

 

And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

 

What is this great and authoritative teaching? What is this power to drive out demons? What is this powerful authority to do these things? That is a question asked throughout Jesus’ life on earth. “By what authority do you do these things?”

I remember a time at seminary when grape juice was the recommended, actually authorized communion element, over wine. This was back in the day when that transition was happening. At one of the chapel services, a retired professor, well known and beloved used real wine at the service where he was preaching. The president of the seminary was peeved by it and asked, who authorized this? The professor spoke up and said, Jesus of Nazareth. That obviously ended the conversation.

Jesus had and has all authority in heaven and on earth. What is this? This is the Son of God. This is the Savior of the world. This is the creator, the sustainer, the Christ, the Holy One. This is the One sent by the Father, authorized for His mission, empowered to declare the reign of God is at hand. What is a bit surprising in the story of Mark 1 is that the people are first amazed by the teaching and second, by the healing.

 

“What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

 

Jesus is the authority.

 

Now, having seen all of this, we are given authority as well. We are ambassadors of Christ living and working under the authority of Jesus. We know well the commission to go and make disciples.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28.18-20).

 

That is an amazing concept to grasp, that we are under the authority that is above all authorities. Make disciples, baptize, and teach. This is the great commission to the church, to each one of us, to work under the authority of the One who taught in the synagogues and drove out demons, who healed the sick and gave sight to the blind, who calmed the sea and caused a great catch of fish in Peter’s net. Think on these things and be encouraged that Jesus is with us to the end of the age. The authority of Jesus Christ goes with us. Amen.