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“In their synagogue was a man with an unclean spirit. He cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?'” (Mark 1:23).
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The synagogue was a holy place.
Why, then, is there a man with an unclean spirit present???
He seems wildly out of place.
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Or is he?
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We shouldn’t be quick to judge.
Perhaps he was conflicted.
Both a believer and a sinner, a man in need of grace.
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Are we any different?
Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, Saint Paul says. They’re holy, much like the synagogue was.
Yet how many of us need something unclean cast out of us – jealousy, greed, lust, fear, a residual grudge?
As someone once put it, “The greatest sin is thinking you have none.”
Like that man in the Gospel, there’s likely both good and evil, love and sin, at work within us.
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May the same Lord who set this poor man free drive out from us whatever is displeasing to him, so that so that we may love and serve with ever greater freedom.