This week’s Gospel lectionary is Mark 1:21-28.

This week’s passage concerns the nature of authority, contrasting the spiritual authority of Jesus with the official authority of the authorized leaders of Jesus’s day. In both his teaching and his healing, Jesus conveys a spiritual authority that the official leaders lack, raising questions about the nature of true spiritual authority and how we can recognize it when we see it.

As the story opens, we find Jesus in the synagogue teaching. As the people listen to him, they find something about his teaching that the official religious leaders lack. Mark tells us that “he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22). Recalling that this is the very first story Mark tells of Jesus’s ministry, following immediately on the heels of Jesus calling his first disciples, it is clear that Mark is trying from the very beginning to establish a sharp contrast between spiritual authority conveyed by heaven and that authorized by human institutions, including not only the synagogue of Jesus’s day but also the church of our day.

As Jesus begins teaching with this astounding authority, an unclean spirit in the congregation suddenly becomes nervous, recognizing that Jesus has the power to cast him out. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” he shouts. “Have you come to destroy us?” (1:24). Jesus silences the unclean spirit and commands him to depart, once again leaving the people astounded. “A new teaching—with authority!” they say. “He commands the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (1:27).

Importantly, the people make a connection between the teaching and the casting out of unclean spirits. Authority is conveyed in both words and deeds that make unclean spirits tremble. The authorized teaching of the scribes did no such thing, and the people recognized their lack of authority.

But what can it mean in our day to cast out unclean spirits? Most of us believe we live in a world without unclean spirits, which we view as a relic from a superstitious past. Yet when Mark uses the term “unclean spirit” (pneuma akatharton), as he often does (see Mark 3:11-12; 3:19-30; 5:1-20; 6:7; 7:24-30; 9:14-29) he has something more profound in mind.

Mark’s most extensive story about unclean spirits occurs a few chapters later in 5:1-20. There Jesus encounters a man with an unclean spirit and demands to know the spirit’s name. The spirit replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many” (5:9).

The particular name Legion is significant because in the first-century context legion was a technical term for a Roman military unit of about 6,000 men. That Mark connects the unclean spirit of the spiritual realm with the military occupation of the political realm suggests that unclean spirits, for Mark, are spiritual manifestations of imperial realia. They are animated beings that can manipulate and control a person, but they have their roots in the political, economic, and social realities of imperial rule.

If we allow ourselves to think of unclean spirits in this sense—as spiritual manifestations of concrete power relations—the idea of spiritual possession becomes clear. The unclean spirits of our day are those spiritual forces that promote and preserve power relations that twist and contort our common humanity, that set some people destructively over and against others. While the unclean spirits of our day may not be named Legion, they do have names like Patriarchy, Racism, and Ethnic Nationalism. They have names like Homophobia and Transphobia. They have names like American Exceptionalism and Global Capitalism. They bear the names of all those forces that set people against one another in order to preserve the power of some at the expense of others.

True spiritual authority is that which—in both teaching and actions—casts out the unclean spirits. True spiritual authority names Racism and makes it tremble. True spiritual authority silences Patriarchy so that it cannot utter a word. True spiritual authority challenges Homophobia and Transphobia so they must flee. True spiritual authority sets people free from the avarice of Global Capitalism and restores their right relationship with their fellow human beings. True spiritual authority makes the unclean spirits tremble.

Spiritual authority is not indicated by degrees, or by titles, or by ordinations. Spiritual authority is not evidenced by wealth or status or elected office. According to Mark 6:7, Jesus conveys this authority to cast out evil spirits to his twelve disciples and, by extension, to all of his followers both ancient and contemporary. We all have the capacity to exercise spiritual authority, should we choose to accept it.

Our task as Christians is to name the spiritual forces that hold us hostage, to challenge the imperial ideologies that animate our lives, and to put the unclean spirits on the run.