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The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, 06/19/2016
Sermon on Luke 8:26-39, by Paula L. Murray
26Then {Jesus and the disciples} sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he had not lived in a house but among the tombs. 28When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him and said with a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.” 29For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many a time it had seized him. He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert.) 30Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him. 31And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss. 32Now a large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. 33Then the demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned. 34When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled and told it in the city and in the country. 35Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. 36And those who had seen it told them how the demon-possessed man had been healed. 37Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. 38The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.
Many of the stories of the Bible seem weird, often because they arise in a time and a place and a culture that is much different than our own. But, sometimes, the stories ARE just weird. The story of the Gerasene demoniac is one of those biblical stories that is just plain strange, and would be strange no matter what culture, time or place in which it is told.
The strange part of the story comes well into the telling of it. It is not, alas, strange for peculiar people who might constitute a danger to themselves or others for reasons outside of their control to be locked away out of public sight. We have institutions where people may be kept for treatment and long term care, though not enough of them and not of sufficient quality. Lacking such institutions, the leaders of the community to which the Gerasene demoniac belonged had kept him chained and under guard. The chains and the guards, as nasty and insensitive as that seems to us, were there for compassion’s sake. Chained and under guard, the community’s leaders could protect him from his tendency to escape into the wilderness and themselves from his violence while still caring for his needs for shelter, food, and water. They could also keep him clothed, a sign of their shared humanity and a necessity in that climate. That arrangement appears to have ended, and the Gerasene demoniac is living naked as a jay bird on the outskirts of town, in what appears to be the local cemetery. His only companions are the corpses of the Gentile dead, the pigs in the surrounding fields, and the demons who ride his spirit and have driven him into madness.
Yes. I do think the Gerasene demoniac is mentally ill, but I do not think that the mental illness is primary. Once, many years ago, my job was to determine whether a patient’s primary diagnosis was a mental illness with psychotic features like hallucinations or drug addiction. In the case of the demoniac, I think the primary condition is demonic possession, and that the mental illness is secondary, a consequence of the possession. You might think this is a hard thing for a onetime therapist and researcher to say, but, frankly, most psychotics I knew would gravitate towards Jesus and not away from him. Religious delusions are common among the mentally ill, and most of my caseload would prefer to think of themselves as Jesus or Mary and not as some spirit that opposes God.
Apart from their preferences, the point is that opposition to Jesus is beginning to build. His practices have revealed his unusual, dare I say, his strange nature. Healing, exorcising, raising a young man from the dead, and stilling the storm that threatened the disciples’ boat just the night before all reveal that Jesus is no ordinary teacher or rabbi. The forces lining up to oppose Jesus are not political or personal but the very same forces that oppose God the Father Almighty, and those forces oppose Jesus for the very same reason they oppose the Father, his divine nature.
If, for reasons of modern discomfort with talk of possessing spirits we do away with the demonic possession, we miss that point, and lose the power of the story and of faith itself. Possessed by an unholy spirit or spirits, an individual is no longer willing to be possessed by the Holy Spirit. Cut off from the Font of all life, the possessed are consumed by sin, and isolated from God and all others. The Gerasene demoniac, possessed only by unholy spirits, haunts the tombs of his community, a companion only of the dead, and utterly alone.
The aloneness of the Gerasene demoniac is not strange, given his condition, and neither, by this time, is Jesus’ obvious willingness to heal or save; the Greek word sozo can mean healing or saving. By this time, we know that Jesus’ own compassion for the sick and the demon ridden is without end, so his healing of the demoniac as soon as he steps out of the boat that has brought him across the Sea of Galilee to the land of the Garasenes is not at all strange to us. In fact, we would have been surprised had he failed to heal the demoniac, given that he has just, via remote, healed the slave of a Roman centurion and a woman publically shamed for her many sins. Nor should we be surprised that Jesus has a conversation not with the Gerasene demoniac but with the Legion of demons inhabiting him, for he has likewise conversed with unholy spirits possessing human beings in the past.
But, and here is the surprise, the unexpected thing that Jesus does, he gives more than the back of his hand to the possessors of the poor citizen of Gersa. He asked the Gerasene demoniac for his name, recognizing his humanity, even as the unholy spirits themselves disputed it when they responded with the word, “Legion.” A legion is a unit of about 6000 Roman soldiers, enough well-trained soldiers to conquer and hold a small provence or country. It is the number of soldiers that matters here, and their training; this is not a disguised political tract on the ills of colonization but a warning of the strength of the forces aligned against God and humanity. It is a gauntlet thrown down at Jesus’ feet, a dare that he cannot actually make the many demons depart from the poor possessed man.
When Jesus took up the challenge, Legion switched tactics, trading on Jesus’ compassion. They asked that they not be thrown into the abyss, the bottomless pit, the outer darkness but be allowed to possess instead the pigs in the fields, and strangely enough, Jesus allowed that request. But theirs was a pyrrhic victory, for no sooner than they took possession of the pigs then those terrified animals tossed themselves over a cliff to their deaths in the Sea of Galilee. The Garasene demoniac comes to his right mind, and cleaned and clothed regains his humanity and develops faith in the saving, healing grace of God. The townspeople are awestruck to find him thus, and even more bewildered at the drowning of their pigs. Jesus is asked to leave the region, for fear that he will drown yet more of their life stock and ruin them financially. They will have no more strange events in their small corner of the world, no, indeed not.
Except, of course, there will be, for the onetime Gerasene demoniac will live among them, a constant reminder of the strangeness that is at the heart of the story of Jesus. Like the ransomed demoniac, we are meant to be a strange people, strange in that we are not a people reconciled to the world’s often evil ways, but are instead a people set apart by and for a God strange enough to sacrifice himself for our salvation. We live out that strangeness day by day when we practice what our Lord proclaims, the saving grace of God revealed to us in the death of Jesus on the cross and in his resurrection from the dead.
The strangeness that is ours by way of our being joined with our crucified and risen Lord in Baptism has been, for generations in this country, covered over by the supportive nature of the state. Blue Laws, for instance, were written to force businesses to close that people might spend Sundays in church with their families. The collapse of those same Blue Laws as the country becomes increasingly secular has meant that participation in Church is entirely voluntary. It is now up to us to practice our faith; we cannot depend on the state in the form of Blue Laws or official sanction to help us do it.
We are, of course, as Christians, expected as a part of Christian practice to observe the Sabbath. The third article of the Small Catechism which we have reflected on these last few weeks is this: “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.” To keep the Sabbath Day holy is to set it apart from the rest of the week that it be “strange,” meaning different in tone and activities than the other days of the week. It is for God, for time spent with him in the reading and reflection of his Word, the receiving of his Sacraments, and the mutual fellowship of the body of Christ. We will look increasingly strange to a world that has come to oppose Jesus Christ, to run away from Jesus Christ instead of running toward Jesus Christ. One of the ways that we will look strange is our insistence that we not work on Sunday or shop or mow the lawn. We will likely, one day, look as quaint to our neighbors in our stubborn refusal to bow our heads to using Sundays as a second day for running weekend errands as our Amish neighbors out in their buggies and bonnets look to us. But we do know that running towards Jesus and devoting ourselves to the daily practice of our faith, will overcome the isolation that sin induces, bringing us increasingly close to our Lord, and also to one another in love and mercy.
In the end, we will all be possessed; it is simply a question as to what spirit, Holy or unholy, does the possessing.