Luke 8:26-39

2^nd SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST | 19.06.22 | Luke 8:26-39 | Paula Murray |

Lord, Hear our Cry!

Jesus has had a busy week. It seems that way, anyway, to us who spent last Sunday in university and have come this Sunday to a rocky beach below a seemingly deserted cemetery.  We were schooled last week on the nature of the Holy Trinity, on that seemingly impossible yet amazingly real unity of substance and loving delight that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a loving delight and a union that spills over in its gloriously divine abundance into our own lives as disciples and as Church.  And, now, we have come from that life-giving, life-changing fountain to a much grimmer place.

We ought not to be surprised, really, given the level of conflict between Jesus and His questioners.  Those folks are on the hunt for some hint of blasphemy that they might make the problem that Jesus is for them go away.  We do not take our faith so seriously these days, so we do not see the problem our Lord is for these other men.  We are all about the live and let live, at least we are unless we’re talking politics.

As opposed to politics, religion has become more hobby than hill to die on for this generation and the one before it and after, so the rage Jesus engendered in the men around Him seems rather mad to us, and not mad as in anger but mad as in lunatic.  But these men know that faith is a life or death matter, something which we are loathe these days to even consider.  So, the angry concern of the Jewish religious seems more like the ravings of the Gerasene demoniac we meet in this morning’s Gospel reading.

Lest you think that this is the scariest part of Jesus’ life at this point, let me remind you that just prior to this episode Jesus and His disciples came close to a watery death as their boat was swamped by the high winds and deep, rolling waves crossing the Sea of Galilee.  Not that Jesus appeared worried; he slept through most of the storm.  It wasn’t until His panicked disciples cried out to Him and woke Him as He slept in the prow of the boat that He responded to the possibility of death on the waves.  But rather than join His disciples in a full-bore terror, Jesus calmed the wind-driven waves with a word and chastised them for their fear.   Their landing on the shore of a Gentile land, the once and only time this happens in the Gospel of Luke, may, at least indirectly, be a consequence of their being pushed off course by the storm.

Or it may also be a part of God’s plan to extend the salvation offered through Jesus beyond Israel and to the Gentiles.

Once on shore, they are met, immediately, by a dirt-incrusted, demon-possessed, hair-covered lunatic still bearing the remnants of the manacles and chains by which his fearful community sought to bind him and keep him and themselves safe.  We know he is not merely insane, for he knows who Jesus is, yet seems not to know who he, himself is.  The demon infested man cries out Jesus’ name as he falls to his knees before the Son of the Most High God, yet when Jesus asks for his name he can only say “legion.”

That word, “legion,” is neither a Hebrew nor an Aramaic word, but is instead Latin.  Nonetheless, Jesus, like most Jews, would know the word and its meaning, for the word legion comes out of the Roman occupation of Judea.  A legion is a Roman military unit composed of up to 6000 foot soldiers and several hundred cavalry.  A legion was a fearsome and powerful fighting force spelling doom for most of Rome’s enemies over its long history.  By using the word legion as his name, the demoniac meant not only that he was possessed by many demons, but that those demons, altogether, were a formidable and alien force.

Remember that this encounter is on Gentile lands with Gentile peoples.  People who could raise pigs and sell them and eat them because they do not live by Jewish Law.  The force against which Jesus contends in the demoniac is far more “alien” than the Gentiles Israel has avoided for generations or even the Romans and their impure ways.  A terrible battle is being waged within the being of the poor man collapsed upon the beach that day, a battle between all that would align itself with all that is holy and with God’s plan for the redemption of creation, and the evil intent on destroying the work of God’s hands.

Jesus wins this particular battle, a sign of His coming victory over sin and death.  Proving that even demons are just tools in the hands of God’s adversary, they pitiably beg Jesus that He not send into the abyss, into the void, into the nothingness that is the consequence of a life turned away from God.  In a truly odd twist, and with Jesus’ authority, the demons enter into the bodies of a herd of pigs grazing nearby, and the pigs cast themselves into the waters that Jesus Himself had just conquered and drown altogether.  The pigs, while repugnant to Jews, may still be a reminder that we are not to make too much of the difference between Jews and Gentiles, for the main thrust of today’s Gospel lesson is not to divide peoples all of whom belong to their Creator anyway and all of whom and are answerable to Him for their thoughts and deeds. While the Gentiles who catch wind of what Jesus has done beg Him to leave, likely as much for the loss of their livelihood as to their fear of His obvious power, still the once Gerasene demoniac becomes a disciple of Jesus, and a witness to his fellow Gentiles of the grace of God for the remainder of his life.  So, the main thrust of this morning’s Gospel reading is to demonstrate for the ages that Jesus is the Christ, the One Who not only exercises authority over the wind and waves of a storm-tossed sea but Who also does battle with the evil one, who would see to the destruction of creation itself if that won him a lordship that is not his, and wins.

Christ’s victory is of ultimate concern for all of us, who see the storm coming towards us even now and who cry out, “Lord, hear our cry!” Obviously, I am pointing towards the individual aches and pains we all suffer as mortal creatures, all of which underscore our temporary nature and the reality of our deaths.  We are like the demoniac in that the wicked one fights his battles against our Lord and God within the being of each one of us.   But this is more than a localized storm, for we all see a dark bank of trouble on the horizon coming our way as economies falter, leadership fails, and real war is fought on lands that have not seen war for generations.

It is no weakness on our part to be brought to our knees in prayer and confession as we look to a potentially troubled future.  God’s people have always called out to Him for freedom from the self-imposed chains that bind us to sin.  We have always cried out to Him to be saved from the pit, to be rescued from dire circumstances like poverty and catastrophic losses.  And always God has responded with compassion and mercy.

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Paula Murray