Lions and Tigers and Demons, oh my!

Mark 5:1-20

Today is everybody’s favorite biblical story—the Gerasene demoniac! You know, when all of you are thinking about your favorite Bible stories, there is Noah’s Ark, and Adam and Eve, and the birth of Jesus, and, of course, the Gerasene demoniac. OK, maybe not, but this story is in the Gospel of Mark, and it isn’t a quick aside either. Mark spends 20 verses out of only 678 in the entire book. That’s about 3% of the entire Gospel story on this particular demon possession.

            If we’re going to understand what’s going on here, then we need to know a few things about the Jewish faith. First of all we should know that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish. As a teacher, literally a rabbi, Jesus would have been charged with observance and interpretation of the Jewish faith. So, when they come across this demon-possessed man, everyone would have understood all the ways in which he was religiously impure—he lived in the tomb among the corpses, he likely eats from these nearby pig herds, and he cut himself, likely creating scars that also would have run afoul of Jewish law. From a modern perspective, we could label this man with any number of mental illnesses, but I’m not sure that helps us. At least, both can be true—he can be demon-possessed and mentally ill. We don’t necessarily know the difference.

If we’re going to read this scripture from a Jewish perspective (which was the perspective both of Jesus and those who would have first read it) we need to understand something about the law. In Judaism, there are three components to the law. One is to love God, summed up in the first three commandments; the second is to love other people, summed up in the final seven commandments; and the third is the holiness code that is written throughout the first five books of the Bible, which are laws that pertain to national identity and purity within religious practice. If you want to understand why a story like the Good Samaritan, for example, was so jarring for Jewish listeners, you need to understand that stopping to care for the bloodied man on the side of the road would have made the priest and the Levite impure. It was against the holiness code that was the very thing that made them Jewish.

The demon-possessed man in our story today would have presented similar problems. Besides being terrifying, he represented an affront to their laws. He takes it even a start farther by calling himself “Legion,” which was a Roman term for a regiment of six thousand soldiers, suggesting both that he is very demon-possessed and also that he is some kind of bodily representation of the pagan empire that ruled over their world. Everything about this man would have been offensive to the Jewish sensibilities.

So it is that Jesus comes into the picture. He exorcises the demons—after all, that’s what Jesus does throughout the Gospel of Mark!—but he does something interesting with them here. They beg him not to be sent out into the world. Firstly, this presents a notable picture, because we learn that exorcising demons does not mean that they are gone. Jesus doesn’t kill demons; he just removes them. Having done that, the demons beg to go into the pigs on the hillside.

Our modern Gentile sensibilities catch us off-guard here. If you are like me your first thought may be “Poor pigs!” What did they ever do to deserve this? But when we read this from a Jewish perspective, we should note that pigs are also ritually unclean. The deal that the demons strike with Jesus not only frees the man but removes a sign of the Gentile-nature of Gerasene as well. Having seen this, the locals beg Jesus to leave. These were their pigs, after all. It looks to them as if Jesus is coming as a kind of Jewish magician, which cannot be good news for the non-Jewish (Gentile) people of Gerasene. They are in awe of Jesus but that awe barely conceals their fear.

Outsiders who think we are in

Mark 4:1-34

There’s a line in this reading from Mark 4 that has always bugged me. It is the part where Jesus is supposed to be explaining things to the disciples and the other people in his inner circle, and he says, “The secret of God’s kingdom has been given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables. This is so that they can look and see but have no insight, and they can hear but not understand. Otherwise, they might turn their lives around and be forgiven.”

I wonder if this bugs some of you as well? I mean, shouldn’t Jesus want people to understand, to turn their lives around and to be forgiven? Is he saying here that that’s not the goal?

On the surface level, this passage offers us an excuse to be the worst versions of ourselves. After all, if Jesus didn’t intend for other people to understand because they are no-good rotten jerks, then presumably those are the people we don’t like already, because we know we are the insiders, ergo the people I don’t like must be the outsiders. If we understand it this way, Jesus may be suggesting that we are on the inside, they are on the outside, and that’s how it’s always going to be. ]

But there’s a huge problem with that interpretation. Fast forward only fifteen verses and Jesus tells the disciples and the other wise guys, “Listen carefully! God will evaluate you with the same standard you use to evaluate others.”

Listen carefully! If you evaluate others and determine they are the ones on the outside, then Jesus is going to hold you to the same standard. And what is that standard? Well, he already told us! The standard is that we understand and interpret the parables correctly. And how shall we interpret the parables correctly? Again, Jesus has already told us the interpretation: He is the Son of God, he is the one who embodies God’s word for the world, he is the one coming to die for the sake of the world, so follow him. And how do the disciples do with this interpretation?

Uh oh. Here’s the big problem: The disciples fail every single time. In Mark’s Gospel, the disciples are the biggest blockheads of all. Whenever Jesus tells them that he has come to die they laugh it off and start preparing his throne for the eventual overthrow of the Roman government that they are expecting. Every time he tells them not to share about the miraculous healings because the only miracle that matters is the empty tomb they laugh him off and tell anybody and everybody about the super cool miracle they just saw.

Secrets and Demons

Mark 1:21-45

The Gospel of Mark catches your attention from the very first chapter. The first thing to notice is what’s missing. No birth story. No Jesus in a manger; no Bethlehem; in fact, no Mary at all. Instead, you get grown-up Jesus and the makings of a Hollywood thriller. There are demons everywhere, and Jesus goes around casting them out like he’s the t-shirt guy at a sporting event—everybody gets a demon cast out of them! This will prove to be just how Mark tells the story, and it is probably my favorite Gospel, but it’s not to everybody’s tastes.

One thing to note about the demons in Mark’s Gospel: they know who Jesus is. One thing to note about the disciples, the lawyers, the priests, and everybody else in Mark’s Gospel: They don’t have a clue who Jesus is, even when he tells them to it straight. Now, about those demons. The demons are part of daily life in a way that is foreign to the rest of the Gospels; in fact, it’s hard to find a corollary for all this demonic stuff anywhere in the Bible. Sure, there are instances of demons in some places, but nobody envisions a world crawling with them quite like Mark. The demons in Mark’s Gospel have two defining traits: 1) They know who Jesus is, and 2) They can do nothing against Jesus’ power.

Meanwhile, the people in the Gospel of Mark are all idiots. I’m not remotely being harsh either. Jesus spends the entire life of his ministry in Mark’s Gospel dealing with people who blatantly ignore everything he says. Every time he heals one of them he says the same thing, “Now, don’t go telling anybody about this!” And every time he does that what do they do? They go blabbing to everybody! This is a central point of Mark’s Gospel: The people never listen to Jesus; the demons always do. This is the first lesson of Mark’s Gospel: A mark of discipleship is not having a correct understanding of who Jesus was, because nobody did, but, rather, discipleship is about following Jesus even when you are getting it wrong.

This point will be brought home many times over the next few months as we read through Mark’s Gospel, because the disciples are the biggest blockheads of them all. They never get it. Not once do they recognize Jesus for who he really is. Jesus preaches a very simple message. He says: I’ve come to die for the sake of the world. And the disciples hear, “I’ve come to rule the world.” The people never listen, but the demons do.