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.
OK, so now that we know this is a Jewish story and
hopefully we understand a little something about that world in which it is
told, it’s time to reflect on what this could possibly mean for us. The first
lesson begins by understanding that the Gentiles didn’t get it. They didn’t
understand that Jesus came for more than the Jews. They assumed, based on their
own experience and fear, that faith was tied to culture and race. This is a
lesson that goes beyond the Gospel of Mark into Acts and Romans, where the
implications of a Jewish Savior meet a world that is mostly not Jewish. Jesus
came for everybody—the Jews, and the Gentiles, and everybody in-between.
The next thing we should note is
that Jesus continued to converse with demons. Sure, he exorcised them from the
man, but he also allowed them what they wanted.
He recognized that the demons were going to be going somewhere—one way or
another—so he allowed them to go where they would do the least damage. I
suspect each of you have your own feelings about demons. Some of you probably
don’t believe they exist at all; some of you may see them everywhere. I’m not
sure it actually matters that much for how we understand this story, because
the lesson seems to be that evil will be there—one way or another. Knowing
this, Jesus simply did what he could. There is some real wisdom here, since we
live in a world of unreachable ideals. You can’t fix the world; Jesus couldn’t
even do it, not at least through healing and casting out demons. Yet, Jesus
healed anyway; he cast out demons anyway. He wasn’t a nihilist, a realist, or even
a pessimist. He knew exactly how many those demons were, how they would go from
there to somewhere else, and he sent them out anyway. He knew he wasn’t fixing
evil. Instead, he was doing a little thing that ultimately wouldn’t seem to
make much of a difference.
But isn’t that everything in our lives? It doesn’t
seem to make much of a difference if we act justly or selfishly. It doesn’t
seem to make much of a difference if we try hard or give half an effort. It
doesn’t seem to make much of a difference if we challenge ourselves by a life
of service when we could be eating potato chips and yelling at a TV screen. It
doesn’t make much of
a difference, but it does make a little difference. We can’t fix everything,
but we can fix little things. Jesus doesn’t refuse to heal the man just because
it won’t kill the demons, just as he doesn’t refuse to heal others even when he
knows they will someday die anyway.
Far from the magic that the locals ascribe to him,
Jesus understands how small a thing it is that he is doing, but small things ultimately
change the world—like water dripping on rock. In Jesus’ case they are also a
sign of something bigger. So it is when any of us pick up the mantle and follow
in Jesus’ footsteps. We don’t care for people in order to save the world, and
we don’t do it to make the world more perfect. We care for people because that’s
what Jesus did, even when he knew his destiny lay further ahead. He did the
little things in the meantime.
The final lesson that will take somewhat longer for
Jesus’ followers to learn regards the nature of who is in and who is out.
Notably, the healed man tries to become a disciple but is not allowed to go on
with Jesus. Is he still ritually impure? Is that the reason? Or is it because
he is Gentile? These are some assumptions that readers would likely have had. It
seems like the Jesus club is going to be Jewish-only for a time. Yet, the man
is also given a command by Jesus that other healed folks in Mark’s Gospel are
not; namely, he is told to go share the good news. He is supposed to share the
message specifically because he is a Gentile. The disciples aren’t given this
command in Mark’s Gospel at all; in Matthew’s Gospel it comes at the very end
in the form of the great commission. But here we have an evangelist, whom Jesus
calls to share his story, not to the Jews but to the others—the least and the
last and the lowly. The disciples aren’t supposed to tell anybody because the
big miracle is still coming, but the Gentiles need to hear about this healer
first so that when Jesus dies on the cross and rises from the dead they have
some frame of reference.
Jesus meets people where they are at. He doesn’t
pretend that everybody has the same life experience or that life is fair. Jesus
understood that human beings are products of our past but also that can be set
free from it. So he healed then told the man to go and share the good news. The
man who was once demon-possessed may well be the first evangelist. Go, says
Jesus, and share what has happened. Implicit in this call to share the story is
a change in the rules. Gentiles sharing about a Jewish messiah—what a world!
Yet, as Jesus’ ministry continues at breakneck speed toward the cross, this
kind of interruption in the normal routine begins to change things.
Those who were on the outside become insiders. The
poor are the ones with true power. Even the ones who seem to deserve what they
got are freed from their burdens. The demons persist, but what of it? They have
power only in a world that values power for power’s sake; they can’t do a thing
against Jesus’ self-sacrificial love.
It’s tempting to look at our world and ascribe all
manner of evil things to the demonic. It might even be true! Yet, we should be
careful to remember that when confronted with demons, Jesus didn’t hold a grudge—neither against the person possessed nor even the demons themselves. He simply healed; he
simply cast them out. He freed people that terrified others. I believe that’s
one of the reasons the people of Gerasene were so eager for Jesus to leave.
They didn’t want the demon-possessed man back in
their community; they didn’t want him healed, not really. How often are we the
same? Saying we want somebody to turn around, but really, we want our kind of
justice?
Jesus doesn’t give our kind of justice. Instead, he
brings a promise of something better. A little thing—a thing we might not even
like much at first, but the only thing that will save us.
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