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June 23, 2019
Texts:
Isaiah 65: 1-9
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39
Good morning 8th Day!
I have to admit that I actually chose this Sunday because the story for today’s lectionary seemed challenging to me and I welcomed the opportunity to wrestle with it. There were moments, however, when I wondered what I had gotten into.
Jesus was a very busy person. I mean, we think we’re busy! In chapter 8 of Luke, in addition to healing the demoniac (as he is called in the story for today), Jesus tells a story of the sower of seeds in various circumstances, talks about not hiding your lamp under a bed, tells the disciples they are his family (rather than his biological mother and siblings), calms a storm, and heals a woman with a long standing hemorrhage on his way to Jarius’s house to bring his twelve-year-old daughter back to life. I’m glad I don’t have to preach on the whole chapter. Jesus did more in one chapter than I’ve even thought about doing in my whole life, and he had maybe about fifteen years at most to complete his ministry!
I would like to look at the story of the healing of the demoniac on at least two levels. The stories in scripture often have multiple levels of meaning, and I’d like to look at this one both as a story of personal healing and as a story of communal liberation. I am basing some of what I say on this book, The Politics of Jesus by Obery Hendricks, Jr., in which he devotes a whole chapter on this story of the man possessed by demons.
A Story of Personal Healing
Jesus has just come from Galilee in a boat, through a storm on the lake, and disembarking to the shore of Gerasenes with his disciples. A naked man comes out from the tombs – which means he is by definition unclean – and starts yelling, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.” Even the demons don’t want to be tormented – although they apparently had spent years tormenting this poor man. He had been bound in chains and shackles but kept breaking them and was driven into the wilds by the demons. Jesus wanted to know the demon by name. “What is your name?” he says. The demon answers “Legion,” signifying lots of demons, not just one. The demons then beg Jesus to send them into the pigs, rather than to the “abyss.”
Jesus gives them permission to go into the pigs – and they do, with disastrous results for the poor pigs, who end up drowning. The swineherds run off to tell the news everywhere in the city and towns around. When they come back, there’s the man himself, who was called a “maniac,” restored to his right mind, clothed and sitting at Jesus’ feet. The people, however, instead of rejoicing and welcoming the man back into the community, reacted with fear and actually ended up asking Jesus to leave. They couldn’t understand his power to free and heal a person – and, of course, losing the pigs was an economic disaster for the farmers. The man immediately wanted to follow Jesus into the boat and back to Galilee, but Jesus told him to spread the good news of what God had done for him and what mercy God had shown him.
But it was the man who approached Jesus initially. It was the maniac’s faith that he could be healed that made Jesus’ work of healing possible. Jesus empowers people who are suffering to heal themselves. Those who are oppressed and in chains to free themselves. We are afraid of such power.
As I pondered this story I thought of an event that happened recently where I work in Baltimore with people with mental disorders.
A couple of years ago, a man, Kevin, who had been homeless for years and incarcerated for a time came into our services. He was able to get his own place and was participating in a day program. He had thought he wanted to learn “good English” – but was unable to find a program to help him. As he sat in my office one day a few weeks ago, he told me how much enjoyment he got out of volunteering at his program doing odd jobs to help out. He had a long-time friend with whom he lived. He seemed like an innocent, illiterate person (he was distressed that he couldn’t speak good English or read a letter sent to him) but relatively happy and in his right mind. One day he came in for a session after he had gotten into a fight with a friend of his who was also in the program. Staff were concerned, and he seemed somewhat guarded about what had happened. He had expressed the fear of going back to jail and noted that he would rather die than be in prison again. The rumor was that alcohol was involved. A couple of weeks later, we got the news that he had been killed in a standoff with the police. There were several different versions of the story. However, it was clear that the lethal demons of alcohol, poverty, mental illness and guns probably combined to end Kevin’s life.
I thought about the difference between Jesus’ approach to the maniac in the tombs and the approach of the “system” that Kevin was a part of.
Jesus was approached by the man in the tombs and he did not draw a weapon or back away from him or call the cops. He recognized the demons and called them by name. He realized that the demons did not represent the true heart of the man but had possessed him, and the man was helpless and bound by them. Jesus saw the situation with compassion and responded with firmness and gentleness. He even did what the demons begged him to do – sent them into the pigs. He did not try to use force to pry the demons out of the man or even to get rid of them. I wondered whether Jesus--had he been in the situation where Kevin was in the standoff with police--would have found a way to save him from his demons without using lethal force. How many other people have died who were innocent and could have been saved if the gentle power of Jesus were used in the situation rather than the lethal force of a weapon?
In a training for using a specific technique (EMDR) to treat dissociative disorder in people who have experienced trauma, the trainer showed videos blurred out, but so you could see the movements. This training was to demonstrate how to help people through identifying the different “voices” within and what they fear. This is so as to finally integrate these “parts” into the complete, whole, and healed person. The person with whom the therapist was working would check in with the different voices within to hear what they were thinking and feeling.
The parts expressed fear of annihilation in the process. Again, it is important to name the parts. We are not looking to “get rid of” the parts – but to integrate them into the whole person. The reprocessing of the trauma is only undertaken with the permission of the “community” of voices inside the person. This was a very moving training. It reminded me again of how Jesus worked with the integration of the man with the demons – but agreed not to destroy the demons or send them into the abyss!
The message of this story on the personal level is about personal demons. What are my own individual demons I need to either integrate or work with to become more whole? What do I keep running from? What is keeping me in chains?
A Story of Communal Liberation
Another way to look at this story is in the context of Jesus’ time and the time of the early Followers of the Way – that is in the context of oppressive Roman domination. One reason this story has the quality of a larger collective message is the name of the demon – which is Legion – the name of the Roman army. (The Message translation calls them the “Mob.”) In this way of reading the story, the demoniac represents the Jewish people oppressed and possessed by the Romans. He is in “chains and shackles,” which he keeps breaking and from which he keeps running into the wilds.
The Jews under Roman rule had repeatedly tried to break their chains and get free – just as enslaved people in America repeatedly tried to rebel and escape their masters. In this reading of the story, the demons named Legion are violence, terror, oppression, and poverty. The tombs where the maniac lives represent perpetual uncleanness and death under the tyranny of their oppressors. The “Legion” does not ask Jesus not to send them out of the man, but out of the country.
Calling out demons is disruptive and disturbing. In Acts 16 (which was in our lectionary recently), Paul and Silas were said to have caused a disturbance in the city after they called out a demon from a slave girl. They were arrested and jailed because her master complained that she no longer was the source of revenue for him. Calling out demons can be economically dangerous, as the swineherds found when their pigs went into the lake and drowned.
On one occasion, Jesus cast out a mute demon and the man spoke. He found his voice and the people felt threatened. They said Jesus was casting out demons by Beelzebul – or the Devil. But Jesus said, “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come to you.” (Lk 11:14-20)
Obery Hendricks writes:
Mark’s veiled description of his country as having gone wild with self-destruction corresponds to the reality of his situation….[the historian] Josephus said it looked like the country had been ravaged by a war. The numerous matter-of-fact references in the Gospels to insanity, lameness, depression, abject dejection, bands of robbers, dispossessed farmers, enslaved debt defaulters, diseased beggars, disrupted menstrual cycles … and revolutionary upheavals depict a society that in many ways appeared to be coming apart at the seams. (p 146)
This description almost seems an apt description of the part of Baltimore where I work.
Hendricks also describes a section of the book The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon in which “the root of a young man’s self-destructive behavior was torturous guilt at his inability to protect his people from the pain of the subjugation.”
Both the Luke story for today and Fanon’s account “attribute their subject’s pathological behavior to the strain of living under the brutal military occupation of their respective homelands.” (p. 148)
Thus the blame for “pathological behavior” lies with the principalities and powers, the systems of White Nationalism and White Supremacy, of greedy profit-making and grinding poverty, of racism and division, of violence and militarism that oppress the masses. So often we blame the poor and the mentally ill for their problems. They do not need to be blamed but to be empowered to see that they have the vision and strength to solve their problems.
My belief is that if people were freed from the demons of poverty, violence, addiction, racism and the debilitating self-blame and even self-hatred that comes from the oppression by these demons, that there would be much less mental and physical illness in our inner cities. Hendricks calls us to name these demons that are causing our people’s suffering, to call them out - that it is our sacred duty, just as it was Jesus’ calling to name the demons of society. He says, “Calling the demon by name is an integral part of our vocation to treat the people’s needs as holy.” (p 149)
Psalm 22
The psalmist says
Deliver my soul from the sword,
My life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion!
And later
For he did not despise or abhor
The affliction of the afflicted;
He did not hide his face from me…”
The man possessed by demons asks Jesus to save him, and Jesus did not despise him or abhor him, naked, unclean and crazed as he was in the tombs. Jesus did not hide his face from the man’s misery, but looked him in the eyes and asked the name of the demon. Jesus faced this man’s reality and thereby was able to help him heal.
Isaiah 65
God says in this passage:
I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,
To be found by those who did not seek me.
I said ‘Here I am, here I am,’
To a nation that did not call on my name.”
And later, of the people
who say,
Keep to yourself, do not come near me,
For I am too holy for you.
God wants us to seek him. God wants to be found. He is yearning for us to call his name. Jesus was ready for people to seek him out, but often those religious ones, like me and you, maybe, didn’t seek him out. The man with the demons did seek out Jesus. But the people in the story who heard about the healing of the maniac from the tombs became afraid and asked Jesus to leave. Did they think he was now contaminated by being with someone from the tombs? Or were they afraid of the holiness of Jesus’ power? Did their fear keep them from being healed of their demons?
Galatians 3
Paul says that we were all “imprisoned and guarded under the law,” but when we are “baptized into Christ” and have put on the clothing of Christ, then we are no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, black or white – for all of us are “one in Christ Jesus.”
Hendricks concludes his chapter “Call the Demon by Name” by saying that the power of Jesus’ Gospel can liberate individuals and their communities “from the grip of oppression and the multiple pathologies that oppression causes.” This story also says that we cannot allow our feelings of fear and powerlessness to keep us from calling the demons by name. Some “will be asked to take our message elsewhere or to soften the names we call out loud. We must not. We who profess to follow Jesus must continually ask God for the strength to call the demon by name, and then speak it.” My question for all of us is, “Where do we need to speak the name of a demon– either a personal demon or a communal one - boldly and clearly? Do we have the courage to do this?”