Luke 8:26-39
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
October 18, 2020
They didn’t want him to get well. For years, the Gerasene people had supposedly cared for this man, keeping him under guard, in chains and shackles, pretending they were doing so for his own protection. They devoted time and energy and resources and angst to his care; still he kept getting worse. More and more demons attached themselves to him, compelling him to rip off his clothes, run wildly through the city, and make his home amongst corpses. When there was destruction of homes or damage to fields, the people were sure it was his doing. They shook their heads in pity, constructed heavier chains, and told their children to stay away.
When Jesus came and healed this man, you would think the people would have been thrilled and relieved. You would think they would have welcomed Jesus and the healed man into the center of the city, prepared a feast and said, “Tell us more about your message.” They didn’t. They were frightened. They begged Jesus to leave. They blamed their fear on the loss of the herd of swine, but that was just an excuse. They were invested in this man remaining sick. I wonder if they were terrified to imagine life without a crazy demon-possessed outsider to blame for all their problems.
The reaction of the Gerasene people to the man’s healing leads me to think twice about the demons in this story. Maybe these demons were not free-floating miniature personifications of evil sent from beyond. Maybe they had a much more human origin. The story makes more sense and is more relevant to our lives if we understand the demons as destructive forces, if we acknowledge the ways our human frailties and fears can become magnified and twisted until they take on a life of their own.
What were the destructive forces at work among the Gerasene people? When Jesus asked the man his name, the demons—the destructive forces—answered for him: “Legion.” The word could simply mean “there are a lot of us.” It could be a thinly veiled reference to the legion of Roman soldiers stationed in the city. Rome was an occupying empire, known for its brutal suppression of resistance. What impact would an occupying force stationed in their city have had on the community?
I imagine a swirl of emotions—rage that could not be safely expressed, fear, grief at the loss of the way things used to be, a debilitating feeling of powerlessness. I imagine tensions building up among the people as they each tried to position themselves to survive. Some would have found ways to cozy up to the soldiers for their own financial gain; they would have felt the heat of the resentful stares of their neighbors. A few may have snuck out at night to perpetrate minor acts of sabotage, enraging their neighbors who feared the whole city would suffer for it. Some became cynical while others dreamed of a new world; many just kept their heads down and tried to pretend everything was fine.
What a whirlwind of destructive forces: despair, rage, suspicion, fear. The tension, I imagine, was unbearable. So they did what communities have done for all of human history: they projected their distress outward, onto a scapegoat. Maybe it was a conscious act: a leader intentionally directing the people’s anger and upset onto a vulnerable man so they would not risk Rome’s wrath by rebelling. Maybe it was unplanned: the kind of group-think we all participate in without consciously deciding to. Either way, it was a relief for the community to take all their emotions and project them onto one man. They could feel in control of their lives as long as he was out of control.
What would happen now, now that the man was sitting clothed and calm beside Jesus? What would they do with their distress, with their feelings of powerlessness, with their rage and fear?
Distress. Powerlessness. Rage. Fear. Our scripture reading speaks powerfully to our own lives right now. We don’t have a legion of Roman soldiers invading our city. Still, we have a legion of destructive forces at work in our community, our nation, our world.
COVID-19 isn’t a demon; it’s a naturally occurring virus that awakens us to how vulnerable we are. The destructive forces it unleashes emerge when we cannot tolerate our vulnerability, when we are overwhelmed by grief and anger and fear. Who do we try to blame so we can fool ourselves into feeling a little more in control?
We are becoming acutely aware of how destructive—even demonic—racism is in today’s world. We see how demagogues purposely twist people’s free-floating anxieties into hatred of someone they perceive to be different. We are tempted to project blame onto leaders we don’t like, as though our deeply rooted prejudices would simply disappear if they were no longer in power. There are destructive forces that perpetuate and intensify the economic divide in our nation, as we blame the poor for the persistence of poverty.
What are the forces of destruction you experience in your life and see in our world today? What are the fears and stresses that take on a life of their own, until they almost seem to have demonic power? When do we project our distress onto others because it is too painful for us to hold?
Into these daunting scenarios—first century Palestine and 21st century America—Jesus comes. What does he do? The Bible tells us that he begins with the person who has been ostracized, the person who has absorbed the pain of the community. He speaks to the Gerasene man: “You are God’s beloved. That is your identity. All these things the community projects onto you—they do not define you.” The man hears and believes. The forces of destruction no longer have a home in his body. They fly off a cliff into the water.
What happens next? What does Jesus say to the community that demonized this man? Nothing. He doesn’t get a chance. They beg him to leave. They cannot imagine how the loss of their scapegoat could be good for them. Whatever this wandering teacher-healer is proclaiming, they don’t want to hear it.
Jesus leaves their city and continues his ministry, proclaiming the good news the Gerasene people were not ready to hear. “The kingdom of God—the kin-dom of God, the realm of God’s love—has come near.” There is another way, he says, to be community. I hope a few of the Gerasenes venture out to other villages to hear Jesus and bring his message back.x
Jesus acknowledges that the Roman legions are real and the power of the kingdom of Caesar is real. Yes, he says, your fears and rage and despair are real and powerful. And there is something more powerful: God’s love, breaking in right here, right now. When you resist the temptation to project blame onto the person who is different from you, when you instead invite them to share a meal, you are part of this new way of being community. When you dare to trust that you are God’s beloved, when you live out that love in your caring for one another, your rage and fear and distress will not destroy or define you.
The Gerasene people tried, unsuccessfully, to use chains to contain the man on whom they projected all their distress. They didn’t realize they were themselves chained by a distorted, destructive vision of community. They didn’t hear Jesus’ message: God’s love is powerful enough to break those chains and transform your community.
How about today? What does Jesus do and say to us? How does he speak to the ways forces of destruction twist themselves into chains in our time?
Jesus starts where he always does: with the people who have been marginalized, with each of us in the ways we have absorbed the destructive messages of our culture. “You are God’s beloved,” he says. “That is your identity. Claim it. Live it. No person, no destructive force, can take that away from you.”
He speaks first to the ones who are suffering the most. Then he speaks to the entire community, if we dare to listen. He proclaims Good News for all of us: Good New of a better way. The forces of racism, hatred, greed and fear are real and powerful, and there is something even more real and even more powerful. The kin-dom of God is breaking in, even and especially into this pain-filled world.
You don’t have to make someone else the bad guy to claim your own goodness; God loves you in all your messy complexity. You can honor the belovedness of neighbor and stranger, even as you acknowledge their messy complexity. You can refuse to add your energy to the forces of destruction. You can name those forces for what they are and choose to be part of something much more powerful: the power of God’s love. That is the good news.
May God bless us with vision to see beyond the way things are. May God bless us with conviction to claim the promise of the kin-dom of God. May God bless us with perseverance to live it into being, one act of love, one act of justice at a time. Amen.