Co-Lead Minister
Luke 8:26-39
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What an odd story, when you think about it. Imagine it as a movie, where Jesus drives out a demon and it leaps into some nearby pigs and the pigs, startled with this new identity start running in a panic, down a hill and into the lake. And the pig herders, maybe not really paying attention initially, I mean really, how much attention does a herd of pigs call for, suddenly notice the chaos and start running after them. And when they can’t catch the pigs – they turn on Jesus. Not to thank him for getting rid of the demons, but to attack him for destroying the pigs.
Initially this story looks like an innocuous tale, or maybe a bit of a slap stick comedy, about Jesus healing a man possessed – but I’m going to argue it is instead a carefully coded, radical call to political resistance. To resistance then and now to whatever forces hold us from being a liberated, loving people. Because remember, there is nothing innocuous about Jesus.
So, Jesus and his friends come across the Sea of Galilee into an area of the Gerasenes. A land occupied by Roman forces and gentiles – people who were not Jews. Immediately, as soon as they reach the shore, Jesus is confronted by a man in the grip of demons. He was naked, and chained and shackled, but even those constraints could not always hold him; he was a strong man who sometimes broke free and ran away, although obviously he was always captured and brought back. Although the Bible says that the man spoke, it’s the ‘unclean spirit’ addressing Jesus: What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me – for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man.” (Luke 8:28-29) Notice that the unclean spirit, or the demon, recognized Jesus, when so many of the ‘righteous’ often completely missed who he was – Son of the Most High God. Jesus asks the demons their name and they tell him they are called ‘Legion’, because there are a lot of them. They beg him to not send them, in the mans possessed, back into the caves, but instead, into the herd of swine that were nearby. Jesus complies, and then the now possessed pigs rush off in a frenzy down a steep bank into a lake where they drown. The local swine herders and residents are understandably not pleased, as some of their food and their income has just been destroyed. And, they were afraid, not just sort of afraid, not just like the fear when we’ve seen something we don’t quite understand, but Luke tells us they had ‘great fear’ and asked Jesus to leave. I think it would be more accurate to say, the told him in no uncertain terms to get out of town, since Jesus and the disciples appear to have immediately jumped out of the boat and headed back into the lake. With the pigs probably.
Lately I’ve been telling my husband we need to get a bigger tv. I mean a really big tv. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed but very often now the plots of tv and movie shows are moved along by the participants sending each other texts on their phones. So instead of dialogue (which I often can’t hear either) they text each other and we, as the viewer need to be able to read what they’ve written. Which neither Bob nor I can do from the distance of our couch. (If any of you watched Ted Lasso it was particularly bad during the whole Sam and Rebecca online dating story line.) So, we need to get up, rewind, and read what was texted from one character to another. It’s a pathetic sign of our aging. And it’s a bit like what we need to do to today to really get the power of this story.
Rewind. Jesus and his friends arrive in the region of the Gerasene. We need to know, as would have the first listeners to this story have known, that this was an area that was “…the setting of a horrifying historical event. According to Josephus, [an early historian] [about 60 years after the birth of Jesus], toward the end of the Jewish revolt, the Roman general Vespasian sent soldiers to retake Gerasa (Jewish War, IV,ix,1). [Earlier mutinous Galileans had staged an uprising, and as part of that revolt had drowned some Roman authorities. In retribution] The Romans killed a thousand young men, imprisoned their families, burned the city, and then attacked villages throughout the region. Many of those buried in Gerasene tombs had been slaughtered by Roman legions.”
(Judith Jones, Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-12-3/commentary-on-luke-826-39-4
Already understanding the political implications of what Jesus was about, no wonder the residents who witnessed what he had done were ‘seized with great fear’ regarding what retribution might await them.
The demons identify themselves as Legion. Any listener at that time would understand this to mean, not just a great number as we understand the word today, but very specifically a division of Roman soldiers, a great number of Roman soldiers. Who is possessing the man? The Roman Empire. Don’t send us away they beg, don’t make us leave this local garrison and place where we have been settled, comfortable conquerors.
The man naked, shackled and chained, humiliated and oppressed, represent the Jews and gentile Palestinians under Roman rule. A brutal regime that oppressed not only the Jews who refuse to worship Caesar, but all the residents of the area through economic and political exploitation. While a ‘herd’ most obviously referred to the swine, the same word in that time was the word for a band of military recruits. We begin to see the military overlay of the language Luke use. Luke tells us that the The dedmons ‘seize’ te man, seizing being the verb used elsewhere in the Bible to describe how Christians were seized and brought to trial. Legion is a division of soldiers, Jesus ‘orders’ the demons; the swine rushed down the hill, better translated as ‘charged’. “The Legio 10th Fretensis was [a Roman legion formed to fight the civil war)— [one of their emblems] used not only on banners but on everyday objects such as coins and bricks — was a pig. The 10th Fretensis participated in the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, took the lead in reconquering Palestine, and was stationed in Jerusalem after the war. For the people of the area, pigs would have seemed a fitting destination for Legion. Here the story takes a darkly humorous turn, for Legion, thinking that it has avoided [being sent away] promptly charges into the deep and drowns.” (Judith Jones, Working Preacher) Much like the Roman authorities during an earlier revolt were drowned in the lake.
What we see here in Luke, and in Mark where he tells the same story, is exorcism as a political repudiation and rejection of power used in any way other than as a source for the flourishing of life.
(Ched Meyers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus), p.192).
Let’s move now from staring at the fine print to the very big, ancient narrative placed before us. How are we to understand that this story moves our story forward? In his book “Binding the Strong Man” Ched Meyers writes about the social psychology of mental illness in situations of political repression. He quotes another author saying that “…demon possession in traditional societies is often a reflection of…’A socially acceptable form of oblique protest against, or escape from, oppression’” …. The tension between [the possessed man’s] hatred for his oppressors and the necessity to repress this hatred in order to avoid dire recrimination drove him mad…He retreated to an inner world where he could symbolically resist Roman domination…Jesus’ disruption of the prevailing accommodation [to the Roman authorities]…brought the man’s and the neighbourhood’s hatred of the Romans out into the open, where the result could be disaster for the community.’” (Meyers, p.192).
Ched Meyers wants us though to look beyond an individualistic understanding of how we might ‘go crazy’ in an oppressive system, and look instead at the ‘colonization of the mind’, in which the community’s anguish over its subjugation is repressed and then turned in on itself,…” (Meyers, p. 193) Where we turn in on each other. Have you noticed post-Covid how cranky people have become, we have become. And the increased polarization in all things political and social, releasing an ugliness is public discord?
So we don’t just wonder what personal demons possess the addict, we look at what forces so press down on our society that addiction is so prevalent? What forces so press down on our society that homelessness is surging? What forces so press down on our society that people in my children’s demographic are so heavily prescribed anti-anxiety medication? What forces are driving refugees into boats to drown by the hundreds, the thousands, 21,000 I read the other day? For that matter, what forces drive gazillionaires to get into a submarine that they gotta know isn’t particularly safe?
What forces – racism, sexism, homophobia, rampant hyper-capitalism, greed, fear of a culture changing all around us?
And call me a conspiracy theorists, I’ve been called worse, and actually the conspiracies we used to talk about when I was studying poli sci in the 70’s are all coming true, but it seems to me while we are preoccupied trying to resist racism and sexism and all the isms over here on this side, on the other side while we’re distracted hyper-capitalism and greed are running amok, unimpeded, until the last drop of water, the last living tree, the last happy soul are left dry, burnt out and laid flat.
What forces and then, how are we unbound from those forces? Jesus for Christians is the strong man that couldn’t be bound. Jesus for Christians, is the narrative that gives us not only a passive faith of eat, pray, and love but a faith of alert, resist, and love fiercely. Jesus is the force that names and drives out the demons, and names us beloved, and calls us to join him. I wonder how your vision, the vision of Canadian Memorial, moves you to unbind the forces that hold us? In your congregational profile you say that you are ‘open-hearted, open-minded, and Affirming, rooted in social action, environmental justice, and contemplative practice.” I wonder how this identity moves to unbind not only what holds us from fullness of living, but holds all creation from being all that God dreams of?
Rewind. What possesses us, and how much are we willing to risk to name the Legion, and to resist?
Amen