The Gospel according to Luke 8:26-30

Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.  When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, "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. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)  Jesus then asked him, "What is your name?" He said, "Legion"; for many demons had entered him.  They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.  Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission.  Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.  When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country.  Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.  Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.  Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.  The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

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I have always had trouble when confronted with the idea that a person might be possessed by demons. I suppose, stemming from my undergraduate major in psychology and my field work at that time in a mental hospital, my first inclination is to attribute bizarre behavior to mental illness.

Our gospel from Luke today is about a man who is referred to as a demoniac, "one who is or seems to be possessed by demons." The word is that "many times it hade seized him," and because he was so uncontrollable, the locals had chained and shackled him. That didn’t work. He was so strong he broke those bonds, so the next step was to drive him away from the people, to the tombs where he lived naked and alone. Pretty scary guy!

Jesus and his disciples had been traveling in a boat, across the lake of Galilee. On their way a terrible storm had come up, and rescuing them, Jesus had stopped the wind from blowing. The disciple were scared by the whole scene and were trying to figure out where this power came from, at which point they approached the shore, the country of the Garasenes. This was foreign country to them, gentile country, known to be "unclean", polluted.

Immediately, down to the water comes the demoniac. "What have you to do with me Jesus, son of the most high?" He asks. Amazing. He needed no introduction, he knew who Jesus was. (for a mad man this was rather sane.) "I beg of you, do not torment me," he pleaded, because at that same instant Jesus had commanded the demons, the unclean spirits, to come out of him. Somehow he saw Jesus as a threat. Then Jesus asks him his name. "Legion" he says, a strange name. A legion was a roman army unit of 6000 men. He was telling Jesus that he had many demons in him.

The next conversation Jesus has is with the released demons who beg him not to send them back to the tombs, the abyss, but instead, they wanted to enter the bodies of the pigs who were grazing on the hillside. With Jesus assent that happened, at which point, the pigs ran down the hillside into the water and were quickly drowned.

This was a dramatic episode for those who observed it. The swineherds who saw this ran back into town to alert the people and crowds rushed back to the lakeside. What they found was the demoniac, now fully clothed and in his right mind, standing with Jesus.

Can you imagine their thoughts? Who was this Jesus who could perform such miracles? What might he do next? Would all their pigs head into the water? In their fear they ordered Jesus to leave town. The healed man doesn’t know what to do. He thinks it will be hard to go back and live among those people who had put him in chains and what’s more, he really wants to follow Jesus, the man who gave him back his life. It is not to be. Jesus calls him to go back to his home and "declare how much god has done for you."

It is not too much to believe that this man, who had lived estranged from the human family during his illness, awoke at that moment to what had happened. He realized he wanted to share his blessing with his family and neighbors. Note the last line of the passage. "So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him." I wonder if he sees god in Jesus, or does he see Jesus in god? What ever. (I read once that this event was the origin of deviled ham.)

To come back to my original thoughts about this event, what does it mean to be possessed by demons? How could those demons recognize Jesus as the son of the most high, when the righteous people of Israel couldn’t? And what about exorcism? Can we explain this in our rational, scientific way of thinking these days? The psychologist would probably see demons as some phenomenon taking place in a person’s mind, a distortion in thinking related to an individual’s history. The person who takes scripture literally would see demons as a simple truth, a force coming from a foreign place that invades a person with some kind of magic power. I find this quite hard to believe even while I want to be true to the gospel.

It is true that demons do exist I think. Maybe we find it necessary to think about the evil in the world by giving it a personality, a name, like Satan, or evil spirit, or demon. To me these forces are as difficult to explain as the divine forces are, and yet both exist. They exist in us, and they exist outside of us, part of us and yet foreign to us. We can’t simply explain them away as a psychological experience although perhaps it may "take hold" of a person.

When I ponder the idea of demons, evil spirits, I think back to the story of the fall of Lucifer. In the beginning Lucifer was one of god’s angels, his "lightbearer." But Lucifer fell out of god’s favor because of his pride, his idolizing of his own creaturely being. And he became know in the world as Satan, the instigator of all evil, the rival of god. In the New Testament we learn of Satan more generally as the "power of darkness." And in the back of our minds, these are figures that we know about and experience daily in our lives.

As I was writing this sermon on Friday afternoon, I heard over the radio the report that Paul Johnson had been beheaded by the Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia. Immediately the thought came to me that Satan, evil forces had to be present for this gruesome event to take place. And then, coming back to the man from Garasa, I had to admit that the forces of evil are not something strange or unknown to me. They can take hold of individuals and groups, and as I said before, they can push from the outside in and from the inside out into the world.

As human beings we know that we have strengths and weakness and that they all come from the same place inside of us. As has been said by Fred Parrella, "we carry within us the gift of grace as well as the possibility of rejecting that grace, of taking every grace and charisma and corrupting it by using it destructively." It frightens me to think of having that power. And religion is not a hiding place to which we can escape from it easily. The people of Garasa were scared to death and that was why they pushed Jesus out. They didn’t want think about the demonic and they certainly weren’t going to enter into the battle between the power of darkness and the light. For all of us, escape is the easy way, but at the same time it is destructive.

Just as Jesus casts out demons in this story, he works to cast out demons that are within us or in the world. And just as the man from Garasene, who was freed from demons, became Jesus disciple, so we today cannot hide from demons but must look at them and embrace them and hold them up to Jesus so that he can be with us as we deal with them.

The Rev. Ruth T. Healy - Priest Associate

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