Proper 7C Luke 8:26-39 Galatians 3:23-29 We Have Before Us Today In
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Proper 7C Luke 8:26-39 Galatians 3:23-29 We have before us today in the Gospel of Luke the 2nd of four episodes where Jesus works wonders. A slave, then a dead man, next a prostitute, and now a madman. Luke piles one story on top of another showing how Jesus widens the circle of the people of God to include those who have been seen as contaminated and corrupting – the unclean. Two thousand years later, the mentally ill are the group we still fear, and shun. In our text Jesus pays a visit to the country of the Gerasenes, a Gentile place, on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. He comes here as he always does in Luke’s gospel, with the authority and power of God’s in-breaking reign. When Jesus is present, people and conditions are challenged, upset, transformed, and his visit to the Gerasenes makes quite an impact. 1 The meaning here is quite clear: There is no place beyond Jesus’ power to set free. Almost before he can get off the boat Jesus is met by a man described as demon possessed. Luke has placed this disturbed young man in an unclean town, in which Jewish people made their living by herding pigs. By Jewish law the pig is an unclean animal, but the town has found it profitable to raise them and sell to neighbors of other faiths who are pork eaters. The madman also is untouchable by religious law. The town, Gerasea, has decided that the young madman is good for nothing. His uncontrollable rages have brought them to drastic measures. They have put him in chains and chained him among the dead, in the town cemetery, where his roaring will bother the living less. Even so, he manages to escape now and then and takes off 2 into the wilds. Why does he return? Because there is nowhere else to go. Because hunger brings him back to the food they will supply. Because he is dependent, it seems. When Jesus arrives by boat from across the Sea, there is no crowd waiting to greet him. His advance team has not been able to roust folks out – curiosity, hope for miracles, and longing for good preaching, the three sure-fire lures, have failed in Gerasea. But Jesus and the disciples can hear the fellow in the cemetery. He appears to be crazed, and he comes at Jesus from his home in the cemetery shouting at Jesus to leave him alone, not to torment him. By the end of Jesus’ time with him, the young man has been restored to health and sanity, is calm, clothed and in his right mind, and rejoices in his acceptance. But something else has happened. The demons and the madness have gone out of the young man and, at Jesus’ direction, into a large herd of swine. The swine, in horror at their own corruption by unclean spirits, run to the edge of the 3 cliff, jump into the Sea and are drowned. Now the townspeople come running, crowding around, horrified at the loss of their valuable swine. And they are terrified of Jesus – so terrified they ask him to leave town. Jesus has changed the town, set the man free, changed a corrupt situation. But the cost has been high financially, too high. And the town does not want to pay it, nor to live without that income. And who can blame them, economies being what they are? New livelihoods are not easy to come by, and this village needs to salvage its hog-tending without delay. The reactions to Jesus are swift and intense. The demons realize immediately that they are in the presence of a power greater than their own, and they tremble. The reaction of the people in the area to the healing of their neighbor is also striking. You might think that they would be happy that this man who has caused them so much trouble is now sane and whole. Perhaps they will throw a party to celebrate this miracle of salvation or hurry to bring to Jesus 4 other friends in need of healing. But there is no party. They are in a state of fearful panic. They are scared and they ask Jesus to leave their community. Why are they scared? Maybe they're fearful that if Jesus hangs around they won't be able to make a living. After all, Jesus has just sent a big part of the local economy to destruction in the lake. The unsettling power of Jesus extends beyond a person’s heart to financial security and economic systems, as a good reading of church history and a clear look at the prophetic life of the Gospel will reveal. If Jesus has power over the forces of the world that oppress and bind, if Jesus can heal somebody like the longsuffering man in the text, destroying a hog farm in the process, what might he do next? Who is safe from such a power? And what if I don't want to see my life upset but prefer to remain in my comfortable, familiar patterns of living. Fear has been prompted by the presence of a power greater 5 than the power of disturbed and maligned spirits. The people had isolated the man with demons and taken the time and expense of guarding and controlling him. Their management goal was relative peace and maintenance of economic power arrangements in the community. Now the power of God comes to their community and disturbs that way of life. Even when working for good, power that can neither be calculated nor managed is frightening. For the Gerasenes, it was too much to risk. They counted the cost and found it too high. They asked Jesus to leave. This story, like all the gospel stories, has the hidden intention of changing us, not leaving us the same as we were before. Possibly at this point in the life and growth of our parish we could hear this text telling us that healing, that health requires confrontation, insight, and risk. Biblical scholar Jeffrey Johns writes, “This story is not just about a personal exorcism. It is also about the promise of 6 God’s ability to defeat and re-order the disordered powers that afflict individuals.” For instance, we are not strangers to mental illness among us and in our nation. We know something of its despair for those who, as William Styron writes, “have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony…” We have some insight into the agony of families with members afflicted by devouring anxieties, the anguish of being in such a state. We know that the confusion and corruption of American life may push many young people who are fragile, over the edge, that in America, social pressures seem to contribute to such illnesses. And we also know something about the economic market forces involved the manufacture and sale of guns, and how this corruption is also fueled by the film and fantasy cyber game industry that celebrates gun violence. The widespread availability of semi-automatic repeating rifles is one of our cultural corruptions. Another is the fantasy 7 world that feeds it, and still another is what seems to me to be the expansive interpretation of the second amendment that enshrines anti-social fear and rage and the right to a personal arsenal. Many, speaking in the name of Jesus’ values, especially since Sandy Hook, have argued for what they see as sane and reasonable limits. But the counter argument has so far won the day, that the right to own such guns and play such games is sacred. Instead, the mentally ill have become scapegoats for the perils we face, all across the nation. It was not the mad young man who endangered Gerasea, it was the collaboration in the corruption in which the town was engaged. And the sanest of men, Jesus, knew that and remedied it. The town turned that remedy down. Statistically, the mentally ill are no more prone to violence than anyone else. Spiritually, it would be true to say that any shooter is, at the time of shooting, insane. But whatever we say, it seems that, then and now, money together with power, always wins the day. 8 Jesus told the now-sane young man, who wanted to stay with him as a disciple, to stay instead in Gerasea and keep on telling people how his cure had come about. That story would be about Jesus, but also about the swine, and about power and about economic interests. In America, the mentally ill need to keep on telling us that, sick or well, they are not the root cause of violence here. Even more helpful would be ceasing to scapegoat the mentally ill, ceasing to see them as lurking monsters who need to be kept in chains. Mental illness is part of the spectrum of the human condition. It has always been present, and will always be. And like the rest of us, the mentally ill need to be safe in our communities. Jesus, who had such compassion for this young man, knew the community could afford to restore him to health. They just needed to care enough to be willing to pay for his wellness. And they needed to understand that his health was a symbol of theirs. 9 It required confrontation, some bold truth telling, and insight. However, it also required the willingness to risk. Luke reports that rather than staying in known Galilee, Jesus disembarked on the opposite shore, arriving at the country of the Gerasenes.