Posts Tagged ‘Gerasene demoniac’

Finding God in the still, small things

June 21, 2025

Pentecost 2 – 2025

Luke 8:26-39 (1 Kings 19:1-4, 18-15a)

Marian Free

In the name of God whose surprises and little miracles are a part of every day. Amen.

Sometimes I wonder if we are so interested in the dramatic and extraordinary that we miss the important details that are contained in the quiet and seemingly mundane. This can be as true of our everyday lives as it can of world events. The small and not so small miracles occur unremarked because we are so absorbed in the bigger,  more exciting picture. This is equally true when it comes to reading and teaching the Bible. We all know about Moses and the burning bush because of the miracle of a bush burning without being consumed and because God spoke the bush, but it takes someone who is really paying attention to notice that ‘Moses turned aside’. A burning bush has no impact if it is not noticed. If Moses had not paid attention, there would have been no story – no plagues, no Exodus, no promised land. The small details are important.

Of necessity our lectionary has to be selective. In order to read through the gospels in three years, we omit passages that are repeated in the gospels, for example, this year we will not hear the parable of the sower during a Sunday service. The lectionary writers have also judiciously omitted some of the more controversial or offensive passages. A consequence of such decision-making is that small details (connecting sentences, off-hand comments) can be overlooked.

Whether it is our focus on the more dramatic aspects of Scripture, or omissions in the lectionary, our view of scripture can be skewed. 

Such is the case with our journey through Luke’s gospel. At the end of Epiphany, we had read up until the end of chapter 6. Today we have leapt straight to the end of chapter 8. Of course, some of chapters 7 and 8 will be covered in other years, but the omission of these verses mean that we never hear the first few verses of chapter 8 which are unique to Luke and which give us quite a different picture of Jesus’ travelling companions. Luke tells us that: “The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.”

Jesus is accompanied, it seems, not only by the 12, but also by a substantial number of women – many others. Notably, these were women of some significance – the wife of Herod’s steward for one. They were also women of some means. Luke tells us that they provided for them out of their own resources. “Them” in this instance appears to refer to Jesus and the 12 – not an insubstantial number to feed and to accommodate. Luke drops this snippet of information into his story as a matter of fact so even were we to hear these lines in church we might be tempted to pass them by and not pay attention to the fact that Jesus’ followers (counted alongside the twelve) were women. We take Luk’es statement for granted, forgetting that in the first century Mediterranean world it was socially unacceptable for women who were not accompanied by male relatives to interact with men.

The story of the Gerasene demoniac is another example of our tendency to focus on the dramatic and to miss the small details. The account of Jesus’ casting the demons from the Gerasene into the pigs is vivid and detailed and includes so much that is amazing and unbelievable that it is these that catch our attention. We are fascinated by the state of the man who had demons – he is naked, lives among the tombs and at times becomes so wild that he is guarded and bound with chains and shackles. Indeed, he becomes so violent at times that he is able to break the chains and disappear into the “wilds”. We are struck by the fact that the poor man has been possessed not by one but by a legion of demons. It is little wonder that we focus on the man’s miraculous recovery and Jesus’ divine power.

Then there are the pigs. What did they do to deserve being possessed by demons that thrust them headlong into the lake? And what of the pig herders whose responsibility it was to tend the pigs?  What punishment will be inflicted on the herders as a consequence of the loss? And so on.

Demon possession and the sorry pigs become front and centre. There is nothing wrong with that, but if we only look at the big picture, we risk missing an important but significant detail. When the people came out to see what had happened, “they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” Jesus has not only set the man free, but he has also restored his dignity, his personhood and his freedom. The man is clothed, unbound and has adopted the position of a disciple. Yes, Jesus performed a miracle, but the miracle was only a means to an end – recognising and affirming the humanity of the afflicted man.

When it comes to evangelism, it is easy to try to get people’s attention by focussing on the miraculous, on Jesus’ godly powers. In fact, this is how some people sell the gospel. Believe in Jesus and this can happen to you. (Even believe in Jesus and you will be able to perform miracles.) The reality is often much more down to earth – being seen, being heard, being accepted for who you are. God sees us and, no matter our faults and failings, no matter the things that bind us, God loves us and sets us free to be who we are.

The dramatic and miraculous are only one part of the story. If we pay attention, if we look for the detail, if pay heed to the omissions, we will discover – as did Elijah – that God is not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the “sheer silence”.

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Double meanings

June 22, 2019

Pentecost 2 – 2019

Gerasene Demoniac Luke 8:26-39

Marian Free

In the name of God, who through Jesus, sets us from from doubt and fear. Amen.

“Goosey, goosey, gander

Where shall I wander,

Upstairs and downstairs

and in my lady’s chamber.

There I found an old man

Who would not say his prayers,

I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.”

This and many other well known nursery rhymes had a hidden (often political) meaning in their time. Goosey, goosey gander for example references the religious persecution that occurred during the English Reformation when Catholic priests were hunted down and killed. In a similar vein, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” refers, not to gardening, but to Queen Mary 1 who, during her short reign, condemned to death hundreds of Protestants (silver bells and cockle shells were not flowers but instruments of torture). “Ring a ring of rosies” apparently refers to the Plague of 1665. The “rosie” was the rash that signified the onset of the disease and the posies were an attempt to cover up the foul smell that resulted from the plague and from the bodies of the dead.

Of course, apparently innocent nursery rhymes are not the only form of literature to have hidden or double meanings, or that can be interpreted in a number of different ways. People under oppressive regimes often use coded, seemingly innocuous, messages to avoid detection or to ensure that their plans do not fall into enemy hands. Early Christians are said to have used the symbol of a fish or of the Chi Rho to signal to others that they were believers. These signs meant nothing to unbelievers but to those who did believe, mutual understanding of the symbols allowed them to speak freely to one another.

There are instances of coded language in scriptures – notably in the apocalyptic literature that includes the Book of Revelation. Judith Jones, an Episcopal priest in Oregon, suggests that today’s account of the Gerasene demoniac is an example of a coded, subversive message written for an oppressed people.

She points out that, at the time that Luke was writing his version of the gospel, the Jewish uprising had been quelled, Jerusalem destroyed and the Roman legions had swept through Gerasa. According to Josephus during the campaign one thousand young men were killed, their families imprisoned and their city burned. As if this were not enough the soldiers then attacked the surrounding villages (The Jewish War IV, ix, 1). Those buried in the tombs of Gerasene would have been those slaughtered by the Roman legions. In such circumstances it is not impossible to imagine that Luke would frame his account of Jesus in such a way as to suggest that Jesus had power, not only over evil spirits, but also over the evil that was the Roman Empire. Nor should we be surprised that Luke would try to tell his story in such a way that it would have meaning for those who were living in the aftermath of such brutal repression.

Jones suggests that words that we take at face value could have been heard entirely differently by those to whom Luke addressed his gospel. The word ‘Legion’ for example, had only one literal meaning. It was a unit in the Roman army that consisted of 6,000 soldiers. The demons were code for Rome. Other words used in the miracle story are translated differently in other New Testament contexts – suggesting that those meanings could be applied here. For example, the word translated here as ‘met’ is used for a king going out to battle against another king in Luke 14:31. The demons are said to ‘seize’ the man in the same way that the disciples are ‘seized’ by the authorities in the Book of Acts, and the chains of the demoniac might well have reminded Luke’s readers of the chains in which the first Christians were bound when they were arrested and imprisoned. Even the pigs may have had a double meaning for Luke’s audience. The legion that led the attack on Palestine and that remained behind in Jerusalem after the war was the Legio 10th Fretensis whose symbol was the pig. The image of a pig featured not only on their flags but also on ordinary objects such as coins and bricks. Pigs therefore might have seemed to be an appropriate home for Legion, though as Jones points out: “Here the story takes a darkly humorous turn, for Legion, thinking that it has avoided the abyss, promptly charges into the deep and drowns.”

Read in this light, Luke appears to be using the story of the demoniac to reassure his readers that ultimately Rome has no power over them.

From this subversive, political standpoint, the exorcism becomes not a quaint miracle story but a story for our own time: a time in which men, women and children are enslaved and brutalized for selfish gain, in which oppressive governments repress dissent and and torture and imprison those who dare to challenge them, in which minorities (including Christians) are persecuted and in which some families are so impoverished that parents are forced to leave their children in the care of others while they travel to far away lands to work (sometimes in dangerous and exploitative situations) so that the children have a chance at a reasonable life.

Even without the political overtones, the story still speaks today to all those who are tortured by addiction or mental illness, to those who are imprisoned by doubt and fear, to those who are enslaved by poverty and disadvantage and to those who are rejected and cast out by society because they do not conform to our definition of normal.

Jesus’ healing of the demoniac reminds us that Jesus has the power to heal and to set free, that Jesus is sovereign over the powers that we can see and the powers that we can’t see and that Jesus love brings us in from the margins to where we truly belong.

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