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.
Swallowsrest 