Our Gospel today begins halfway through an action … “Then they arrived at the region of the Gerasenes”
This is just after Jesus has calmed the sea and rebuked the winds, prompting the disciples to ask, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?”
That question, left deftly hanging in the narrative by Luke, is answered in our reading today.
We note firstly that we are in non-Jewish land, as indicated by being opposite Galilee. And, like Gailee and Judea, we are in occupied land, possessed land – and we use that word consciously here, because throughout the Jewish scriptures of the day, translated into Greek, the same word is used for both Israel’s possession of the Land of the Canaanites and possession of a person by a spirit or a demon. Possession whether of land or personhood was connected.
So, in a possessed land we hear of a possessed man, living in the tombs, the places of the dead, making him constantly unclean, constantly excluded and constantly alone. Though he has many, legion, within him, outwardly he is on his own.
Until Jesus arrives.
And then we get the answer to the question from the passage before today’s, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds …”
28 When he, the possessed man, saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?’
By this Luke shows us that Jesus is in some way divine, that he carries with him, like a son in a patriarchal culture, the power and authority of his father, the most high God.
And so, Jesus, the one who is human and who is divine, who is earthy and heavenly, who is from here and from not-here, is recognized by demons, who themselves are both here, in and as the possessed person, and from not here – from the inner, unphysical realms of the spiritual hinterland.
There is so much charge and excitement connected with demons and possession, all stoked by the lurid fantasies of Hollywood, that a sermon is not the right place to sensitively unpack and understand these realities.
A common modern view is to assume that demons in the bible are pre-modern representations of natural phenomena – that demonic possession, for example, is an ancient way of understanding epileptic fits. As easy and as neat as this view is however, it assumes too much and erases the traditionalist spiritual world view, much as European colonizing religions erased the traditional spiritualities of first nations peoples across the globe.
Whatever the traditional Jewish understanding of demonic possession was, we can be sure it was not simple, but was multilayered and nuanced, as this account in Luke shows.
Luke makes clear that this possession has robbed the man of his personhood. Living a half-life in the tombs, with the dead, not only is he ostracized but he is also described as not wearing clothes, a state that in Jewish culture reduced a person to the level of an animal.
Now Jesus commands the demons to leave using traditional exorcism methods – he obtains the name of the possessing forces. Having the name of someone, of some unseen or only half seen force, of a demon, meant the possessor of that name now has power over the demon. So, Jesus, as the Son of the Most High, ‘asks’, and receives the name: legion.
This name is of utmost importance. Jesus and his contemporaries spoke Aramaic and the Gospels were written in Greek. Legion however, is neither Aramaic nor Greek; it is Latin.
It means both ‘many’ and also refers to a Roman garrison of troops, perhaps four to six thousand in number, certainly many. There are several Greek words meaning ‘many’ or ‘multitude’ used throughout the gospels. Luke chooses not to use any of them but introduces the Latin legion deliberately. It is one of only a very few instances in the Gospels that a Latin, a Roman, word is used, borrowed from the Empire that occupied, that possessed the Judean land and people. Again, very conscious and very deliberate.
We cannot be sure what Luke is doing here, but he is certainly making some social comment, some link between the possession of individuals and the possession of Land and people by the Roman empire. That restoration in Christ is restoration not only of a person, but of a people, that God restores life to individuals and to the communal.
We see this restoration of the personal and the potential but unactualized restoration of the communal towards the end of the passage. The once possessed man is now clothed, again a deliberately included detail, showing his restoration to human status, and in his right mind.
Furthermore, he is sitting at the feet of Jesus, the place where disciples sat. Through his healing, through his encounter with Christ, through the expulsion of the possessing spiritual-imperial powers, this man is now an icon of restoration, a sign of God’s saving power and discipleship to Christ.
But the people, his people, cannot enter the invitation offered by his restored body and self: they become frightened, and ask Jesus to leave, “for they were seized with great fear”. They cannot take the next step.
Perhaps they cannot accept God’s healing power so evident in the person of the man in front of them, the man who by his renewed life bears witness to Christ as God. This man however, at the command of Jesus stays with his people as a living testimony. And note these last lines:
38 … Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 “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.
How much Jesus had done for him. Jesus himself commanded he declare how much GOD had done, but he changes this to how much JESUS has done – because being depossessed in body, mind and spirit, he now knows that Jesus is not simply son of the Most High God, but is himself God. Perhaps this is what his people could not abide, perhaps this is what made them so frightened?
In any case, this depossessed disciple of Christ, one whom has been healed of the surrounding forces of empire within and without, is certainly a model for our lives in Christ, and in God.
Because like him, we will all later, return to our homes, our families and our communities. And from there, we are, like him to become an Icon of Christ’s healing love.
We are to declare in our City what Jesus has done – not in any evangelical creed based ‘turn or burn’ way at all – but simply, like this man, being in our right mind, freeing ourselves, with God’s help from the cultural forces that trap us in a half-life, we are to show ourselves as a disciple, as a student of the eternal through our body, through our many individual lives – as a testament to the One life God offers to all people, even those who are alone, or scorned, or isolated and possessed by the imperial and life negating forces of this world.
We are to do this even for those cannot take the next step, even for those who are afraid of the invitation of love and even for those who reject Christ and the divine from their lives. And we are to do this because Christ still loves. Amen.