Luke 8.26-39 (NRSV)

Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac

26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. ²⁷As 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. ²⁸When 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’— ²⁹for 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.) ³⁰Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. ³¹They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

³² 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. ³³Then 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.

³⁴ When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. ³⁵Then 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. ³⁶Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.³⁷Then 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. ³⁸The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but 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.

In verses 26-39 we see Jesus moving from the calming of the seas, to the calming of a deranged mind. No sooner had they arrived at the opposite shore than Jesus was confronted by a person who was possessed by a demon. The man called himself ‘Legion’, because he believed that he was possessed by many, many demons. The demons immediately recognised who Jesus was. They knew they were in for trouble, so they begged Jesus to spare them from total destruction. Jesus sent them into a herd of pigs which ran into the lake and drowned.

Many people have been perplexed by this. Why, they ask, did he not just destroy them and complete the task? One commentator suggests:

Because the time for such work had not yet come. He healed many people of the destructive work of demon possession, but he did not yet destroy demons. The same question could be asked today - why doesn't Jesus stop all the evil in the world? His time for that has not yet come. But it will come.

It is probably also true that there are no such beings as demons, and so it is more about needing to deal with the fact of human sin – and this remedy is much more difficult to implement. Perhaps, therefore, a more significant reason might be that the disciples and the people of the region needed to learn an important lesson. Christ is not the source of evil and suffering in the world - sin is - and the sin of the people who rebelled against the loss of their pigs, is graphically revealed in this incident.

Some suggest that Jesus had every right to destroy a herd of 2 000 pigs, because God owns everything. We are reminded of this fact in Psalm 50:10-11:

Every animal in the forest belongs to me, and so do the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds in the mountains, and every wild creature is in my care.

Because God owns everything, he has every right to do with it as he pleases. Nothing that we are and have belongs to us. We are merely entrusted with everything and, as stewards, we administer what belongs to the Lord. When we realise this - we are liberated from another sort of bondage - possession by our possessions. But this is only good theory. In practice this is a concern because we also know that God is love and that Jesus is the incarnation of God because he embodies this love. This being true, we know that God wants all suffering to end and it is almost insulting to God to just say that because everything is his, He can do what he likes with it. We know that what God wants is love and the end of suffering. We need to think more clearly about this and not allow simplistic answers to complex issues to tempt us away from the important task of wrestling with this.

The community should have thanked Jesus for delivering the man from his demon possession, no matter what it cost. But what was their response. Verse 37 explains: 'Everyone from around Gerasa begged Jesus to leave'. A commentator in the Life Application Bible writes:

People have always tended to value financial gain above needy people. ... People are continually being sacrificed to money. Don't think more highly of "pigs" than people. Think carefully about how your decisions will affect other human beings, and be willing to choose a simpler life-style if it would keep other people from being harmed.

The healed man, in obedience to Jesus, returned to the village and told others about what had happened to him. His insistence that he remain with Jesus might well have been motivated out of fear that he might fall prey to demons once more. We too, are often racked with insecurity, but like this man, if we are faithful to what Jesus calls us to do, we will be kept safe. As Miller (p. 93) states: 'Unless faith issues in obedient action it is no permanent safeguard against evil'.

Here again we are reminded that those who hear the word and keep it are the true citizens of the New Kingdom. Faith is the response through which one receives the benefits of being a citizen of the Kingdom of God. When people exercise their faith, it grows and one knows life in all its fullness. This theme was taken up by James in his letter (1.1-4) where we read:

My friends, be glad, even if you have a lot of trouble. You know that you learn to endure by having your faith tested. But you must learn to endure everything, so that you will be completely mature and not lacking in anything.

This too is often used as a simple answer to complex issues. It is easy to say ‘be glad’ from where we are sitting in our comfort and relative ease; I think we need to delve deeper and not be content with a simplistic understanding of this text either.

Caird suggests that Jesus is here calming a deranged mind – a disintegrated personality – and this is evidenced in the morbid preoccupation with graves, abnormal strength, insensitivity to pain, refusal to wear clothes and a multiple and fluctuating self – the man thinking that he was possessed by a whole regiment of demons. It may be that he was this way because of traumatic experiences associated with the Roman occupation. His cure came with a violent convulsion, which was so dramatic that it caused a herd of pigs to stampede in panic. Those observing all this made an association between unclean demons and unclean animals assuming that the ‘demons’ found a new unclean home and that this must have happened with the consent of Jesus.

This story is difficult to get to grips with, with a modern way of thinking, but it is helpful to remember that, at the time of Jesus, demons were very real to the people. Whatever was the cause, this man was so ill that he was considered a danger to others and forced to live away from society. His immense strength suggests that it was courageous of Jesus to go even near him. It would appear that everyone else was too afraid of him and so he was left to his own devices.

Barclay suggests that we have made too much of the matter of the pigs, especially those who feel inclined to condemn Jesus as being guilty of immoral cruelty. He too suggests that we need to remember the intensity of the contemporary belief in demons. It seems that the man was so ‘possessed’ by his illness that he would need a visible sign to prove to him that the demons had left his body – and the pigs served this purpose. It is almost as if Jesus was able to say to him: “Look your demons have gone!”(Barclay, p. 108) Barclay adds that the love of Jesus for this man required him to find some way to get through to him.

There is therefore the real sense that what angered the people more than anything was their loss of material wealth and that they cared more for their possessions than for this poor wretched man.

There is a disturbing modern parallel. A while back we heard of the tragic loss of life in the sweat shops in Bangladesh, where hundreds of people suffered to provide the west with cheap clothing. Is the west’s insistence on cheap food and clothing, when most of us can afford to pay much more for things, just the same? Profit seems to be valued above the value of human life. If we stand on the rights of the pigs in this story, and complain about what Jesus did, are we too not placing a higher value on things rather than people? The Gerasenes should have rejoiced that this poor soul was healed and saved, no matter what the cost.