Jesus Sends a Man's Demons into a Herd of Swine (Luke 8.26-39)

26Jesus and his disciples 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. 32Now 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. 34When 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.

There is a relentless pace to the stories in the gospels. The disciples and Jesus have only just sailed across the lake where they faced a ferocious storm that nearly drowned them. Jesus calms the storm and for the rest of the night the disciples are quiet – ‘who is this man that even the winds and the storms obey him? (Mark 4:35-41). The lake is about 7 miles wide (13km) at its widest point. By early morning they have reached the other side. Jesus steps ashore and, all of a sudden a wild man, totally naked, comes running towards him screaming at the top of his voice. In contemporary parlance it is a mental health issue. Today his seizures would be controlled either by drugs, through an operation, or else he would be hospitalised. Here there are no drugs to sedate him and no mental homes to confine him. A guard and chains was all that was available in the 1st century and that was considered to be humane. The townsmen have been trying to keep him from hurting himself and terrorising his community. However the chains have not succeeded in keeping him in check and here he comes to confront Jesus. The man appears to know who Jesus is and he calls out to him. Jesus responds in kind and asks the man for his name. Name exchanging establishes an immediate intimacy between the two of them. It sets the stage for an interaction that will see Legion being raw, vulnerable and needy and Jesus being equal to what is asked of him.When he calls himself Legion he is telling Jesus that there are a lot of different voices in his head. A Roman legion consisted of between 3,000 and 6,000 foot-soldiers all supported by cavalry. On a normal day when things are going well and nothing is particularly wrong we all have different thoughts and ideas competing for our attention. For people who struggle with fear, anxiety, worry or depression this will be magnified many times over. You can have a glimpse of what it was like to be Legion if you imagine being bombarded by some memory, or sin, or habit, or thought: there are so many thousands of them that at times you find it hard to cope. Counsellors have specific training to help them for when they meet the Legions within society. Someone will sit on each side of the person being trained. They will then whisper negative, derogatory and dismissive thoughts into each ear; they will then debrief the person asking him how he felt with these different voices in his head.The confusion in Legion’s head is palpable. The story starts with him as the demoniac presented as less than human, wearing no clothes, living in the tombs and driven into the wilderness. At the end of the story he is humanised, wearing clothes, in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus and then returning home. There are two miracles involved in this story. There is the medical cure and the social restoration. Jesus cures the physical and cerebral disability; he then tells Legion to return to his community. For years Legion has been displaced from his community and alienated from his home and city. He has been a bizarre feature in the community for years. His self-destructive behaviour and his tremendous strength are legendary. His family had been both disgraced and pitied since this happened. It would only have been half a miracle had Jesus cured him and then allowed him to walk away without working through the issues involved in re-finding his place within the community. It is not as easy as Jesus clicking his fingers and seeing things happen. The town’s people ask him to leave. They are fearful at what has happened to Legion and they are angry at the loss of their herd. Pork was the food of the Roman occupiers and so it may be that the pigs that drowned belonged to the army but were tended by the local inhabitants. This would mean that the economic loss was not as great as it might have otherwise been. The Jews saw pigs as unclean animals and they did not eat pork. However, the Romans that occupied Palestine had used preserved pork – especially bacon – as a survival food for generations. Thus it was that pigs were raised in Palestine for the Romans.It is not easy for Legion because he can be cured without being healed. He would still need to pick up on his old life and relearn the skills of socialisation. He shies away from doing this and asks Jesus if he can go with him. Jesus sends him back to the two to pick up on (what was described to me as) ‘the burden of normality’. Any mental, emotional disability of the type described in this passage will have given Legion wild, exciting dramatic and insightful ways of looking at the world – in his case this has been all to much for him and he has been driven into madness. However, the fits were a part of who he was and curing the madness would change everything about who he was in the world.It is the same dilemma faced by Bartimaeus, the blind man who used to beg by the gates of Jerusalem. He had made a life for himself being blind and had learned to expect no other. When he hears that Jesus (who can heal him) is walking past, he needs to make a choice. If he shouted out to Jesus to come and heal him, then all his coping mechanisms, his way of relating to the world and his distinctive identity would be shattered. Once he admits that he wants to be healed then he changes his life completely. In another occasion Jesus asked a cripple by the pool of Bethsaida whether he wanted to be healed. It is not as strange a question as it may sound – Jesus wants to know whether he has got the energy, faith and self-possession to face up to what will be needed in turning a cure into a healing. Bartimaeus, Legion, the cripple by the pool of Bethsaida all face up to the healing reality of Jesus. The decisions they take about how to respond will affect the rest of their lives. Do they have the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual faith to take what is on offer? Alternately are they locked in to their one way of relating to the world and do not have the insight or prescience to respond? It is a question that I have to face, in my own way, now that I have been offered the possibility of brain surgery to treat my epilepsy. I do not simply have epilepsy! I am epileptic! I live with it by being a part of it; it has become something of who I am and how I relate to the world. I have been told that medication will never properly control my seizures – ‘that is fine; that is my world. Walk with me, laugh with me but don’t ever pity me because that is who I am. I never think of a life without epilepsy. That is until now that I have been told that I should consider an operation. All of a sudden a cure is within my fingertips but do I want it? It will change everything about who I am.This thin, fine, precise challenge is the same as is faced by any of us. When we pray for something, the truly frightening thing is not that God will not hear our prayers; it is that our prayers will be heard and answered. It takes courage to open up to God for help, healing and guidance. If you admit that you need help then you always feel more vulnerable and worse off than you did immediately before. Things may be harder before they become easier but be careful what you pray for because you will get it