“For freedom Christ has set us free.”[i]  That statement is from a letter the apostle Paul wrote to a group of churches in an area called Galatia.  Today that region is part of Turkey, but in Paul’s time Galatia was a province of the Roman Empire, and so Paul was writing to a non-Jewish, or Gentile, group of Christians.  Listen to how he began:

To the churches of Galatia:  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever.  Amen.[ii]

From start to finish, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a declaration of freedom — a declaration of the freedom Christ has acquired for you and for me and for anyone else who is willing to accept that freedom and live it.  “For freedom Christ has set us free.”  Paul follows that statement with this directive:  “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

That directive is important for us to remember as we continue on the journey we are taking through the Gospel of Mark, stopping to consider some of the challenging questions we hear Jesus ask along the way.  The questions that Jesus asked, and the circumstances in which he asked them, called for the people around him to focus upon just who Jesus was and what power and authority he might have.  Did he have the power and authority to forgive sin?  Did he have the power and authority to eliminate or modify a commandment from God?  Did he have the power and authority to halt a storm or calm an ocean, to control what appears to us to be utter chaos and beyond control?  Today we are adding another concern:  Did Jesus have the power and authority to liberate people from whatever was keeping them enslaved?  Even the people who were closest to Jesus — the men and women who were right there with him as he traveled the countryside preaching and healing and explaining the nature of God — even the people who were closest to Jesus were unable to answer these kinds of questions.  They could not fathom who Jesus was, what he was capable of doing, what his presence might mean for the world — or how they should respond.

When we left off this past Sunday, Jesus was out in a boat with his disciples.  At Jesus’ direction, several boatloads of people were traveling across the Sea of Galilee.  Along the way they encountered a violent storm, and Jesus quelled it by rebuking the wind and telling the sea, “Peace!  Be still!”[iii]  This left Jesus’ followers filled with fear and asking one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”[iv] That brings us, now, to our Second Lesson:

They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes.  And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him.  He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain, for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him.  Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.  When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”  For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”  Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”  He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”  He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.  Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.”  So he gave them permission.  And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.  The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country.  Then people came to see what it was that had happened.  They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid.  Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it.  Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood.  As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him.  But Jesus refused, and said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.”  And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

You know what this story is, don’t you?  This is the first reported case of deviled ham.[v]  Once we are through groaning at that, we do need to say what this story is not.  This is not a story about Jesus’ ability to send demons into a herd of pigs.  It is not even — or at least not merely — a story about Jesus’ ability to perform an exorcism, to oust a demon from within a man.  If that was all this story amounted to, it would be no more memorable than all of the other exorcism stories of Jesus’ day.  The Bible and other writings from the time tell us that there were other people, such as the Pharisees, who could exorcize demons.[vi]  Scripture generally treats exorcism in a fairly matter-of-fact manner, but not this episode.  And, to understand why this particular exorcism merits special attention, we need to spend some time picking this story apart.

We begin by remembering where this event took place.  Jesus had just brought his followers across the Sea of Galilee, out of their home territory and into a region ruled by Rome and populated primarily by people of Greek ancestry.  The cities of this area had Roman-built pagan temples, and the residents engaged in the imperial cult, which meant they worshiped as a god whoever the Roman emperor was at the time.  Jesus had been having a hard enough time dealing with his fellow Jews back on his own side of the Sea of Galilee, and now he was looking to engage this very foreign audience.  It did not take long for him to encounter trouble.  When Jesus set foot on shore, he was met by a man whose behavior was so frightening and bizarre that folks had tried to restrain him with shackles and chains.  But this man escaped from everything they used.  “No one,” we read, “had the strength to subdue him.” 

You and I can recognize, here, a man who posed a danger not only to other people but also to himself, and that leads us to say, “What else would we expect his relatives and the town authorities to do, but to do their best to confine this man and hold him down?”  But while we are recognizing the very sad dilemma this man’s conduct posed, let us also recognize something else.  Let us also recognize in this story the instruments and marks of slavery — shackles and chains — indicative of all that might imprison and confine and prevent a person from engaging in a fulfilling life.

The instruments and marks of slavery can be actual shackles and chains, as they were for this man.  But, they also can be made up of the circumstances and conditions of our lives, circumstances and conditions that other people might not recognize or see.  That we, ourselves, might not recognize or see.  Each year during our New Year’s Eve Watch Night service we talk about some of our invisible shackles and chains.  We talk about the negative situations we place ourselves in, or fail to remove ourselves from.  About the many ways we sidestep and ignore the call of Christ and allow ourselves to wander away from his path.  We talk about the ignorance we maintain and the bad habits we nurture, instead of nurturing our relationship with God.  About how stubbornly we cling to the attitudes of “I can’t” and “they won’t” and “what difference will it make,” attitudes that keep us embedded in the mire.  We carry on this conversation not to scold ourselves, not to punish ourselves with the knowledge of what has been holding us back, but to reassure each other that we do not have to remain within our personal shackles and chains.  To help us recall that freedom is available, that all it takes for us to enjoy freedom is for us to grab hold of the promise that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away . . . !”[vii]

Why should that be so hard?  Why does it sometimes prove impossible for you and me to believe that Christ will give us new life?  Why is it so difficult for us to accept the freedom that Christ offers?  Perhaps we do not believe that we deserve to be set free.  In Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol, the sorrowful ghost of Jacob Marley tells Scrooge, “I wear the chain I forged in life. . . .  I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”  Jacob Marley is telling Scrooge that it was his own actions and failures to act that formed every link in the enormous chain that he now drags around.  But Marley also is telling Scrooge that he took on that punishing chain of his “own free will.”  No one forced him to take on such a burden.  Perhaps it was time for him to put it down.

Another reason some of us do not accept the freedom that Christ offers is that we do not recognize that freedom as desirable or good.  That was the case for the people who came out to see what had happened with the demoniac and the herd of pigs.  We read that “they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood.”  Jesus offered them healing and wholeness and the kingdom of God, but all they could see was the loss of some pigs.  They preferred the status quo, they preferred things as they were, they preferred going on with their lives as they always had done — even if that meant sending the only true source of healing and hope back across the sea.  Don’t ask us to give anything up God, don’t ask us to trust you to put something wonderful in its place.  Don’t ask us to change, God, don’t ask us to have faith that the new creation you will make of us is better than the old self you will cause to pass away.

The question Jesus asked that day was, “What is your name?”  He was speaking to the part of that man that was broken and in pain, he was talking directly to the illness or deprivation or cruel life history that was holding that man back from enjoying the life for which God had created him.  How many reasons were there for this man’s life of shackles and chains and self-mutilation?  Thousands.  As many as there were soldiers in a legion of the Roman army.  And, throughout this story we never learn the name of this man.  He is called only “the demoniac,” identified only by his affliction.  We have such people today.  There is the alcoholic, the battered wife.  The mental patient, the homeless guy, the prostitute, the starving child.  Otherwise nameless people whom we all too easily sweep aside and overlook.  Just as tragic:  identities we sometimes adopt for ourselves and cannot seem to live beyond.

What is your name?  You do have one, you know.  Hear the assurance God has given you through the prophet Isaiah:  “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”[viii]  Take from Psalm 139 the knowledge that there is no place you can go, no depth to which you can descend, where you are beyond God’s presence, beyond God’s love.  If you say, “surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to God.  For it was God who formed your inward parts, God who knit you together in your mother’s womb.  God’s eyes beheld your unformed substance, and God’s eyes behold you now.[ix]  And in the fullness of time God sent his son into the world so that you might receive adoption as God’s own child.  “So you are no longer a slave, but a child, and if a child, then also an heir”[x] of all the glory and freedom enjoyed by Christ.  Amen.

Copyright 2008 © Leslie R. Stacks. All rights reserved.