Legion
Luke 8:26-39
Click here for the video: Legion
It turns out that the storm was only the beginning of what was in store for them. Our reading this morning comes from a sequence in the Jesus story, as it’s told by Luke, in which Jesus and those following him cross the lake. It happens just like that. Jesus hops in one of their boats and says, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” It isn’t a whim. It isn’t goof. It seems to be informed by an encounter he had in which his mother and brothers show up to one of the places he’s been teaching around Galilee. They can’t get through the crowd of people listening to him and someone tells him that they’re just outside and they want to see him. His response is to observe that his mother and brother, effectively his family, isn’t defined by blood, or DNA, or convention. No, Jesus says that family is anyone who hears God’s word and does it. Then he hops in their boat and talks about going to the other side of the lake.
Well, the other side of the lake was more than a day trip across the water. To go to the other side meant leaving the safe, comfortable, known world of the Galilean fishing communities that made up Jesus’ backyard and entering what in many ways was a whole new world.
A little over ten years ago, I had the chance to travel to Israel as part of a pilgrimage group made up of pastors from a variety of traditions. The first week of our two-week pilgrimage was spent on the banks of the same lake that Jesus wanted to cross. It’s called the Sea of Galilee, but it’s really a freshwater lake. Anyway, on the afternoon that we arrived, we could hear the thumping bass notes of music being played across the lake. The music, we were told was coming from the Golan Heights, a disputed territory between the modern nation states of Israel and Syria. It didn’t look that far across the lake, but it seemed like a world away from the safety of our villa. While time marches on, not all that much has changed in that respect since Jesus’ days on the lake.
Back then the region across the lake was known as the Decapolis, home to ten Greek cities that were decidedly far less Jewish than the hills around Capernaum. Like he still does today with those who would follow him, when Jesus suggested that they go to the other side of the lake, he was encouraging them to leave their comfort zone, to cross not just some body of water but the wide expanse that often separates us from them. To go across to the other side means going from a world that is relatively small and self-contained, one where we know the rules and what to expect, to a world that is much larger; one where we may not speak the language, where the customs are different and the food is strange, and we can’t always get our bearings. And if to make the point that taking that journey across to the other side, taking that journey from the known to the unknown isn’t always easy, they run into a storm that at one point threatens to swamp their boat. But it turns out that the storm was only the beginning of what was in store for them.
That’s because no sooner do they reach the shore safely and step foot onto this foreign land, than they are met by a man who has a demon. But it isn’t any old demon. And here is where Luke takes a little liberty with historic timelines and his Jesus story to make a much larger point. Many of the stories written about Jesus- who he was, what he taught, how he was crucified by Rome and resurrected by God- were written in the shadow of a much larger historic event, the great Jewish Revolt against Rome from 66-70 CE, some thirty to forty years after Jesus’ own death and resurrection. Much of what we know today about that event, which ultimately led to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, we know because of the great historian Josephus. One of the events that Josephus records took place, where else, but Gerasa. It was at Gerasa that the Romans attacked the Jewish minority of that region, killing a thousand of their young men, taking captive their women and children before plundering their homes and setting fire to their village. To the followers of Jesus in that boat, all of that lies in the distant future. But to those hearing this story for the first time, to the people hearing this story from Luke, it is recent history. So, when they come ashore at the country of the Gerasenes, a place as Luke reminds us that is both geographically and otherwise opposite of Galilee, and are met by a man with a demon, it is a foreshadow of what is to come. For those in the boat, it only confirms their worst suspicions, maybe it even reinforced the instinct they had to stay put on their own side of the lake where it was safe.
That’s the difference between most of us and Jesus. We hear a story like the one Josephus tells, we hear about a place where something terrible might have happened, a place that sounds dangerous and scary and we have the good sense to leave well enough alone. But Jesus does not. Friends, it has to be said, following Jesus isn’t safe. Because for Jesus, his mother and his brothers, his family, the group of people to which he feels he belongs and is connected to isn’t defined by any of the conventional categories of his day, or our day for that matter. It isn’t defined by blood lines, or religious categories, or racial differences, or ethnicities. It isn’t bound by social class, or convention- where you grew up, or who you did or didn’t go to school with, or how you made a living. For Jesus, who we call our own isn’t really defined by us at all. Who we call our own is determined by what God says, who hears it and how they respond. The very first thing Jesus encounters when he steps out of that boat is someone who needs to hear what God has to say, someone who is being held captive and has been cast out, literally left for dead among the tombs. The first person Jesus encounters is a haunted man, living in a haunted place. He is a stand-in really, for any one of us living with the trauma of something they just can’t shake, living with the memory of a wound that won’t seem to heal.
Because when he asks the demon’s name, it says, “Legion.” Now on the one hand that only signals the connection between this story and the massacre to come at Gerasa. Legion is a military term for a company of soldiers. Legion were the Romans who laid waste to the people of Gerasa. Legion were the armies of the empire who had occupied the land, taxed the people living there into desperate poverty, and terrorized them with their public crucifixions. But Legion too are the demons that continue to haunt us, that break the constraints of polite society, that isolate us from the land of the living. Legion are the addictions that enslave us, the prejudices that bind us, the fears that paralyze us, and the insecurities that enrage us.
The only thing more frightening than that demonic legion is someone who has been set free from all of that. The only thing more frightening than the trauma we’re living with and have grown used to carrying around, is the prospect of living without it, because too often that’s the thing that has come to define us. Without it we no longer know who we are. Jesus casts that Legion out. Vanquishes them to the sea, and when the people of the surrounding city and countryside hear about it they come out to see what has happened only to find the person everyone knew as “crazy,” sitting with Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. What do you do with that? What do you do when you are no longer defined by what afflicts you? Or, conversely, what do you do when the person you’ve always thought of in terms of their affliction can no longer be thought of, and talked about, and treated in that way? What do you do when Jesus shows up and suddenly all bets are off?
It turns out that what you may have to do is decide if you really want to be free, or if you simply want to escape. There are plenty of people who opt for the second option. People escape in all kinds of ways. They escape with people who will continue to tell them all the things they want to hear on their own side of the lake. Or they escape into historic revisions that deny both the past and the pain that past holds. They even escape into religion that makes them so heavenly minded they are of no earthly good. The man himself would have escaped if he could have, if Jesus had let him. He begs to go with them, climb in that boat with Jesus and leave this haunted place with his frightened neighbors behind. Only that isn’t what faith is for. That isn’t what the healing that comes from faith does. It isn’t some private escape; a personal improvement project that allows us to opt out of everything else going on in the world. Faith is not an escape from a world of pain. Faith is the freedom that comes from trusting that we no longer have to be defined by all that pain, controlled by that pain, possessed by that pain. We are freed from it so that we can declare to those who think they know us just what God has done; transforming all of the hurts and traumas that would isolate us with a word that speaks peace, forgiveness and love. A word that, if we will hear it, sets us free to call each other family. Alleluia, amen.