Go somewhere else! 15/03/2022

Read Mark 5:1-20

[Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash.]

Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region. [Mark 5:17]

What had Jesus done to make these people want him to leave the area? The short answer is that Jesus had completely transformed the life of an individual who was a menace to himself and to his society. In the region of the Gerasenes (or Gadara) there was this poor individual who was demon possessed. He resided in the cemetery among the graves. He was not able to live in the local community because he posed a threat to the lives of others. They had tried to chain him but he had amazing strength and, every time he was bound with chains, he had broken free. They had put iron clamps on his feet but he had broken them as well. He was a well-known but much-feared figure of a man who went around the hillside uttering loud cries of despair and he was constantly self-harming by cutting himself with stones. He was a pathetic individual. You would not want him for a neighbour, however.

That is, until the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. This man recognised that Jesus was the Son of God and he shouted loudly to Jesus, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?" He was aware that Jesus was the Son of God but he had not been used to anyone being able to help him or to alleviate his suffering. And so, he begged Jesus not to torture him. This was a misunderstanding of the nature of the Son of God. But this is a mistake made by many in the centuries since this incident. They imagine that Jesus will bring problems into their lives. They imagine that Jesus will harm them and make life worse for them. This was a big mistake he was making. He was being visited by one who had the power to make his life unimaginably better. Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the helpless man but he imagined that Jesus would simply replace one oppressive presence with another. His life was so bad that he could not imagine that it would ever get any better. He imagined that Jesus would simply replace the evil spirits and would make things worse not better.

It is interesting to note some of the details of this miracle. There is a discussion about what is to happen to the evil spirits. They did not want to be driven from the area and they begged Jesus to allow them to possess the pigs. Whenever Jesus granted the spirits their wish, there was a disastrous consequence for the pigs. They ran down the steep bank and fell over the cliff into the lake and they were drowned. There were around 2,000 pigs and they represented a considerable sum of money for their owners. The herdsmen of the pigs went into the town and reported the incident but they majored on the loss of the pigs. They did not mention the transformation in the life of Legion, the man who had been in the grip of these evil spirits. And so the people came to Jesus and they pleaded with Him to leave the area.

I find this sad and strange. They obviously did not place a high premium on the welfare of this individual. He was described as 'sitting there, dressed and in his right mind.' This tormented individual had found personal peace from the Son of God and it transformed his whole demeanour and behaviour. It says that the people who witnessed this incident were afraid and that might explain why they begged Jesus to leave their area. People are often uncomfortable with the evidence of conversion. A cousin of mine was converted in his late teens and his girlfriend's parents were unhappy with this new young man who was living a clean life. They preferred the former sin-loving, careless guy to this Bible basher. It was the end of his relationship with that girlfriend.

There seems to have been a mixture of motives on the part of the inhabitants of this area. The financial loss of the pigs was clearly part of their thinking. The Jews did not keep pigs so there may have been Gentiles living in this area. For the owners of the pigs, this was a substantial loss and may have meant the end of their livelihood. But what is more important - people or possessions? In Gadara, clearly the pigs mattered more than this tortured individual. Many people feel that they do not matter at all in our society. It is all about progress and efficiency and people are just commodities. Before I retired, I was invited to a large meeting in the headquarters where we were told about the change agenda which was going to be introduced. The emphasis was on efficiency. It was implied that we were not being efficient and the Council needed to become more efficient - which meant that a large percentage of the workforce would retire early or become redundant.

In the world, we are just a number. There is a poem by W.H. Auden called "The Unknown Citizen" and the poet makes that very point [https://poets.org/poem/unknown-citizen]. Wherever you go in the postmodern world, your identity is a long number. We have ceased from being an individual with feelings, longings and personality and have become a nameless statistic. This is becoming too political and so I will get back to the lesson from Mark's Gospel. Jesus cared for this messed up individual even though nobody else did. This is a comfort to me and hopefully to you today. Jesus cared so much for the crazy guy in the area of the Gesarenes that he crossed a lake and endured a storm in order to meet him and to deliver him from his bondage to the evil spirits. He was prepared to see 2,000 pigs drowning in the lake in order to deliver him from his lifetime of misery.

When I was preparing this blog, I was reminded of a reaction to the building of a mental health facility fairly near us in our last home. This provoked a great protest from the neighbours and the local people as the rumour was spread that this was a 'paedophiles' palace.' We had a visit from a neighbour who asked Janie and me to sign a petition to oppose the building of this facility. We both refused to sign and we tried to make the point that this building was to meet a specific need in the local area and to deal with the many people who suffered from mental illness such as depression. Because they had such an illness, this did not make them bad people. The people of Gadara or the Gesarenes did not care for Legion but as long as he was in the isolated area of the graveyard, he was not posing as a threat to their comfortable way of life. They call this mindset NIMBY - "Not in My Back Yard." They were treating Jesus as a nuisance too - "Go to another area. Anywhere as long as it is far away from here."