Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26.39
In all the pages of the Bible, it’s hard to find a description of human misery more desperate than the man in today’s gospel: the awful method of restraint, the isolation, the agony of spirits overtaking him like a mob. You get a sense of how powerful his affliction is from his name. “Legion,” he says—a legion being a cohort of 5000 Roman soldiers. This man is overwhelmed, overcome, a military occupation of body and soul.
Nowadays we might describe his condition in clinical and scientific categories. But even people with diagnostic skills know that there are dark, agonizing powers that can’t be put into easy categories. And where this man lived, not a house but among tombs, would have made his misery worse. Ancient Jewish regulations considered anyone who had contact with a dead body unclean for seven days. They needed to be isolated from family and friends for a week. This was a practical, public health measure to reduce the risk of disease spreading. But for the man captive to dark powers, homeless in a graveyard day after day, he would’ve been chronically unclean, restoration always seven days out of reach—one more added, then another, estranged from the life he once knew. I wonder if, among the voices tormenting him, lines from Psalm 31 ever echoed in his mind. “I have become an object of scorn to my neighbors and of fear to my friends…I am forgotten like a dead man out of mind; I am as useless as a broken pot.”
Yet that very psalm, Psalm 31, also trusts God as it laments. In and through desperate circumstances, Psalm 31 knows there is a source of well-being and life. At the very same time that sorrow, scorn, and fear are all laid out before God the psalmist says, “I trust in you, O Lord. My life is in your hands…Save me in your merciful love.” Psalm 31 is turned toward God, even in lament; and, even in lament, knows that God is for us.
In today’s gospel, through the window of the account of Jesus’ healing someone tormented, isolated, and in deep need, we see the larger picture of a God who never abandons anyone, no matter how desperate their circumstances and lives. No one is forgotten by God, no one beyond God’s care. Through this window we see the larger picture of how sin and suffering, evil and death—all the powers that threaten to overwhelm and overtake us—are dealt with in God, Legions both literal and spiritual.
This Legion of spirits afflicting the man knows who Jesus is. They call him “Son of the Most High.” That’s the very name the angel announcing Jesus’ conception to Mary called him, too. “He will be great…Son of the Most High.” The title affirms Jesus’ transcendence, his might and power over all rival powers. And just as God showed might in the Old Testament by delivering the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and drowning Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, Jesus shows mercy and might by delivering this person from an army of spirits and drowning them the Sea of Galilee. God’s deliverance of people is a consistent theme from Old Testament to New. Each of Jesus’ healing miracles is a signpost that points to a world where all people might receive rescue, healing, and new life—receive salvation now and fully in the age to come.
And for us and our need for rescue and healing? Take, for example, the need for forgiveness for the wrongs you’ve done or the good you’ve failed to do. Whether it’s in thought, word, or deed, we have an enormous capacity not only to do things that fall short of God’s desires. And, somehow, those things manage to get recorded in our memory and set on perpetual playback in our mind. The voice is seldom silent: sometimes it’s like a scream; other times a whisper; but it haunts and comes back. When it speaks it has no mercy but accuses. ‘How could I have done this? Why do I keep doing this? Can God forgive me?’ ‘Torment’ may be too strong a word, but not by much. Sometimes well-meaning people offer advice about letting go of your past and moving on with your life. Easier said than done. You can Google advice on ‘12 Ways to Forgive Yourself’ but find that by tip 11, your faults and failings cling to you like clothes on a humid day.
That is only one example. There are other things that we find we don’t have the power within ourselves to shed or change: distrust of others, how quickly we get angry, regrets, envy, indifference, or how quickly fear and anxiety can grip us, possess us, and not let us go.
The gospel account of Jesus’ healing a person tormented, isolated, and in deep need tells of the larger picture of a God who never abandons anyone—God’s care for you no matter how deep your need. That’s one of the reasons to come to worship week in and week out: to take our lives as we hold them and place them in the hand of Jesus as he holds us.
It’s a well-placed trust. Because even Jesus knows what it is like to entrust his life to the hand of God the Father. At the climax of the entire gospel story, Jesus himself looks very much like the man he meets in today’s gospel account. On the cross, Jesus himself is stripped of his clothes, crucified on a hill outside Jerusalem, abandoned, then left among the tombs. Jesus, Son of the Most High, doesn’t keep a high distance from us. He shares the plight of the people he loves. “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” The work of God in Jesus is not merely for one person in today’s text alone but reaches out to all people, to you, and to the whole world. No one is beyond God’s care. Jesus will never stop coming to you for your restoration, life, and your well-being.
After Jesus restores and heals the man in the gospel, the crowds find him “sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind.” A number of biblical commentators make a connection between the description of this man ‘clothed’ with something that St Paul says in today’s second reading about each of us as Jesus’ followers. “As many of you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself in Christ.”
Clothed in Christ, through faith in Christ, we have a peace that nothing else can give. Baptized in Christ, your life belongs to Christ. You are saved and delivered by God’s merciful love. Like God drowning Pharaoh and his armies in the waters of the Red Sea, like Jesus in the gospel drowning the mob of spirits in the Sea of Galilee, Jesus takes all human sin with him into the waters of baptism for our life and restoration. “I believe in one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” we say each week in the Creed. The faults and failings that cling to you, and the thing you cannot manage shed on your own and wish were different, have been dealt with by Christ who comes to you. So, too, your fears and anxieties. You can, as 1st Peter says, “Throw the full weight of your anxieties upon God, for you are his personal concern.” Baptism clothes us in Christ. The sacrament of water and word is the real presence of our life made new in God.
At the end of today’s gospel, Jesus says to the person healed, “Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.” But did you notice that the Gospel of Luke says that the person restored went and proclaimed, “how much Jesus had done for him.” To the person who is healed, God and Jesus are one and the same. The Gospel of Luke wants us to know and trust the same thing. Through the window of today’s gospel reading, we see the larger picture of a God who never abandons anyone; Jesus’ gift of healing is for you no matter how deep your need. Now restored by his renewing and healing grace, Jesus makes each of us—individually, and us together as a congregation—a living witness to a world where all people might receive rescue, healing, and new life in him.
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