A change of influence - Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
In my teenage years, I attended a school whose headteacher was also a Methodist local preacher. During one of his lessons, he told us of the time when he arrived to take a service at a small country church. The service began with six people present in the congregation. Within five minutes, he had caused sufficient offence for that number to drop to three!
I guess he hadn’t imbibed the message of Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to win friends and influence people.” Perhaps like me, he was more in touch with the sort of attitudes that led, Guardian journlaist, Toby Young to recently write his cracking good book, “How to lose friends and alienate people.”
Well in today’s Scripture reading, Jesus turns out not to be exactly a model for pleasing the masses. He is somewhere in the area known as Decapolis which was a predominantly non Jewish area to the southeast of the Lake of Galilee. If he had gone there looking for a quiet time, he certainly did not find it. For on his arrival we find him meeting what is described as a “demon-possessed man.” Now as to what exactly was wrong with this man, we cannot be sure. Certainly he was in a highly disturbed state. We are told that he wandered naked around the tombs and what today we would see as brutal efforts to restrain him had failed. He was in quite a mess!
And now seeing Jesus, this out of control man living an out of control life, is straining at the leash for conflict. Hear that tormented cry:
“What do you want with me, Jesus Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!”
Words that give clues to a history of suffering and the denial of humanity.
But now there comes a change to his life. Long seen as one not worth spending the time of day with, he is spoken to by Jesus as a real person. Jesus asks him a simple question;
“What is your name?”
It’s such an ordinary question but the answer offered by this man is so revealing;
“Legion.”
But Legion is not a name. At that time it meant a unit of 6,000 Roman soldiers with four such legions being stationed in nearby Syrian to control the eastern frontier that included Palestine. So what does this mean? A real possibility is that this man has acquired a multitude of personalities. To me this brings back memories of being a support worker in Cornwall. One of the clients, I spent time with, had such a condition. Alone in a room, he would produce at times varying voices involved in heated arguments with each other. More than once, hearing the sound of argument, I rushed in so that I could help calm down the argument, only to find just this one man to all intents and purposes angrily shouting at himself. It is believe you me quite a disturbing condition to witness.
But “Legion” as a name could well tell us something as to what had produced the man’s condition. Roman military occupation was harsh. It had to be or they would have been overthrown. However at times it went way down the road of depravity as Josephus demonstrates in this account of the Romans putting down the Jewish rebellion less that 40 years later;
“Vesaspian sent Lucius Annius to Gerasa with a cavalry and a considerable number of foot soldiers. After taking the town by assault, he killed a thousand of the young men who had not escaped, took their families captive, and allowed his soldiers to plunder the property. Finally, he set fire to the houses and marched against the surrounding villages. Those who were able-bodied fled, the weak perished, and all that was left went up in flames.”
And so, one can not help wondering if the man’s condition was a result of things he had participated in, witnessed or been the victim of. For encounters with violence and its attendant cruelties and suffering, are things that can poison the human soul. Only in the past week, as the Falklands War has been commemorated, we have been reminded that more of our servicemen have died by their own hand since that war than were killed within it - surely something for leaders to recall before taking decisions for war!
Back to Luke’s narrative. We find Jesus bring healing to this man by sending the demons into the nearby pigs. Why it happened this way is not clear. Some commentators point out that the wild boar was the symbol of a nearby legion. And so as the swine go over the cliffs to destruction, there might be within this narrative a message that powerful as the Roman occupation was, ultimately, its power would dwindle to nothing in the encounter with God. A political reading you might suggest in this age in which we tend to separate religion from politics yet so often we find in the deeds and words of Jesus, powerful messages about the political matters of his day.
Still now we might expect a happy ending. The disturbed man is grateful and would like to go with Jesus. But all is not calm. The nearby community, once frightened of the disturbed man, now feel a fear at what Jesus has done and they demand that Jesus should go away. Why they fear we are not told. It may be that they see Jesus as a threat to the predictability of their lives. They do not want their world to be turned upside down. It may be because in the destruction of their pigs, they have suffered great financial and economic loss. Is it not often the case as those who fought two centuries ago against the transatlantic slave trade found, set yourself against the local economic base and you will face rejection. You know, today as in the past, we are prone to an idolatrous worship of all wealth creating activity. Maybe, we need to distinguish between the economic activity that is life enhancing and that which is destructive to life or to peoples’ wellbeing. Not a few sectors of the British economy could do with a culling!
Finally, what does this episode tell us about the ways of Jesus. Well, Jesus crosses boundaries. He steps outside of traditional Israel and goes here to man whose lifestyle amongst the tombs made him ritually unclean. He does this to show us that he is for all people and not just for some. His love is for all including those most tormented for whereas as to often we dehumanise people, Jesus sees the worth of humanity in all people and desires that this humanity might be fully treasured.
Jesus offers challenge. He is not prepared to accept a life denying status quo. Instead he calls people to follow him the restoration of lost and marred humanity. And in that goal, he seeks to draw each of to be a part of his ever increasing cycles of love and grace. For when our Scripture Reading comes to a close, who do we find telling people the good news of Jesus but “Legion” himself. For Legion has been liberated from the powers that had possessed him. But liberating someone from something is not enough. As political history reminds us, too often people are liberated from one oppression merely to be placed under another form of oppression. The liberation of Jesus is so much more than that. Like Legion, we are offered the liberation of Jesus for a purpose - to be free people with the potential to bring the hope of God’s new community of love and grace.
This sermon is being preached at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday June 24th 2007 a
I guess he hadn’t imbibed the message of Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to win friends and influence people.” Perhaps like me, he was more in touch with the sort of attitudes that led, Guardian journlaist, Toby Young to recently write his cracking good book, “How to lose friends and alienate people.”
Well in today’s Scripture reading, Jesus turns out not to be exactly a model for pleasing the masses. He is somewhere in the area known as Decapolis which was a predominantly non Jewish area to the southeast of the Lake of Galilee. If he had gone there looking for a quiet time, he certainly did not find it. For on his arrival we find him meeting what is described as a “demon-possessed man.” Now as to what exactly was wrong with this man, we cannot be sure. Certainly he was in a highly disturbed state. We are told that he wandered naked around the tombs and what today we would see as brutal efforts to restrain him had failed. He was in quite a mess!
And now seeing Jesus, this out of control man living an out of control life, is straining at the leash for conflict. Hear that tormented cry:
“What do you want with me, Jesus Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!”
Words that give clues to a history of suffering and the denial of humanity.
But now there comes a change to his life. Long seen as one not worth spending the time of day with, he is spoken to by Jesus as a real person. Jesus asks him a simple question;
“What is your name?”
It’s such an ordinary question but the answer offered by this man is so revealing;
“Legion.”
But Legion is not a name. At that time it meant a unit of 6,000 Roman soldiers with four such legions being stationed in nearby Syrian to control the eastern frontier that included Palestine. So what does this mean? A real possibility is that this man has acquired a multitude of personalities. To me this brings back memories of being a support worker in Cornwall. One of the clients, I spent time with, had such a condition. Alone in a room, he would produce at times varying voices involved in heated arguments with each other. More than once, hearing the sound of argument, I rushed in so that I could help calm down the argument, only to find just this one man to all intents and purposes angrily shouting at himself. It is believe you me quite a disturbing condition to witness.
But “Legion” as a name could well tell us something as to what had produced the man’s condition. Roman military occupation was harsh. It had to be or they would have been overthrown. However at times it went way down the road of depravity as Josephus demonstrates in this account of the Romans putting down the Jewish rebellion less that 40 years later;
“Vesaspian sent Lucius Annius to Gerasa with a cavalry and a considerable number of foot soldiers. After taking the town by assault, he killed a thousand of the young men who had not escaped, took their families captive, and allowed his soldiers to plunder the property. Finally, he set fire to the houses and marched against the surrounding villages. Those who were able-bodied fled, the weak perished, and all that was left went up in flames.”
And so, one can not help wondering if the man’s condition was a result of things he had participated in, witnessed or been the victim of. For encounters with violence and its attendant cruelties and suffering, are things that can poison the human soul. Only in the past week, as the Falklands War has been commemorated, we have been reminded that more of our servicemen have died by their own hand since that war than were killed within it - surely something for leaders to recall before taking decisions for war!
Back to Luke’s narrative. We find Jesus bring healing to this man by sending the demons into the nearby pigs. Why it happened this way is not clear. Some commentators point out that the wild boar was the symbol of a nearby legion. And so as the swine go over the cliffs to destruction, there might be within this narrative a message that powerful as the Roman occupation was, ultimately, its power would dwindle to nothing in the encounter with God. A political reading you might suggest in this age in which we tend to separate religion from politics yet so often we find in the deeds and words of Jesus, powerful messages about the political matters of his day.
Still now we might expect a happy ending. The disturbed man is grateful and would like to go with Jesus. But all is not calm. The nearby community, once frightened of the disturbed man, now feel a fear at what Jesus has done and they demand that Jesus should go away. Why they fear we are not told. It may be that they see Jesus as a threat to the predictability of their lives. They do not want their world to be turned upside down. It may be because in the destruction of their pigs, they have suffered great financial and economic loss. Is it not often the case as those who fought two centuries ago against the transatlantic slave trade found, set yourself against the local economic base and you will face rejection. You know, today as in the past, we are prone to an idolatrous worship of all wealth creating activity. Maybe, we need to distinguish between the economic activity that is life enhancing and that which is destructive to life or to peoples’ wellbeing. Not a few sectors of the British economy could do with a culling!
Finally, what does this episode tell us about the ways of Jesus. Well, Jesus crosses boundaries. He steps outside of traditional Israel and goes here to man whose lifestyle amongst the tombs made him ritually unclean. He does this to show us that he is for all people and not just for some. His love is for all including those most tormented for whereas as to often we dehumanise people, Jesus sees the worth of humanity in all people and desires that this humanity might be fully treasured.
Jesus offers challenge. He is not prepared to accept a life denying status quo. Instead he calls people to follow him the restoration of lost and marred humanity. And in that goal, he seeks to draw each of to be a part of his ever increasing cycles of love and grace. For when our Scripture Reading comes to a close, who do we find telling people the good news of Jesus but “Legion” himself. For Legion has been liberated from the powers that had possessed him. But liberating someone from something is not enough. As political history reminds us, too often people are liberated from one oppression merely to be placed under another form of oppression. The liberation of Jesus is so much more than that. Like Legion, we are offered the liberation of Jesus for a purpose - to be free people with the potential to bring the hope of God’s new community of love and grace.
This sermon is being preached at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday June 24th 2007 a
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