The power in the story of the man healed of so many demons is not simply that he finds someone to love him. It’s that he becomes a multiplier of love.
receiving God’s love to give it away
Proper 7C | Luke 8:26-39
When you walk into this room, I always wonder what you’re thinking about. For some, it’s no doubt memories of events in this space. Or perhaps it’s current events in your life. Or those events in the world which rattle and shake us.
I imagine that some come in to hear the words of Jesus. Perhaps for comfort or courage. Or you come to be with other people who are on this same journey, listening to that still, small voice amidst the cacophony of outrage and menace.
Mostly, though, I imagine that you’re a lot like me and you come hoping for answers, direction, guidance. That you are committing at least a little bit to follow the Rabbi where he’s leading us.
We might use different words for it or define the terms differently. But most of us come to this plot of dirt, entering this sanctuary, seeking love. And we come hoping, praying, pleading that we might learn how to love like that.
We come here because we expect to find love here. We come to join these people because these people claim to want to love each other. This place. These people. Our rabbi.
We follow because we want to love and we want to learn how to love.
Easter is over.
Lent is gone. So we are back in Ordinary Time. We rejoin the story begun in Advent as told in Luke. The story of Jesus’s life and ministry.
So the story so far:
An angel comes to some unlikely parents giving them miracle babies. The second one is Jesus, of course. The first one is John, known as The Baptist, who prepares the way for the other. Jesus gets baptized by John, tempted by the Adversary, and nearly killed in his home town for preaching the good news.
Then he calls some disciples, including four fishermen and a tax collector, heals people, exorcizes demons (who speak directly to him), and breaks rules about the Sabbath.
“I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?” 6:9
Chapter 7
The lectionary jumps over chapter 7 which has some awesome stories:
- Jesus heals a Roman soldier’s slave. He appeals to Jesus, not out of self-interest, but for concern for the person’s dignity.
- Then Jesus brings a child back from the dead. An action which restores the widowed mother back into community.
- Some disciples of John the Baptist come to make sure Jesus is really the Messiah. Jesus sends them back to tell them what they’ve seen with their own eyes.
And then one of my favorites: Jesus at Simon the Pharisee’s house. He teaches a woman and the sanctimonious Simon about love. Go read that one: 7:36-50. It’s a barn burner.
Then in chapter 8, the writer points out that women are followers of Jesus, too. He tells a parable about the sower, and then Jesus disses his own family, saying his followers are his real family. Because they don’t just love him, they love the mission God has given him.
Then they set out in a boat and Jesus calms a storm.
So we are learning that Jesus isn’t just someone to love. And he isn’t one to fear. But he is one to trust, observe, and bear witness to. And then we move, too.
That’s when the boat arrives at the other shore. They left Hebrew land and crossed the sea to exclusively Greek territory. To a region called the Decapolis: for it’s 10 Greek cities. One of those cities, Gennesaret seems to be where they are heading.
But Jesus isn’t going to a town or village or city. He’s going to a cemetery.
This alone would be shocking to 1st century hearers. Tombs are places of ritual impurity and much of the purity code is built around rabbis and religious people maintaining ritual purity.
So he’s gone where he’s not supposed to go, entered a place in that land he’s not to go into. And what does he find? A naked man racked by multiple demons. For those keeping score, that’s two more purity problems.
This man is afflicted with so many demons they call themselves “Legion”. A Roman legion at that time was about 5,000 men.
When Jesus exorcized a demon back in chapter 4, it said to Jesus:
“Let us alone! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
Luke 4:34
Like the Devil who can quote scripture, it is only the demons who really understand who Jesus is.
Then a weird thing happens. They ask Jesus not to send them into the abyss. They beg him to put them into a herd of pigs instead. And then, when he does, they run off the cliff, sending themselves into the abyss.
Shunned
When the people see the man, clothed and healed, like a fully-restored human being, they don’t know what to do. Seeing love like this terrified them. Almost like it was easier to shun the man who is suffering rather than reconcile with him.
And what to do with Jesus? The one who healed him; restored his humanity; shared the love of God with him? Their only thought is self-preservation. Shun him. We’re frightened. Make this power go away. He’s ruining everything.
They think Jesus’s love is ruining their lives; predictable and selfish as they may be.
The man should be welcomed into his home community. The rules suggest as much. But you know he isn’t. He’s a sign of their sin, not his own. He’s a sign of their cowardice in the face of God’s love. Then a symbol of their shame he will remain.
So naturally he wants to follow the love. He begs to go with them.
But Jesus gets back in the boat and goes back to his home country. And he leaves the man there as a sign of God’s love.
So we might be puzzling out what to make of this encounter.
It has all the hallmarks of the story so far. Jesus exorcizing demons and restoring a person to community. And it has surprise and broken laws and deeper convictions. It is a story of love and shame and witness.
And as we’ve heard it and reflected on it, we might be thinking about our own lives: the places to which we travel. Perhaps sharing the gospel with strangers. Bringing Jesus with us or perhaps following him there. Crossing borders or just the street to see what we can see.
Perhaps we are confounded by what to do or why Jesus doesn’t bring the man along. He needs more love, doesn’t he? Or is this not only about him and what he needs? The city needs his witness and his love. Besides, how can he be restored if he’s half a world away?
And perhaps we’re thinking about other places. That right now ICE agents would be entering sanctuaries and pulling people from their communities. That tearing apart of families may be on hold.
We could look at our detention centers and comfortably debate whether or not we call them concentration camps. But there’s still overcrowding. Soap and beds are apparently considered luxuries. We aren’t really restoring any people are we?
Our shame is still revealed in our indifference to human dignity. How easily we call it “politics” and compartmentalize it. Or brush it away. Brush our parts in it away.
Jesus never said this would be easy.
When he showed Simon and Andrew how God could fill the nets in the daytime or still the storm they thought would kill them all. When Jesus raised a boy from the dead or threw 5000 demons into a herd of pigs.
He never said that is easy.
But he kept saying to witness that.
“and declare how much God has done for you.”
God didn’t fill that man with demons or put him in the cemetery. God didn’t separate that man from his community or treat him like he’s trash. People did that. Read these gospel stories and our history books and our newspapers: we keep throwing each other away.
Showing Up
And yet Jesus keeps showing up where theologians say he’s not supposed to be. And he sits with the dying, the imprisoned, the hungry, the sick, the possessed. Then reminds us what freedom really looks like.
He keeps showing love to the unlovable and freedom to the tortured. Even showing us love. Showing us all the path to restoration is love.
What if we’re that man, once possessed and now free? And we come to the place where we know we’ll find love. Where we’ll find Jesus and he’ll take us to another place where we won’t be shunned or despised for who we are. We think our job is to come and get loved.
But we’ve already been freed by love. And we have it in abundance!
Then those words would be just as much for us. To go out in our community and “declare how much God has done for you.”
We may come here to receive love. But we receive more than we need and with that love, a conviction to share it. We don’t just become God’s vehicle for love; we are multipliers of it.
We are God’s love ambassadors with a simple mission: show what love looks like. Generous, thoughtful, and full of improbable hope. A healing love, a restoring love; the very love of God.