Saturday, June 18, 2016
Pentecost 5, Year C, Proper 7, June 19, 2916
Sermon for The Fifth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 7 ~ June
19, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
All the people …. asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
Exorcism
is bad for business. Freeing people from domination by mysterious, unseen forces
can upset the status quo and annoy
powerful people. This may have happened in the case of the Gerasene demoniac as
it does later in the Acts, when Paul
and Silas are thrown into prison in Philippi for spoiling the business of the owners
of the slave-girl medium they had healed.
Two
details of today’s incident jump out to me:
- The liberated man wants to go with
Jesus, but Jesus tells him to stay put.
- The
people who know what happened beg Jesus to go away, because they are seized with great fear.
There
are two sermons here, so I will just give a nod to the first, and concentrate
on the second. Salvation comes through
following Jesus, but He does not call everyone
to follow Him. We know that Jesus will save those who follow Him. But that does
NOT mean that those He tells to stay put are condemned. Not at all. We know where the Church is; we do NOT know
where the Church is NOT, said the Russian theologian I never tire of
quoting. From today’s story, it appears that Jesus doesn’t even WANT everyone
to follow Him, at least not in the same way. We must never think that we can tell anything
about God’s relationship to other persons. One size does NOT fit all!
So
on to the second sermon! Why did the locals want Jesus to get out as fast as
possible. Maybe it had something to do with the dead pigs.
…people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.
Why
were they so afraid, with a fear underscored in the passage? On first glance it
might be fear of Jesus: fear of Someone with great, supernatural power. But where
else do we find such a reaction? Other miracle stories lack this detail. People
rejoice, people are amazed, people are thankful, &c, but not seized with great fear. What are they
afraid of? I suggest that it has to do with the pigs. A large herd of them,
feeding on the nearby hillside.
…Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.
Which
means they told them about what happened to the pigs, and
…Then [everybody] asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.
Let’s
think about that. Somebody must have been buying the pork. But why such a big
herd? Pagan farmers could raise their own pigs, so who was buying those culled
from a herd of hundreds – or even thousands? The Romans, that’s who! That’s one
theory, at least.
There
were Roman soldiers all over the place, legions in garrisons and higher
officers living on their own. That would account for the large pork business
that Jesus destroyed in the process of freeing the Gerasene demoniac. The owner
would have been livid. A kind of “defense contractor,” he would have been quite
well-to-do and influential. His hired swineherds ran into town to inform him, to
explain that it wasn’t their fault. The crowd knew that he would arrive any
minute – probably with Roman soldiers – and that would account for their fear. They
wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the meddlesome
Outsider, Who destroyed the herd. Apparently, our Lord took their point and
left immediately to go back across the Lake.
Exorcism
is bad for business. In this instance, it is also – arguably – bad for imperialism.
In freeing the poor kid from the unseen forces that dominated him, Jesus also
indirectly challenged Roman imperial rule. It is not just an accident that the
demons called themselves, legion, referring
to a unit of the Roman Army. It’s a Latin word, and Jesus was throwing these
Latin-named demons out. He sent them directly to destroy the swine, unclean
food intended for the occupying imperialists.
Exorcism
is bad for business. In this case, it attacked not only the Empire’s
food-supply, it also destroyed a fair amount of capital. If the demons were
really comparable to a legion it
meant – at the time – about five
thousand of them. At one demon per pig, that was indeed a large herd: an extraordinarily substantial capital accumulation.
Jesus interfered with the market intended to support the current system of
imperial governance.
As
the Gerasene demoniac was enslaved by the demons whose name was Legion, so the People of God were dominated by the Roman legions. And not by
military force alone: a small number of local civilians grew rich by
collaborating with the imperial overlords. This was a kind of First Century
Military-Industrial Complex. And as we just heard, Jesus assaulted it by
destroying the collaborator’s wealth. THAT is why those who saw it were seized with great fear.
So,
it should be obvious that exorcism – the freeing of human beings from the
forces of evil that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, the forces we renounce
at Baptism – is not ultimately about wicked ghosts. It is about systemic evil –
the mysterious, unseen forces that seem to have a life of their own, that cause
increasing misery and now threaten our very survival.
The
Gerasene demoniac represents God’s creation, enslaved and disfigured and mortally
endangered. The One through Whom all things were made is come to set us free.
If that entails destroying whatever feeds and nourishes those mysterious,
unseen forces along with the wealth of those willing to collaborate and support
them, so be it.
Exorcism
is bad for business.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
