Reading the Bible Amid the Culture Wars 

A lot of questions could preoccupy us as we think about reading scripture. The whole idea of demons and devils is unsettling, disturbing.  But we can get sidetracked onto a lot of other questions.  We could ask the scientific question, “Are demons real and how would they go into pigs?  Or were the pigs disturbed by the commotion?”  We could ask a psychological question, “Is this just a description of mental illness?” which is our own modern preoccupation.  Or the moral question, “Hey, what about the destruction of that property?  Someone owned those 2,000 hogs!”  There is even a geographical question.  Your bible probably mentions that ancient manuscripts list three different places where this may have occurred: Gerasa, Gadara, and Gergasa.

 Some Christian variations do believe resolving all of these contradictions are essential or the house of cards will collapst. But the Christian faith is not a house of playing cards, it is a long, multilayered story and tradition. One might argue, “The Bible was perfectly given, preserved from every ambiguity, and therefore all we have to do is get to the original. Of course, we don’t have a single text of the original, only copies. Yet Christianity exists still. We may, in seeing why the books of the New Testament came into being, as easily say, “they were accepted because they rang true and were consistent with the faith early Christians experienced and taught one another.”

 So, from that latter view, the gospel is not particularly interested in any of those questions, important as they might be. It is interested in another question, and one that really interests us.  Does Jesus really have the power to heal our brokenness?  Before we answer too glibly, let’s think about this text together. Here we have a man who is the least promising candidate for inclusion in the kingdom.  He is “possessed.”  In every way, Mark wants us to know that Jesus has walked into an unpromising situation.   He lives “Across the lake”  “lived in the tombs”  “No one had the strength to subdue him”  “Night and day he cried out, cut himself.”  The Decapolis is an area where Gentiles lived.  It would have been considered unclean.

Someone has said, “Nothing is kosher here.  Everything is unclean–spirits, tombs, pigs, territory.” There is no less promising place for Jesus to work than this one.  Now we can think about Jesus working among nice people—people like us.  We deserve to be loved.  We’re trying, doing our best, raising our families in church, and trying to be good and decent folks.  But Jesus here goes to what we used to call in East Tennessee when I worked there, “Culls.”  People who are the waste of society.  People who have to be housed or hospitalized or institutionalized or paid for because they are useless to us.

God, in the view of the gospel, is making a point here—the most dehumanizing forces of darkness in the world cannot stand against the power of redeeming love.  You may or may not believe that, but it is the gospel.  If you do not believe it in your heart of hearts, you really do not believe in the gospel.  A gospel for nice people is not the gospel.  The gospel is good news—for everybody, even the most hopeless.

It’s not that the people of the town haven’t tried to deal with this man.  They have sought to limit his destructiveness, chain him, bind him, and keep his bad influence away.  But they haven’t been able to come up with anything that was strong enough to overcome him.

And that’s our problem—we never seem to know where to really look to find the right answer.  We are always looking for the answer to our deepest problems in the wrong places.  Thomas Keating tells the story that comes from the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam about a Sufi master who had lost the key to his house.  He was looking for it in the grass outside.  He got down on his hands and knees and started running his fingers through every blade of grass.  Eight or ten of his disciples came along and asked, “Master, what is wrong?”  He said, “I have lost the key to my house.”  “Can we help you look for it?”  Of course, he was delighted!  So they all got down on their knees and began combing through the grass.

As the sun grew hotter, one of the more intelligent disciples said, “Master, do you have any idea where you might have lost the key?”  The Master replied, “Of course, I lost it in the house,” and they all immediately exclaimed, “Then why are we looking for it out here?”  He said, “Isn’t it obvious?  There is more light here!”

Keating quotes St. Augustine said that there are three terrible consequences of sin in all of our lives.  First, we do not know where to look for happiness.  Sin leaves us in a state of ignorance.  Second, we look for happiness in all the wrong places.  Sin distorts our perception of where the key can be found.  Third, even when we identify what would truly make us happy, we do not have the willpower to attain it.

One of the most powerful phrases in the story is when Mark says, “And he dwelled among the tombs.”  He was the living dead.  Not unlike many hopeless people across our society today—forgotten, despised, destitute.  We did our best, but they could not be redeemed.

A certain number of people are simply hopeless.  We count on that.  Certain people will always be unemployed.  Certain people cannot be rehabilitated.  Some people will never overcome their addictions and self-destruct.  It sounds heartless, but at a certain point we throw up our hands and say, “We’ve got to do damage control.”  A lot of politics is about these kinds of calculations.

Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” asked Senator Charles Sumner to come to the aid of a needy citizen.  When Sumner turned her down with the excuse that he had grown too busy to concern himself with individuals, Howe replied, “Charles, that’s remarkable.  Even God hasn’t reached that stage yet.”

The problem with our sense of “where the problem is” is that we are like the people of Gadara.  When you ask, “Where is evil?” they would point to “that man over there.”  We’re pretty sure the problem is “out there” somewhere—bad people, bad institutions, bad laws, bad luck.

But Jesus in the gospels knew the truth—if evil lives out through our social structures, it is birthed in the human heart.  Evil, as Walter Wink puts it, has no existence apart from dwelling within and among us humans.

 There is a pro0found consistency in the pages of the gospel presentation of Jesus: he welcomes the excluded back into Israel again: sick, Samaritan, sinner, traitor, rich, poor, unclean, leper, demon-possessed.  And here I mention a profound and peculiar truth the late Fred Craddock mentioned in the story of the man with the withered hand Jesus met at the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. The gospel of John tells the story in chapter 5:

² Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, ^[a]Bethesda, having five porches. ³ In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, ^[b]paralyzed, ^[c]waiting for the moving of the water. ⁴ For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. ⁵ Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. ⁶ When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷ The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.”

Little details fly past us in a hurried reading: “thirty-eight years.” I remember hearing Craddock in a lecture say, “There is a pool of Bethsaida in every town, where desperate people come to get well.” But he had been sitting there thirty-eight years and no one ever stopped to say, “Let’s help you today.” When Jesus cast out as demon that possessed a man in the synagogue at Capernaum, it occurs to the reader that as man possessed and captive to internal demonic chains had been sitting there, sabbath after sabbath, but only Jesus bothered to set him free.

And so we come to this story. Now we are in the area of the Gentiles—Roman administration and control. Mark (?) observed that in those two demon possession stories is an interesting point—institutional religion and secular political and civic and economic life found a way to let broken, utterly consumed souls dwell among them without giving a thought to their deliverance and healing.

That is where we find ourselves against the power of evil.  We are always trying to do battle against it but we never see where it lives.  Billy Graham recently thanked the United Nations for all its good work, but then went on to say that there are many issues it has been unable to solve, including the problems of evil and suffering, and this is because these are finally spiritual problems.  They cannot be fixed with money or armies or treaties.  They are problems rooted in the human heart and its brokenness.

Sometimes as we look at these problems and their stubbornness, we might be tempted to throw up our hands in despair.  Much as the townspeople had done with the man who has come to be known as the “Gadarene demoniac.”

We have to know where the problem really is before we can be healed.  But we also have to have access to a power great enough to overcome it.  And this is Mark’s point.  Here, in this unpromising place, among the tombs and ceremonial uncleanness, where the smell of death itself is on his breath, Jesus is able to defeat the demons.

A “Legion” was a division of the Roman army that contained more than 6,000 soldiers. We understand from this that the man found himself in profound brokenness. Can’t we understand what it is like to pulled from within by so many different feelings and passions? Karl Barth said that the demons do not shout blasphemies or war cries, as we might expect, when they meet Jesus.  “What we hear is that the darkness . . .finds itself threatened and in supreme danger, and recognizes that this is the case”  He goes on to say, “The inspirer of fear in others, it is now itself afraid.”  He binds the devil up, tosses him out of heaven, hurls him into unclean hogs and finally into a lake, “thus perishing finally from the world.”

According to the gospels, Jesus has the power to change your life, redeem your worst, touch you and lead you out of your worst contradictions.  We keep forgetting that.  And we need to remember it in a time like ours that is bent on power by division and exclusion. If only we can get rid of the foreigners, the “bad people” as some like to cast it, then all shall be well. But it will not. 

Anton Boisen was the founder of modern chaplaincy.  He came to his vocation in his forties, locked in a mental hospital, an utter failure in his life as a minister, his career ruined.  Discovered that even in a mental hospital, his spiritual life continued.  He began to see a need for ministers to go and learn about the world of the mentally ill and the modern clinical pastoral education movement was born.

There are all kinds of tombs, unclean places and unpromising situations to which Jesus comes.  They are not only the tombs of the homeless, the drug-addict and the insane.  We can find ourselves in the grip of sin inwardly and no one around us would suspect. Consider our own government and the failed war on drugs, now going on for nearly forty years. We blow up boats, arrest gangs, jail addicts and dealers alike and the problem only seems to grow. So we even consider just legalizing it so we can at least pay for treatment on the backs of their suffering.

Addictions of all kinds represent one of the most expensive undertakings of our day—both those who profit for them and those who work to overcome them.  The majority of the illegal drugs used in the world are consumed right here in this country. Family problems are so complicated and the stresses on those families so great that many people are pessimistic about the future of our families. 

Maybe, though, it is because we keep trying to solve a problem that is finally spiritual by external means.  The place to begin is by healing the brokenness that is in us all.  How do we do that?  The place to begin is with surrender.

Demons possess against the will.  That’s the way it is with sin and evil.  We find ourselves caught, trapped, stuck.  We stumble in and only too late realize that we didn’t read the fine print.  No one starts out to destroy themselves, but evil cannot be managed.  It will wind up managing you.             The God of scripture is not like that.  When the people come out to see what has happened, they find him sitting calmly, in his right mind, and clothed.  And they are afraid. Jesus does not possess the man.  His love is not like that.  Fear is the opposite of faith.  He simply invites the man’s trust. That’s all he asks from us to do and to offer to one another.

In the Twelve-Step program of AA there is something healing and redemptive in the approach of AA that can assist people in the grips of any problem that overwhelms or threatens them.  At the heart of the Twelve Steps is this: You are helpless to solve your problems yourself and you must surrender to a power greater than your own.

Surrender is the beginning of healing.  The man was totally helpless to overcome his possession.  He did not have the will to be happy.  Jesus freed him, though, and invited his trust.

 And that is what Jesus asks from all in the gospel telling  The beginning place in the pilgrimage of faith is trust.  When I talk of surrender, I tap into the deepest anxieties and fears that most of us have.  The real problem with is the fear of surrender.