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The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 8:26-39
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 8:26-39
✛
The Demoniac, C'est Moi
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She lingered after a weekday mass to ask me a question. Hesitantly, yet with firmness, and with lines of anguish down her face, she asked: “Why does God allow suffering?” As they say, books have been written on that subject, and yours truly has led whole seminars. Yet for all its variety, suffering hits us in some concrete existential situation. “Are you suffering?” I asked; she nodded yes but said no more. I encouraged her to read some of the Psalms, and to ask God why he was allowing her to suffer, and I prayed with her that God would be with her and give her good; and then she retreated into her anonymity.
Suffering is not a question that our Scriptures shy away from. Indeed, it seems the opposite: those who suffer are drawn to the Scriptures, and drawn to that sweet figure the Bible tells of, the man of gentleness, who would not break a bruised reed; the man of perception, who could see into your own heart; the innocent man, whose unjust execution seems to shed strange light into dark alleys even today. Those who suffer are drawn to our Scriptures and to this man.
And he is drawn to them. Please allow me that overused word “awesome” to describe the Gospel encounter we just read. Jesus comes ashore and there meets a man who is possessed by demons. The man’s suffering is described plainly but frighteningly. He wears no clothes and lives in no house. His hang-out is the tombs outside the city. Many times his demons had convulsed him; even when bound with chains and fetters and closely watched, he broke free and ran away into the wild, deserted places [see Fitzmyer trans. in Anchor Bible].
I think that each of these details is a marker for an aspect of human suffering.
Start with his nakedness. Why is nakedness a suffering? The point is counter-intuitive, for our culture certainly makes nakedness, or near nakedness, highly alluring. Yet it is obvious that clothes protect our skin from many scratches and abrasions, and allow us to sit on places that we would otherwise flee from (think subway seats). Clothes also allow us to live in climates that vary from the human ideal of about 75 degrees. But those practical points aren’t what’s at issue.
Clothing is necessary because we are fallen human beings. Indeed, immediately after the fall, the first order of business was to make aprons. That shows us that a fallen human being isn’t only messed up on the inside—it isn’t only our desires or our will that has been twisted away from God—but our bodies too bear the condition of being fallen. At the final resurrection, Paul says, our shameful, dishonorable bodies will be transformed into glorious bodies [cf. Gen 2.25, 3.8; 1 Cor 15.43]. The resurrection body will be naked, but its nakedness would seem to us like a further clothing.
So to return to the man possessed, his suffering is that of all of us children of Adam who bear in our bodies the shame of the fall. But this man’s suffering is worse because the demons will not allow him the mitigating protection of clothing that God has provided us fallen creatures.
Second: he lives in no house and cannot remain with any human company; even when bound and fettered, he breaks away. Why is isolation a suffering? We might first think about practical benefits, things like common defense and cooperative labor. But again, the theological point isn’t the practicality of living in society.
It is that to live with other human beings simply is what it means to be a human being. Aristotle’s famous line is that if you show me a man who is completely alone, I say to you he is not a man: he is either some sort of beast, or a god. It is human to live with one another. In Genesis chapter one, God creates man, male and female all at once. And in the complementary story of Genesis chapter two, when God makes just one man, he states at once that it is not good for the man to be alone.
The condition of the fall is seen not only in the shame that sticks to our bodies but also in our dislike of full human fellowship [cf. Isa 65.5]. From the first generation after the fall, brother has lifted arm against brother. We can’t live peaceably together, so we move away, or we rely on the power of the state to enforce lawfulness. To deal with the fall, God has given us the medicine of laws and governments with the coercive power to punish wrongdoing. This naked demoniac cannot live in human fellowship; and even the forcible power of government applied to him in fetters and chains cannot tame him. He reveals our common suffering as sinners who must be compelled to live together and who manage to live together only because of the power of the state. But his suffering is even worse: his demons will not allow him even the divine medicine of government power to deal with the fallen human condition. His demons break those irons and drive him out alone into the wild, beyond human contact.
And thirdly, his hang-out is the tombs [cf. Isa 65.4]. He shows us the ineluctable consequence of the fall: every one of us, in the end, goes down to the grave. Living among the tombs—or “loitering” as one scholar [Fitzmyer] translates it; it is hardly living—he is spiritually unclean, in touch with the dead, who have gone under the earth and, until Jesus himself will be buried, have no way of rising from that place.
These sufferings, of shame and hostility and mortality, are common to every one of us. But in this demoniac they are exposed for that they are, writ large before us. And what happens is truly awesome. Jesus speaks with authority to the man and to the demons within him. They know that Jesus has authority to cast them into the abyss. They have been thrown out from heaven and get to wander the earth only for a season. They beg Jesus for mercy, but he shows them none. They ask to avoid the abyss by going into a herd of pigs. Jesus sends them into the pigs, but the pigs, despite being unclean animals, do God’s work. The pigs plunge into the water, taking down the demons with them.
And they are gone—gone! They aren’t in the man, they aren’t in the pigs, they aren’t anywhere. Jesus has sent the demons into hell!
And the man is, then, simply and wonderfully and beautifully, just—a man. He talks. He sits. He wears clothes. And being restored, he becomes a witness to the Gospel of Jesus. He obeys Jesus and goes through the country and tells everyone what God has done for him. God has driven away his demons, yes. But God has also lifted him from the tombs, and made it possible for him to live with and have friendship among human beings, and clothed him with new garments. It isn’t the fullness of redemption—Jesus has yet to die and rise from the dead and so forth—it isn’t the fullness of redemption (we aren’t there yet!)—but it is a sign. A sign of redemption. A sign, he is, of what Jesus will do for you and for me.
