Mark 5:1-20 “The Jesus We Need” Scott Hoezee

Recently the people in and around Wichita, Kansas, breathed a very large collective sigh of relief. The so-called, self-designated BTK serial killer had been caught thirty years after his first murder in 1974. This one-man reign of terror began with a gruesome murder of a family of four. A father, mother, and two young children were found bound, gagged, and strangled in their suburban Wichita home. BTK would strike periodically throughout the next several years, each time murdering a woman and each time using his preferred method of “bind, torture, kill.” His sickness was further revealed in the trinkets he stole from each crime scene and in the obvious relish he took in sending letters to local newspapers—letters that more or less celebrated his own criminal cleverness.

He went silent for many years, leading some to believe he had moved away or had died. But no one was sure and so the community, which had been actively terrorized in the 1970s, continued to live with some unease. Then last year, on the thirtieth anniversary of his first crime, BTK burst back onto the scene with a flurry of new correspondence. Finally the police put the puzzle pieces together and arrested a man who was described last week by the New York Times as “intensely ordinary.” A pillar in his local Lutheran church, he had recently been elected Council president. He was also a security officer known to be a stickler for enforcing even the most minor of rules and laws. Yet all along it now appears this husband and father was one of this country’s most notorious and sick serial killers.

The relief in Wichita is palpable by all reports. And that’s what you would expect when a public menace is removed at long last. Any other reaction would strike us as weird. What in the world could account for it if people started calling in to local radio talkshows in Wichita and saying they missed the good old days when life was more tense while BTK was on the loose? Why would anyone write a letter to the editor in some Kansas newspaper, suggesting that the detective who finally cracked the case be relocated to Los Angeles or something seeing as they didn’t want his like working in their community? No, any reaction other than gratitude and relief would puzzle us deeply and concern us poignantly.

Yet exactly that scenario plays itself out in Mark 5. Once in the area of the Gerasenes there was a man who was public menace #1. He wasn’t just crazy, he was possessed. And he wasn’t possessed by some garden variety demon but by a host of devils who called themselves Legion and whose ferocity was legendary in those parts. Over the years the local sheriff had organized this or that posse now and again to snag the man. So they threw a net around him or hit him upside the head with a blunt instrument so as finally to chain him up for good. On more than one occasion the local authorities had succeeded, too. Legion was caught, bound, and chained. But every time the power of the demonic yielded superhuman strength in this man. He burst the links of the chains like they were made of paper not steel.

It got to the point that volunteers for the next posse were harder and harder to come by. It looked like this was a threat to public safety that just was not going to go away. So people learned to live with a level of fear. Parents knew to tell their children to avoid the cemetery and its environs. Concerned parents met their children after school even as others posted extra supervisors for local playgrounds just in case Legion decided to take a daytrip into town. They tried to blot Legion from their minds but long about the time they had succeeded in not thinking about him for a day or so, the wind would be just right such that you could hear his blood-curdling howls long into the night. The sounds weren’t animal exactly but neither were they human. However you might choose to describe these piercing cries, they kept many’a person up well into the night even as parents had to comfort frightened children who found even their sweeter dreams haunted by the fear of Legion.

Then one day a man from Nazareth arrived by boat. He had quite the reputation and even the good folks of the Gerasenes knew of it. Rumors of healing attended this rabbi—the man was said to carry the good contagion of health. Word had it that he was also a mesmerizing teacher and public speaker. Hence, Jesus’ arrival at the Gerasenes marina was something of an event. But then it happened. Legion came hurtling down from the cemetery, screaming and shrieking at the top of his lungs. This was not what the Chamber of Commerce had planned.

But this Nazareth person called Jesus seemed oddly nonplused. “Knock it off and come out of him!” he said with a voice of steady authority. The disciples had seen this often enough to know what came next: there would be a brief spasm that would turn the hapless person’s face five shades of purple before the person would flop to the ground, looking dead but soon enough proving to be not only alive but quite delivered of the demon. Legion, however, was not quite so easily ousted. Speaking in a voice that sounded like the blend of several eerie voices, Legion cried out, “Not so fast, Son of the Most High God! Before we go, you must promise not to torture us.”

By now the disciples realized this one was going to be tough. “What is your name?” Jesus asked. “Legion, for we are many. Do not even think about banishing us totally from this area.” Now when you think about it, that’s an odd request. What in the world does the geographical region of the Gerasenes have to do with anything? Had Satan divided up the world into zones such that this was Legion’s assignment that they couldn’t leave? That is a possibility, though it’s a chilling one. The thought of such a high level of organization on the level of the demonic points to what we talked about a few weeks ago when discussing Jesus the Exorcist: namely, the enemy we face as children of God is fierce, savvy, cruel, and clever. As Martin Luther’s famous hymn put it, when it comes to battles with the devil “our striving would be losing were not the right man on our side.”

And that right man of God’s own choosing stood face to face and toe to toe with Legion that day in the Gerasenes. While Jesus remained strangely silent, Legion kept babbling insanely. It was almost as though Jesus, serene in his confidence, was just going to let Legion babble on until it hit on its own sordid solution. “Pigs!” Legion finally shrieks. “Better to live in pigs than not at all. At least they are local pigs. Send us there.” With a silent nod of his head, Jesus gave Legion the go-ahead signal. The hapless victim collapsed into a heap. Long about the time the locals were getting ready to buzz excitedly about this, a ghastly squealing came from a herd of pigs nearby. For years some would say the pigs’ eyes had begun to glow red just before they ran lemming-like headlong toward the cliffs and into the sea below. Bloated pig carcasses would be washing up on shore for days thereafter.

Like wildfire the news of this spread into the city. People fairly flocked out to where this wonder-worker was and when they got there, they saw Legion (whose real name was probably something like Jacob) sitting at Jesus’ feet, munching a sandwich, and exhibiting what was clearly normal behavior. But then verse 15 delivers Mark 5's bombshell. The people saw all this and they were . . . overjoyed? Grateful? Awed? No, they were afraid. They were afraid of Jesus. They were afraid of the power that had allowed him to get rid of Legion. They were, in short, afraid of God in their midst.

We noted earlier that the demons asked Jesus not to send them from that area. Now, in a kind of grim irony, we see that after Jesus relieved the community of what had for so long been a threat to public safety and a spoiler of civic shalom, the people do ask Jesus to leave their area. Apparently without a word, Jesus heads back to the marina. But before he leaves, the healed man begs to go with him. But Jesus tells him to stay behind as a witness.

Clearly Mark is playing a little bit here with themes related to coming and going. The demons wanted to stay. The people ask Jesus to go. The cured man asks to go, but Jesus tells him to stay. In the end, the demons may well still have been hanging out in the neighborhood, the man they had once inhabited sticks around, and so when it’s all said and done, the only one who for sure leaves is the one that the people should have, by all rights, wanted to keep, and that is the Son of the Most High God. It looks as though the good people of the Gerasenes could deal with anybody in their community except God himself.

People say and do funny things when they are afraid. Fear leads us to all kinds of irrational thinking and behavior. Left unchecked, fear can lead to paranoia, to seeing threats that aren’t even real. But when you are afraid, one thing you are very certain about is the desire to remove the source of your terror or avoid the places where fear is most likely to creep up the back of your spine and take up residence in your mind. When you have fear of heights, you avoid tall buildings and mountaintops. When you are claustrophobic, you avoid elevators and closets and crawlspaces. If you have arachnaphobia, you make sure your roommate or spouse sweeps away every spider in the house.

The people of the Gerasenes were afraid. But of what? Why is there here no hint of public gratitude of the kind we have seen lately in Wichita in the wake of BTK’s arrest? Why was there no civic sigh of relief with an attendant heaping of thanks upon the man who had at long last done what the community long ago concluded they could not do themselves: namely, removing the stigma and threat of Legion from their midst? What threat did they see in Jesus, of all people? Did it have to do with those pigs? Did they love pork so much and God so little that the loss of all that good bacon was enough to see Jesus as a threat to the local ham industry? Did they worry that he’d soon be getting rid of all their pigs? He was Jewish, after all. They had those kosher scruples. Or was it a purely economic issue? The pig herders had lost a lot of capital and maybe that upset people.

But we’re not told they were angry or upset. They were afraid. Of what? Maybe of God. There’s an old saying “Better the devil you know.” Maybe the Gerasenes community had concluded that although Legion was an unpleasant demonic presence among them, at least he was their possessed man and they could manage him as such. Lines had been drawn, boundaries set, and a contingency plan had been drawn up by the town council just in case Legion started doing stuff that seemed more threatening than the run-of-the-mill activities they had long since gotten used to.

Jesus upset their tidy little applecart. Jesus burst in bearing a divine power they were not accustomed to seeing, and it scared them silly. Today a herd of pigs, tomorrow . . . well, who knows what he’ll do tomorrow! Why, the day could come when you wouldn’t even be able to recognize the Gerasenes anymore. Sure Legion had a very public problem and everyone knew it, but truth be told, they all had their own little hangups and problems, their own little favorite guilty pleasures and sinful patterns of business and homelife. Suppose the man who was able to duke it out successfully with a whole band of demons started to take on lesser problem areas. Surely he could. He’d proven that much. Anybody who could banish a legion of devils with a mere nod of his head would surely have no problem whatsoever cleaning up a little graft in the local political machine, calling someone on his serial adultery, putting a lid on the wanton gossip that was the staple of the local bars and beauty shops. The people were so afraid that this man might shake up their world that they clean forgot to be thankful for the removal of public menace #1.

In theology there is a traditional Latin phrase amor morits, which means to be in love with death. The progress of corruption in human history has gotten to the point where people actually feel grimly intrigued by sin and evil. We’ve gotten to the point where we think the world would lose half its color and most of its pizzazz if somehow all sin would disappear tonight. What would be left to watch on TV if sin dried up this night? How many songs would disappear from your I-pod and CD collection if all that is sordid and tawdry were banished from the planet in one fell swoop? Would there be any novels worth reading if evil weren’t around to spice things up? Would we still be allowed to eat chocolate, sip a martini, or enjoy sexuality if things really got cleaned up in our lives and community?

Every day people prove that they are secretly in love with death and with all that contributes to a deadening atmosphere. What is the Jerry Springer show and the vast majority of daytime shows like it if not finally a celebration of the tawdry? Why do people who are, all things being equal, decent folks who likely would never do anything particularly violent in their actual lives, nevertheless drawn to music and songs that rhapsodize about gang-banging, beating up on women, and lurid sexual goings-on? It seems as though we like the work of God in some areas of life but become afraid in case we sense that this same work could upset our own status quo. So some are able to celebrate the removal of dictators and the overthrow of evil regimes but become incensed if someone suggests they should clean up their own act and start going to church every week.

Give the people of the Gerasenes at least this much credit: they saw in Jesus the potential for broad and sweeping changes that, once they get rolling, will never stop until that day when all things are made new. They were afraid of what this man might mean for the rest of their lives. Maybe even we as Christians are sometimes guilty of domesticating Jesus to the point that we, too, resist the implications of Jesus’ work across the warp and woof of our lives. A reporter in Mexico City once observed that on Sundays, the women of the city went into the cathedrals for mass while most of the men waited for the women, loitering during the service on the cathedral’s front steps. So one Sunday morning the reporter approached these men and asked, “Why don’t you go in? Aren’t you religious?” One of the men spoke for the whole group when he replied incredulously, “Of course we’re religious, but we’re not fanatics!”

There is a little of that in all people. A little religion is good thing. So we put “In God We Trust” on our money and even though this upsets a few folks now and then, most of the country lives with that slogan just fine even though most of those same people couldn’t explain a single line in the Apostles’ Creed if their lives depended on it. A little piety is a good thing but let’s not be fanatics. The family that prays together stays together, but don’t tell us we need to give more money away to the church or to the poor. We regularly say “God Bless America” but we don’t really need to read the Bible with our kids at the dinner table, do we? Doesn’t being a follower of Jesus mean little more than live and let live, be tolerant, don’t judge?

A person can think things like that in the abstract and can even fool him- or herself that it’s the truth. But when Jesus himself arrives on your doorstep and starts throwing out this or that demon, then there is no escaping the sense that once this Son of the Most High God gets going, he might just not stop. Of course, as believers in this Jesus, one of the things we pine for is nothing short of the new creation, the renewal and restoration of all things. So when it comes to following this Savior’s program, starting with our own lives right here and right now, we’re not afraid of Jesus, are we? We don’t want him to stop, do we? Amen.