Lent 2 ¢ Introduction
Most of us today will find it difficult to identify with this demoniac, called Legion. He is surely one of the strangest characters in the gospel narratives. And his tale is told in surprising detail and at unusual length. Many of the man’s symptoms seem to fit well with modern day accounts, but the ancient concept of demon possession is quite alien to our modern understanding of mental illness. And the whole business with the pigs, while strangely fascinating, is also quite bizarre. Yet I invite you, for a brief moment, to suspend your twenty-first century frame of mind and step back two thousand years to capture something of what this experience must have meant to one so desperately troubled, and in such crying need of deliverance.
(Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, Luke 8:26-39)
Yes, it was like being occupied
by a whole regiment, a legion of Roman soldiers.
You see, there were voices,
all kinds of voices, with all sorts of accents,
some of them rough and crude and ugly,
others refined and seeming wise.
They would tell me what to do and say,
even what to think, and especially what to fear.
And if I disobeyed them, tried to ignore
or resist their constant demands,
they made me hurt myself.
I would fall down and break bones,
or cut myself so that I was always bruised
and bleeding, wounded somewhere.
Clothing was just a hindrance, even a danger,
since it could, and did catch fire,
or would wrap itself around
and nearly choke the life from me.
I slept among the gravestones
where folk hardly ever ventured,
and fed myself on whatever scraps and garbage
I could scavenge from the edges of the town,
or the feedboxes of beasts.
I had been this way as long as I could remember,
not that I did much remembering really,
I was so distracted by those constant voices,
that unruly crowd that fought to seize my ears,
my mind, my body and my life.
People were afraid of me.
Children fled in terror whenever I appeared,
and even my own family gave me up for dead.
So that when, one day, a fishing boat –
sailing across from Galilee by the look of it –
with a group of men aboard, around a dozen of them,
touched on the shore right by where I live
I was both amazed and alarmed.
As they landed I rushed toward them
making my usual wild gestures and noises
hoping to scare them off
before they scared me half to death.
But although some of them did seem unnerved
their leader, a young man
with the kindest face I ever saw,
stretched out both his hands to touch,
maybe even to embrace me.
I fell down at his feet,
and the voices, never at a loss for words,
called him, somehow, by his name:
Jesus, Son of the Most High God.
They begged him to depart,
climb right back into his ship and sail away.
It was the strangest thing, because they were afraid –
the first time I ever saw that in them –
they were the ones in deadly fear, and I was not.
Despite all their screaming,
in my ears, and through my babbling lips,
I felt quite separated from them, distanced,
as if already they had begun to move away.
Their fear, you see,
and my utter lack of fear –
for the first time in many, many years —
their fear drove them away from me
and left me to myself, alone.
I’m not sure what happened next,
so caught up I was in my new sense of calm,
and in the way those old, familiar voices
were fading off into the distance.
Then suddenly a herd of hogs
that had been grazing quietly
on a hillside just across the bay,
stampeded off toward the bank,
plunged deep into the sea and drowned.
The herdsmen didn’t like that,
and the townspeople, who had come out
to check on all the fuss, were not pleased either.
But I was not concerned with them.
Indeed they didn’t recognize me for some time
since I was sitting at the Master’s feet,
my tormented body fully clothed
and my mind at one again.
They asked him to move on,
just as I had done not long before,
But he seemed willing to agree to their request.
Not so soon, Master. I implored him.
You have restored my life today,
my peace of mind, my health and strength of body.
Now let me come with you so that I can spend
my new-found life in serving you.
You will serve me best, Jesus responded,
as he and his friends clambered back into their boat,
by staying over here among your people,
living out this new life you received today
in joyful thanks to God,
and telling all whom you encounter
of the deliverance you have found from the chaos
of demands, commands, confusion and despair
to the quiet calm of soul that comes
from knowing you are a beloved child
of a graceful, faithful God.
I watched until their sail
disappeared into the setting sun.
Tomorrow I must claim my new-won freedom
and begin to tell my fearful fellow townsfolk
where I have been these many years
and what, and who has set me free
and sent me home rejoicing.
Strange about those pigs, all the same.
I hope the herdsmen don’t blame it on me.
Barrie Shepherd retired from historic First Church in New York City in 2000.
