Folks have in recent centuries struggled with the supernatural moments in the gospels, but seeing the things I have seen it puzzles me that some still stumble over manifestations of the demonic in the stories the gospels tell.
One could try to blame this recent disbelief on relative affluence and ease but having been a pastor for seventeen years in one of the stablest suburbs in America I can testify first-hand that darkness doesn't discriminate. There is as much spiritual mayhem here as anywhere, as much bewildering evil now as then.
One of the reasons the gospels have the kind of power they do for so many is that they do not shrink from reality. They tell it like it is. They are not in denial about the corners into which we humans have painted ourselves.
And this story of a demon-addled man by a rural lakeshore, and of the trauma his affliction has imposed on his family and the community, makes as much sense in their time as it does in ours.
The demons don't want to be sent back to "the Abyss,” whatever the hell that is, and one wonders what "the Abyss” must be like because they had rather inhabit a herd of pigs than go back there. The pigs, for all their piggish existence, are yet part of the creation God made good
One recalls that our oceans have a depth called "the Abyss,” which is pitch black, where strange luminous creatures eat each other. And it was Stephen Hawking who described the entrance to a black hole, the "event horizon,” as a place where one might hang a sign with the words of Dante: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." It seems "the Abyss" is something rather worse still.
The Oxford shootings felt like entering a place like that, and you and I have had other moments of confronting real darkness.
Once when I was sitting in a room on the phone with a young woman tormented by an eating disorder, who had been committed for last resort care, it felt like a deep chill invaded the room, a resistance to the light I was trying to speak into her heart and mind.
l'Il admit it frightened me but I kept speaking words of life and eventually whatever felt it owned this young woman dissipated, and in the weeks and months to come she eventually found liberty and wholeness.
The legions' words are the first ones we read in the account (Luke 8:26-39) but they are spoken in desperate *reply* to Jesus's command that they depart from the man they control.
I imagine Jesus spoke the command in the "still small voice," the one Elijah heard in the cave on Sinai, the whisper that wasn't in the wind, earthquake, or fire-quiet, authentic words of a love that does not boast and yet cannot be resisted by darkness.
And after the stampede and the cliff and the drownings and the rumors of the pig herders and the townsfolk's curiosity and the running to see what trouble Jesus had made for them, there was simply the man made well: sitting at the feet of his rabbi, “clothed and in his right mind."
And for a just one brilliant moment everyone was silenced by the holiness of it all.
"clothed and in his right mind."
I know when I read those words that this story is true and that it's the truest story one can tell, not just of this man's life but of humanity. And this is why we who sit at his feet are no longer afraid. Nothing is going to stop love from clothing us all in himself and giving us all the mind of God.
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