Our demons – 17 June 2016

The gospel lesson for next Sunday is Luke’s telling of Jesus’s encounter with the madman of Gerasa and his demons.  We find this related in all three synoptic gospels, with much variation.  The story clearly worried the early church – and it is a big problem for various reasons.  My first self-protective instinct was to talk about something else this morning.  But this unpleasant narrative does have a weird challenge about it – how can we talk intelligently and meaningfully in the 21^st century, as people of faith, about demons and madness…?

I think it is worth noting that Luke has sandwiched this story between the dramatic account of Jesus stilling the storm on the lake, and the incidents where Jesus instantly heals a woman with a chronic haemorrhage, and then raises a dead child to life.  So Jesus is being depicted as having supernatural power, over the storm, over the world of demons, and over sickness and even death.  And we have to ask, all the more urgently… How do we approach all this in our day, sensibly, sensitively, without surrendering to naiveté and superstition, in order to hear what these things may be saying to us about God and faith.

Of course the story comes to us in 1^st century terms.  Madness was demon possession.  Jesus could speak to the demons.  The man lived chained up naked in the graveyard.  He had no name but called himself Legion.  And animal rights people just have to endure the fact that Jesus orders the demons into a lot of pigs, which are forthwith drowned in the lake.  Of course, strict Jews would have thought that was appropriate for pigs, unclean animals – rather in the way the Nazis thought it appropriate to torment Jews because they were only Untermenschen, sub-human, anyway. 

Now… The more I think about this, the more I realise that I am not at all ready to wave any light dismissal to demons.  There is a pitch of evil which is not explained by all our science.  We don’t explain it by demons either.  But when we say, for instance, that someone has personal demons, it is a graphic way of referring to a reality.   I wonder, do we teach serious sustained history in our schools anymore?  My teachers were people steeped in the ancient classics and onwards, and they understood in the human record that, like eruptions on the skin, evil simply breaks through into human activity and society, and even the most intelligent of us can default to it and become captive to it.  We have seen this over and over in history, and we are most certainly seeing it in our day.  The evil which compelled a man to murder 49 people and injure as many more, from motives of pure hatred, in a Florida nightclub.  The evil which is compelling thousands of crazed men with guns, around Syria and Libya and other parts, killing people and laying waste to the land.  The evil which drives football fans to turn into drunken mobs, mindlessly attacking others…  And I have no time even to get started on the evils of injustice and inequality, much more complex, which see people left without the utter basics of food, water, housing or safety, health care or education. 

It seems to me, as a Christian believer, that evil stalks abroad.  It seems to me also that in this story of the Gerasene demoniac we have, an ancient picture, of Jesus confronting the evil, bringing light and health, delivering, and creating anew.  It has been and remains true in the lives of many believers.  The deliverer, this Jesus, is whom we encounter in our silence and submission.