Frightened by Jesus – 21 June 2013

When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.  And they were afraid.  Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.  Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.  [Luke 8: 35-37]

Congregations next Sunday will be edified by -- as it has always seemed to me -- this difficult and unpleasant story.  Jesus, in gentile territory, exorcises the demons from a psychopath who lives and rages among the tombstones.  The demons, after a conversation with Jesus, enter a herd of gentile pigs, which then stampede over a cliff to their deaths.  Wonderful.   I can’t elucidate this event in any real way.  I think the church remembered and recorded it because it was spectacular, mainly –and placed it alongside the raising of the daughter of Jairus, the stilling of the storm, and the instant healing of the woman with the haemorrhage.   It appeals to those in the church who need to be fed with the dramatic and miraculous.  In contemplative life and prayer we tend not to be quite so impressed.  We experience faith more in day-to-day things, the intractable and unanswered questions, the mysteries of life and its injustices, and the simple need each day to put one foot in front of the other.

One of the puzzling aspects of this story however we might consider.  When the local people saw the madman at last clothed and in his right mind, and listening to Jesus, they were afraid, says the writer.  Eventually the people asked Jesus to leave their district because, says the writer, they were seized with great fear.  What are they afraid of?  The man, ostensibly, was healed.  Was it that they had lost their pigs?  That would be upsetting, but not frightening, surely.

How do we normally process and manage life in a world of much evil, violence, hideous illness?  We hope it all keeps far away, never comes near us, we cope by being able to carry on provided it is always at a distance.  The madman was obliged to live outside the town in the cemetery.  I remember trying to deal with some angry parishioners who had their dream home in a street where, suddenly, it was proposed to use a nearby house as an IHC home.  But now, here is Jesus upsetting the precarious balance of trying to have everything nice in the town and everything nasty somewhere else.  He is making the demoniac one of us. 

But still, this is one of the passages of scripture I find really difficult, mainly because the world view of the 21^st century is far removed from the world view of Jesus’s day.  But evil and suffering have not changed, and neither has the often irrational fear it all generates.  In our prayer we are exposed to the love that casts out fear, and we are in the company and sharing the prayer of the one who constantly asked, Why are you afraid?