First Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: Isaiah 65: 1-9 and Luke 8: 26-39
You will have noticed that we are now into the long run of ‘Sundays after Trinity’, and have reached the long ‘green’ season in the Church’s liturgical year, which now stretches out into late October except for the occasional saint’s day and harvest thanksgiving. Some of the church’s publications call it ‘ordinary time’, though there is a tendency to refrain from calling any of the Lord’s seasons ‘ordinary’, lest it sounds unexciting or boring.
And it seems that the people to whom the prophet spoke in the first reading had become bored with God. The chapter starts with God waiting patiently for his people to come looking for him. When they don’t, God begins to call out in welcome, but still the people ignore him.
What are they doing that apparently has so much more appeal? They have started practising some strange rituals – sacrificing in gardens, meeting in tombs and other secret and scary places, and eating things that are spiced with the taste of uncleanness, and deliberately breaking ancient taboos. These people have made themselves a crazy, busy religion, made exciting by fear, and by trespass into the previously forbidden. What’s more, they have persuaded themselves that they have become rather superior, through these strange practices: “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.” They have muddled themselves to the point where they cannot tell the sacred from the profane or the just plain stupid.
Now these folk wouldn’t be alone. There are plenty of strange practices and customs in Christian worship and in church life generally. One doesn’t mind if they are an aid to worship and a drawing near to God, but if that is not the case, and they are a hindrance to true devotion to anyone, then it’s time to think again.
In the reading we heard, God can’t stand it any longer. “These [people] are smoke in my nostrils.” The straw that breaks the camel’s back is the use of their word ‘holy’. Sadly, the people have lost all ability to recognize real holiness, and so to recognize God. So the Lord vows to act and contest what they are doing.
Just as the people in Isaiah have chosen a world of illusion and madness, and can only be restored to wholeness at great cost, so the story of the demon-possessed man in the gospel reading is about madness and sanity. Was he mad, bad or just sad – that man who lived among the tombs? Did he choose to live among the tombs, or did others drive him away from society? His life is lonely and pitiful.
And yet, in an ironic twist, it is the ‘mad man’ who recognizes who Jesus is. Now to the modern reader the idea of demon possession is quite a difficult concept. We would look at this character who had become known as ‘Legion’, and think of mental disturbance or other mental illness; psychosis, schizophrenia or other similar terms. But in New Testament days, demons were thought of as real supernatural beings associated with individuals. These daimones to use the Greek word, gave substance to people’s lived experience of forces outside human control or understanding. A person comes into Worcester cathedral occasionally when I am there with this lived experience, telling me the exact day and time he was overcome. So before we dismiss the story of the madman, spare a thought for people who do feel they have been overtaken by dark forces today.
John Pridmore bids us note three disturbing prayers or requests in that gospel story. Firstly, the man or the demon cries out ‘Do not torment me.’ Then the demons beg Jesus not to order them back into the abyss. Then thirdly, the people of the region ask Jesus to clear off somewhere else.
The incident is designed to show us that Jesus has real authority over evil spirits. But more than that, we see Jesus searching for the lost soul – the ‘love that will not let me go’ – relentless and unsparing. Such is the love we often wish would leave us alone. This man had so many demons that he had become known as ‘Legion’. We learn that because Jesus asked his name, and it seems he had forgotten it, so long was it since he had been addressed properly.
In the second prayer, the demons beg Jesus not to send them back into the abyss – the abode of ‘the beast’ which is mentioned in Revelation. They would rather be lodging in the mind of this crazed unhappy man. But, again, before we dismiss this idea of real demons, we should ask whether we are prepared to let our particular demons go, or is it more comfortable to stay with them? You’ll remember the story in John’s gospel about the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, but never managed to get into the healing waters of the Pool of Bethzatha because someone else got there first. Jesus asked him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ Or was it said in a different way “Do you really want to be made well, or are you content to stay as you are and complain about your lot all the time?” As a missionary once pointed out, “What matters are not the metaphysical questions, but what we do about what possess us – our obsessions, our embedded resentments, and our unhealed memories.”
The third question was that of the people of the locality. They begged Jesus to leave their district. It seems rather odd, since they had just witnessed a miracle and a man returned to health. But at that sight they were afraid – ‘they were seized with great fear.’ Perhaps they reasoned, ‘if Jesus changed that man’s life so radically, would he change ours?’ Do we really want this awkward, unsettling, threatening figure around? It is not the first time in this gospel that Jesus is asked to go, for Simon Peter, after witnessing a fishing miracle, cries out “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” When we see Jesus as he is in all his power and authority, we realize how mortal and fallible we are. But there is more than one meaning of ‘fear’. And the Gerasene people, instead of being drawn into faith by what they’d witnessed, allowed fear to separate them from God. They forget that to fear God is to grow to know him, and that this fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that, in the words of 1 John, ‘perfect love casts out fear.’
There is, in fact, a fourth prayer. The healed man asks to stay with Jesus – a reasonable request, one would think. But, no! Jesus sends him home so that he will tell everyone what God has done for him.
A closing prayer by Judith Dimond:
Most High God, I long to be made clean and free of all that torments me; my fears and my sins which stop me living in your abundance. I give thanks that you so willingly release me, and pledge myself to tell of your power in my life. Amen.