Casting out demons

I’m so glad we’re all here today for this Gospel story about Jesus casting out demons.  How many of you read the lectionary texts ahead of time—and you knew this was coming—and you showed up anyway?  How many of you want to leave right now?  Oh don’t leave, the fun part starts now! 

This story of Jesus sending demons into a herd of pigs—it’s a weird story.  Biblical scholar Ched Myers says that the imagery of demons and exorcism is the kind of subject that reveals the crisis in our society.  An event that reveals something else—you might call that a revelation. 

Ched Myers, who does not mince words, says that in contemporary Christianity, people who identify as theologically liberal will avoid speaking of demons because it suggests a “primitive” worldview, while people with a theologically conservative framework will literalize Jesus’s deep symbolism into, he writes, “a hyper-spiritualized kind of warfare that seems inspired more by militarism than by healing.”  And that’s just the Christians—our popular culture, he writes, “pathologizes or trivializes exorcism through zombie caricatures.“[1]

This exorcism story is so weird that it reveals the crisis: we don’t understand what Jesus is doing.  How can we, since we are so far separated from this story by geography, language and culture, and thousands of years of history?  This story was somehow important enough to show up in our Bible twice: in Luke’s Gospel, as we’ve read today, and also another Gospel—does anyone know which one?  Mark. 

And yeah, we could just ignore this story, but then we’d miss out on what God is doing through Jesus and the revealing power of the Holy Spirit, revelation that is still unfolding today in our time, by the way.  And I’m grateful for scholars like Ched Myers who can study the text and listen to academic interpretation and help us understand what is going on. 

Sometimes a turn of phrase in Scripture will get your attention because it sounds almost right but not quite—did anyone else think it was weird that Jesus arrived at a town that describes a hillside where a “herd of swine was feeding?”[2]  Ched Myers made sense of this for me because—and get ready, this really blew my mind—pigs do not travel in herds.  Pigs don’t travel in herds now, and they didn’t do this back in Jesus’s time either.  But this word for the group of pigs—herd—was also the word used to refer to “a band of military recruits.”[3] 

Also weird was what this demon called himself: Legion.  That word had only one meaning in the social world where Jesus and the Gospel-writers Mark and Luke lived.  Legion meant a division of Roman soldiers.  Ched Myers found military imagery elsewhere in this text, in the way Jesus commands the demons to enter the pigs, and the image of pigs rushing into a body of water is described like troops rushing into battle.  Why pigs? Maybe because they’re unclean animals for Jewish people keeping kosher and following dietary laws, maybe pigs are easily disposable for the purposes of this story. 

Why drowning?  Are there other famous stories in the Bible about enemies drowning in the sea?  Oh yeah, way back in the story of the Exodus, when the people of God were enslaved in Egypt and Pharaoh Pharaoh finally let the people go, and Moses led them out and the Egyptian soldiers chased them all the way into the Red Sea where the waters parted for the people of God but then the waters closed down upon the soldiers and they drowned while the people of God escaped to freedom and Moses’ sister Miriam led the dancing.  Their dancing was not celebrating the loss of soliders’ lives, but celebrating that narrow escape and how God preserved life for the people of God.  Remember that story?  

And maybe you’re not familiar enough with ancient history to know details about the Jewish Revolt and locations of war crimes, and neither was I so this was new information to me too: Gerasa, the town referenced in the region of the Gerasenes, which means people of the town of Gerasa, was captured by Roman soldiers who killed one thousand of the young men and took their families captive before plundering their property and then setting fire to their houses.  Then the soldiers moved on to other villages.  

The Jewish Revolt happened around the year 66, and Jesus would have been preaching some 30-plus years before that, and the Gospels of Mark and Luke were written some years not long after the Jewish Revolt.  So while Jesus was living, this town of Gerasa had not yet been destroyed, but I suspect this destruction would be the kind of event that would loom large in the minds of people.  In the same way we can’t say the names of towns like Hiroshima and Nagasaki without thinking of the terrible things that happened there, where atomic bombs were dropped in 1945. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki both were towns before they were bombed, and they remain towns today, both with peace museums dedicated to telling the story.  And Gerasa was a town before it was overtaken by Roman soldiers, and it’s still a town today, now called Jerash, in the country of Jordan. 

For Mark and also for Luke, writing their gospels and telling the story of this town and Jesus’s visit, would they just omit this story because it brings up too much hurt, painful memories of people who would eventually be killed?  Or would they tell the story because every life matters, even the lives of people who are haunted or possessed by demons or mentally ill?  Does healing still matter, in the face of large-scale war and rampant illness? 

Apparently healing matters to Jesus, who shows up and doesn’t turn his face but engages directly with this man and his legion of demons.  The man was naked and living in a cemetery because that was the best way the people of the town knew how to deal with the situation—how many people have to set aside their humanity to allow for an arrangement like this?  And what’s actually crazier: the person with demons or illness being isolated from their community, or the people who have homes and who have resources who cannot imagine a better way to care for each other? 

People living under oppressive governments can be affected by the brutality of living in fear or living in the violence of poverty; it’s not a large-scale invasion but the day to day buildup of terror that chips away at humanity and diminishes people’s creativity for problem-solving and decreases any hope for the future. 

This story of Jesus healing the man of his legion of demons—it’s about individual healing for that one man, yes, but it’s also about the triumph of God’s power over even governments and political forces that oppress other humans. 

What happened to the demons is what happened to the pigs is what happened to those ancient Egyptian soldiers who chased the newly-liberated people of God all the way to the edge of the Red Sea—they will be drowned in the water and denied their power and stripped of the ability to inflict harm upon other people.  AND this is what we WISH could have happened to the soldiers who would eventually destroy the town of Gerasa. 

To people who are laboring under an oppressive government, to people who are experiencing the day-to-day violence of their culture being erased and their humanity stripped away, to people for whom life makes more sense without clothes and living in a cemetery: Jesus comes to set you free from whatever would threaten you and whatever would bind you and limit your movements, whether you are bound by external forces like poverty or government oppression or internal forces like illness. 

You are set free, and the man who was possessed by demons wanted to follow Jesus and leave town and tell the world!  But sometimes being set free means staying right where you are.  Jesus tells him, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” 

Home, what a delight!  And at the same time, what a monumental burden.  Home might be the place you were cast out of, by people who made sense of the world by disposing of you.  Why would you ever go back there?  How could Jesus ask such a cruel thing? 

But if you don’t tell your story, who else is gonna do it?  If you don’t participate in mending the torn fabric of your community, how is it ever gonna happen? 

Summer is often a time for family reunions.  I have some family reunions planned; do you?  Is anyone here less-than-excited about some of these gatherings of distant relatives?  Maybe you’re geographically separated, maybe you haven’t seen each other in a long time and, well, that’s kinda fine to keep it that way, to keep the peace. 

But is it truly peace if you can’t be together with your family?  That would be a pretty shallow view of peace, don’t you think? 

Anytime there’s a Gospel story that includes a healing by Jesus, the healing doesn’t stop with the person who is healed of their sickness or their injury or their disability.  The healing is meant to spread out from there, because the healing isn’t just about a single physical body, one person who is given another chance at health and abundant life.  Healing is meant for the entire community, to restore the relationships around that person who had been sick or injured or disabled. 

It's like the opposite of a virus that infects a person and spreads disease and harm.  Healing can get inside and infect a person with hope, which is so much more powerful than fear and disease.  This is the healing of the kin-dom of God.  Not a kingdom in the way human kingdoms are led by one man enthroned with ultimate power, but a kin-dom of family connections that surround with support and comfort and care for one another.  This is how God’s power works. 

It can be scary—God’s power is upsetting.  God’s power threatens the earthly powers of people who want to enslave others and colonize the lands and the minds of humans whose hope has grown dim and who lack the energy or creativity or the will to imagine that life could be any different. 

And yet Jesus shows up, healing the people most afflicted by illness, healing the people who are so far beyond hope that the rest of us cast them out of community and said ‘live in the cemetery for all I care.’  If the people of Gerasa were about to face the terrible destruction of their homes, this story would also be told about them: Jesus showed up to heal.  Maybe it doesn’t look like a big deal, or we think it’s not a big enough deal, like putting a tiny bandage on a huge gaping wound.  But healing has to start somewhere. 

The only real question left is: can healing start with you?  God’s peace on this earth requires your participation.  Can healing start with you? 

Amen.

 Pastor Cheryl

[1] Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025, page 117.

[2] Luke 8:32

[3] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988, page 191.