THEY WENT ACROSS the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. 2When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain. 4For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
6When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!” 8For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!”
9Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.
11A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13He gave them permission, and the evil spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
14Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. 15When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 16Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well. 17Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.
18As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. 19Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” 20So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.
Original Meaning
JESUS DOES NOT limit his miracles to one side of the lake. He declares God’s rule and sows God’s grace far and wide, including the region of the Gerasenes.1 Crossing the lake to an area where swine are kept is more than a sportive outing. Jesus embarks on a daring invasion to claim alien turf under enemy occupation and reveals that there is no place in the world into which God’s reign does not intend to extend itself. The confrontation that ensues reveals that every square inch, at sea and on the land, will be contested by Satan.
The Encounter with a Demon-Possessed Man (5:1–5)
AS JESUS DISEMBARKS from the boat, he immediately locks horns with another person in the grip of demons. Wherever Jesus goes, his holy presence, like some chemical catalyst, triggers an immediate reaction from the unholy. These demons do not cower in fear but cause the man to rush at Jesus. Mark alone gives us a vivid account of this man’s condition and how he had been treated. This description reveals that he is “as storm-tossed by the demons as the disciples’ boat had been.”2 The man’s home is the unclean place of the dead,3 and he himself is home to unclean (evil) spirits.4 He may have survived in the tombs by feeding off food that had been left for the dead. The tattered remnants of his clothing symbolized the wreckage of his life. His harum-scarum behavior apparently had spooked the community in which he lived. They tried unsuccessfully to bind him, but he was powerful enough to snap the fetters and chains like string (5:3).
The fierce strength of this demon-possessed man is reiterated in 5:5: No one had the strength to “subdue” him. The Greek word used here (damazo) is used for taming a wild animal and is better translated, “no one was able to tame him.” Obviously this demoniac roams free because all attempts to constrain him have failed. He is one tough customer, and only a power more potent than iron bars and chains will bridle him. Translating the verb “tame” also opens up another dimension to the text. It strikes us immediately that something is wrong. One does not normally “tame” human beings; one tames wild animals (or the tongue, James 3:8). People treat him like a wild animal, and he acts like one.
He is banished as an outcast from society and must dwell with those whose sleep will not be disturbed by his shrieks echoing through the night as he lacerates his body with stones.5 He is a microcosm of the whole of creation, inarticulately groaning for redemption (Rom. 8:22). He is condemned to live out his days alone amid the decaying bones of the dead, with no one who loves him and no one to love. Malignant spirits always deface humanity and destroy life.
The Encounter with Unclean Spirits (5:6–13)
MARK PRESENTS A suspenseful confrontation between Jesus and the evil spirit(s) that control this ravaged man. The puzzling shifts in number from the singular (5:7, 9, 10) to the plural (5:9, 12, 13) suggest that the evil spirits are using him as a mouthpiece and that he is a miniature Pandemonium, the abode of all demons. Apparently, Jesus was telling the evil spirit to come out of the man (5:8), which meets with evasive tactics. Unlike humans, who cannot quite fathom the reality of the divine breaking into human history (4:41), evil spirits always recognize Jesus’ divine origin (1:24; 3:11; see James 2:19) and quake in his presence. They know that they are pitted against vastly superior firepower.
These demons, however, are feisty. In their desperate attempt to resist any exorcism, they are momentarily successful in creating a standoff with gambits from an exorcist’s bag of tricks. This is no ordinary demon that can be dismissed with only a word to shut up and leave. They try to wheel and deal as equals, and the struggle not only makes for an entertaining account but makes Jesus’ ultimate victory all the more significant.6 Nevertheless, the exorcism requires a struggle.
The evasive tactics consist of the demonized man prostrating himself before Jesus. Whether this action is counterfeit worship or conniving submission, the evil spirits employ subterfuge to persuade Jesus to leave them alone. The man in their clutches cries out with a loud voice, “What do you want with me?” (cf. 1:24), and attempts to control Jesus by pronouncing his name, “Jesus, Son of the Most High God.” As noted earlier, it was assumed that one had power over others when one knew their name. When they pronounce Jesus’ name, they are basically saying, “We’ve got your number.” They also abjure Jesus by the name of God not to torment them (presumably to destroy them, 1:24), although they themselves had tormented this poor man past endurance. They invoke the name of God to keep the Son of God off their back—to protect themselves.
Jesus seems to parry these diversionary tactics by asking for the demon’s name. The evil spirits evade the question, however, by giving a number instead of a name: “My name is Legion” (5:9), the number in a Roman regiment (consisting of 6,000 foot soldiers and 120 horsemen). This man is captive to a legion of demons (cf. 5:15, “the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons”), at least enough “to drive 2,000 swine crazy.”7 This explains the switch to third-person plural verbs in 5:12–13 and the plural “evil spirits” (5:13). An engrossing battle of wits between Jesus and the demons unfolds as the evil spirits worry about being forced to leave their familiar surroundings. It would make sense from a Jewish perspective for demons to be most at home in this pagan setting. They perceive it to be their territory, but the kingdom of God manifest in Jesus’ ministry is laying claim to all the earth. There is no protectorate of Satan that is safe.
It was popular belief in the first century that evil spirits were not content to wander aimlessly about. They abhor a vacuum and want to inhabit something. A human host is best; wanting that, a bunch of pigs will do. Anything is better than wandering in dry places (Matt. 12:43; Luke 11:24) or being consigned to the sea if you are a land demon.8 The evil spirits therefore request to be sent into an enormously large herd of pigs feeding on the hillside.
Jesus seems all too gracious in granting the request, but it leads to the surprise ending. Christians are warned to watch because “your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He is even ready to devour a herd of pigs. These demons create fits of frenzy in whatever they inhabit, and the very thing they want to avert happens. The united legionary force is broken up as the pigs, an animal without a herd instinct, begin to stampede, lemminglike, down the bank and into the waters, where both they and the evil spirits are destroyed.9 The destructive power of the sea that almost sank the disciples’ boat now swallows up the pigs.10 Jesus, who has just demonstrated his dominion over the sea (4:39, 41; compare Pss. 65:7; 88:9; 106:9; 107:23–32), does not need to know the names of the evil spirits in order to drive them out. The kamikaze demons “fall victim to their own designs and tumble headlong into chaos.”11 “The joke is on them.”12 From a Jewish perspective, the scene is a joke: unclean spirits and unclean animals are both wiped out in one fell swoop, and a human being is cleansed.
The Encounter with the Townspeople (5:14–17)
THE TOWNSPEOPLE’S RESPONSE to the man’s restoration (5:15–17) is startling. When the community arrives, they are not frightened by what has happened to the pigs but by seeing this man now clothed and in his right mind! They do not rejoice at his recovery but are afraid. What is so scary about seeing a person sitting at the feet of Jesus? The community had desperately tried to tame him with chains and fetters, all to no avail. Now Jesus frees him from the chains of demons with a word. The disciples have also expressed fear at Jesus’ manifestation of great power (4:41) and wondered who this one with them is.
These townspeople do not seem to care that Jesus has such power; they just want him gone. Instead of giving him the key to the city, they give him a cold shoulder. The demons had begged Jesus to let them stay in the region (5:10); the townspeople now beg Jesus to leave the region. They are more comfortable with the malevolent forces that take captive human beings and destroy animals than they are with the one who can expel them. They can cope with the odd demon-possessed wild man who terrorizes the neighborhood with random acts of violence. But they want to keep someone with Jesus’ power at lake’s length—on the other side of the sea. They must consider Jesus more dangerous and worrisome than the demons.
Demons tend to keep to their own turf, but who can control someone with such power as Jesus possesses? As Jesus had granted the request of the demons, he now also grants the request of the community to leave them. This benighted community becomes another example of the outsiders who see but do not see, who hear what happens but who do not hear (4:10–12). They do not recognize the help that Jesus offers and do not invite him to stay or bring their sick and demonized to him (8:16; 9:32). They chase off the source of their deliverance and salvation. People can tolerate religion as long as it does not affect business profits (Acts 16:19; 19:24–27).
Jesus’ Instructions to the Restored Man (5:18–20)
THE SPOTLIGHT SHIFTS back to the man, whose fear of Jesus is vanquished with the expulsion of the demons. He is seated, the position of the disciple (Luke 10:39; Acts 22:3), and requests to “to be with Jesus,” the role of the disciple (3:14). The community has begged Jesus to leave them (5:17); this man begs to be with Jesus (5:18). Another surprising twist in the account comes when Jesus declines his petition—the only request that he does not grant in this story. Mark does not give us any explanation for this refusal.13 While Jesus’ dismissal of this man may seem like bad news, it can only be good news for one who yearned for the warmth of family, for a sense of place and identity, and for a sense of purpose.14 Jesus sends him to his own house so that he can be restored to his family.
Jesus also reverses his usual demand of silence by telling the man to spread the news how God has mercied him. Why? Is it because he does not fear a messianic upsurge in the midst of Gentiles or because this place needs some witness to begin sowing the word? Jesus may grant the community’s wishes for him to leave, but he leaves this disturbing evidence of his presence. The infamous man with the legion remains to proclaim how he has been delivered by God’s mercy. The upshot is that the preaching of the gospel about Jesus expands into the Decapolis.15 The splash created by the testimony of the man is more effective in divulging who Jesus is than the splash created by the demons in the pigs.
A Christological subtlety in 5:19–20 should not be overlooked. Jesus tells the man, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” (5:19). The man is not simply to tell people about the miracle that happened to him but what that miracle signifies: The Lord has been at work. Yet Jesus is the one who healed him, and the man announces the things that Jesus has done for him (5:20). For Jesus, all that he does is designed to bring glory to God. For Mark, Jesus is synonymous with the Lord (1:3; 12:36–7). Where Jesus acts, God acts.16
Bridging Contexts
THIS ACCOUNT RAISES two interesting issues for our attempts to bring this story into our age. (1) It serves as an example of prevenient grace. (2) This brush with demonic slavery requires careful analysis before we can communicate its message successfully to our contemporary culture. The encounter has multifaceted dimensions, each of which can speak to different modern situations.
An Example of Prevenient Grace
Isaiah 65:1–5a forms an interesting backdrop for this story:
“I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me;
I was found by those who did not seek me.
To a nation that did not call on my name,
I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’
All day long I have held out my hands
to an obstinate people,
who walk in ways not good,
pursuing their own imaginations—
a people who continually provoke me
to my very face,
offering sacrifices in gardens
and burning incense on altars of brick;
who sit among the graves
and spend their nights keeping secret vigil;
who eat the flesh of pigs,
and whose pots hold broth of unclean meat;
who say, ‘Keep away; don’t come near me,
for I am too sacred for you!’”17
One can immediately spot the parallels with the story in Mark: the mention of demons (5:2; Isa. 65:3), dwelling in the tombs (5:3, 5; Isa. 65:4a), the warning to keep away (5:7; Isa. 65:5a), and the reference to the pigs (5:11; Isa. 65:4b). This Isaian backdrop helps clarify that Jesus lands at a place awash in pagan practices and one that has not called on God’s name (Isa. 65:1). For the early Christian community, this story may have provided proof that the gospel was to extend beyond the holy confines of Israel to a heathenish world.
This case hardly needs to be made to churches today, but reading this incident alongside the Isaiah narrative brings out the theological principle of prevenient grace that governs the spread of the kingdom of God. God takes the initiative in turning to human beings—even those across the lake in an unholy land filled with swine and demons. God searches out those who have never searched for or thought about turning to God. The psalmist says, “I call on the LORD in my distress, and he answers me” (Ps. 120:1). The demoniac’s incoherent cries are directed into the air to no god in particular. Not surprisingly, they receive no answer. He is not seeking God or even seeking healing. Caught in the web of demonic powers, he even resists healing when it comes. The region where he resides also resists it. Yet we see the power of God’s mercy and love that captures and transforms those who do not even know that it exists and may initially resist it when it invades their lives.
A Multifaceted Account
TO BUILD A bridge to our world, it helps to recognize that what happens in this story is multifaceted. Jesus encounters three different characters in the story: the evil spirits, whom he outfoxes; the man, whom he heals; and the community, whom he frightens. Each of these makes a request. The demons beg him to allow them to stay in the same country and to send them into the nearby swine. The community begs him to leave their country. The man begs to be with him. Jesus grants every request except the man’s.
Engaging the demonic. Jesus’ victory over wily and death-dealing spirits returns to one of Mark’s themes: Jesus’ power over the demonic, the dark side of reality, which enslaves and dehumanizes human beings. Jesus crosses to the opposite side of the lake and has the strength to rout even the most severe cases of evil spirits with sensational effects. The story emphasizes the drastic nature of the man’s possession, and the large number of demons who try to fend off being expelled underscores the difficulty of the exorcism. The man is under the control of a demonic force that appears to use him as a personal gymnasium. When one compares the accounts of Jesus’ exorcisms to stories of exorcisms from the contemporary Greco-Roman world, one thing stands out: Jesus does not resort to any special techniques employed by other exorcists to purge the demons—such as odd recipes, secret prayers, bizarre formulae, or knowledge of the names of the demons or their thwarting angel. The power of his person alone drives the demons out.
Many today, however, including conservative Christians, are put off by stories of demons, particularly one that records what seems to be a wanton destruction of two thousand innocent animals. This story is also likely to disturb anyone who sympathizes with the aims of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Some ask, Why were these innocent pigs destroyed? Consequently, preachers are tempted to shy away from this passage.
Indeed, one might wonder, if God knows every sparrow that falls, does he also know when pigs drown? But Jesus’ point about the sparrows is that God knows and cares about birds that are not worth two cents to humans. How much more will God care about humans who are of more value than a sparrow (Matt. 10:29–31)? From Jesus’ perspective, the deranged man in this incident is of more value than two thousand pigs. Modern hearers frequently miss this point because they are more sensitive to the problem of the destruction of innocent animals and the loss of someone’s property. One therefore needs to make clear that Jesus did not consign the animals to destruction in the sea. The demonic spirits ignited the rampage that led to their destruction, not Jesus.
Characters such as Piglet, Porky Pig, Miss Piggy, and Babe have won our hearts, and we feel no aversion to pigs. Consequently, some background on the Jewish aversion to pigs helps explain why their violent demise would have evoked cheers instead of tears. The deep antipathy toward these animals has nothing to do with the biblical injunction against eating pork (Lev. 11:7–8). In first-century Palestine, swine’s flesh was associated with the brutal persecution of Jews by pagans, who wanted to eradicate peculiar Jewish practices. An account in 1 Maccabees 6:18–31 and 7:1–42 poignantly describes the gallantry of those who endured extreme torture and refused to compromise their faith when forced to eat swine’s flesh, a symbolic rejection of the religion of their fathers. Swine were therefore indelible reminders of paganism and persecution. On hearing this account, Jews would have hailed the swine’s destruction as a token of God’s ultimate vindication over the powers of oppression. There is no similar phenomenon associated with animals in our culture, although modern readers would probably not think twice if the animals destroyed by demons run amok were a pack of bubonic plague-carrying rats or a nest of venomous snakes.
Even if one can resolve the destruction of the animals, one may still be uncomfortable with the demons in this incident. Judging from the media, moderns are becoming interested in angels, perhaps because they are so benign and seem nondenominational. But they are not sure what to make of demons, and many choose to neglect this biblical subject altogether. Some modern hearers will therefore miss the point of this story because they are put off by the idea of exorcisms. By contrast, C. Peter Wagner writes confidently about real battles in various parts of the world with powers experienced as personal beings.18 He reflects the views of many Christians today, who do not question that demons are real, created, personal beings. Since the Bible takes for granted that such beings exist, so do they; and they assume that Jesus’ confrontation with demons reflects a reality that our modern scientific approaches cannot measure or grasp. They recognize that evil is attributable to Satan, who violently resists God’s good purposes for creation.
But how does one communicate with those many others who dismiss any idea that supernatural evil beings can take control of a person’s life as a relic of ancient superstition? Such persons would probably feel more comfortable with a polysyllabic medical term to describe this man’s condition, and psychiatrists might propose several possible psychoses. Others might blame the man’s condition on a chemical imbalance, a history of being abused as a child, or some genetic propensity to violence. By giving this condition a scientific name, perhaps we believe that we can understand it and have some control over it. Such diagnoses might make the account more attractive to those who are unsympathetic to supernatural phenomena, but they do not solve the problem of evil. We may change the names of the demons, but they are not thereby conquered and they do not lose their malice. As Leenhardt perceptively observes, “We have renamed the demons of the past, but we have not exorcised them.”19
One need not try to recreate in a congregation a first-century worldview about the demonic. That is not our task. But we do need to make people aware that we are up against supernatural powers that oppose God, destroy life, deface it, defeat it, and deform it. Daniel Day Williams wrote that the belief that evil issues from a “power from beyond the self may be more realistic than humanism, which expects its overcoming through human effort alone.” That belief is not only more realistic, it is, from the New Testament perspective, essential. It will prevent us from naively putting our trust in some wistful idea of inevitable human progress and will keep us from ever fooling ourselves into thinking that we can get along fine without God. Sometimes tragic events force us to admit that an evil exists beyond that which lurks in the hearts of individuals. Williams quotes Alfred Weber’s description of his experience in Europe between the two world wars:
It was as if certain forces sprang up out of the ground; giants of action, crafty, hungry for power, which nobody had noticed before, seemed to shoot up like a crop of dragon’s teeth.20
One newspaper columnist wrote in response to a terrorist bombing that slaughtered many innocent people, including a day-care center: “From what universe beyond this one that most of us inhabit does this kind of evil arise?” A belief in supernatural evil powers keeps us from whittling down the source of evil to our size and prevents us from deceiving ourselves that we can defeat it alone. People need to recognize that creation is fallen and needs redeeming, for then they will look to the One who has the power to redeem it. The incident with the Gerasene demoniac therefore has relevance even for skeptics. It shows that through Christ God is eradicating what Rosa Coldfield, in William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom, called “the sickness at the heart of things.”
One should also make a careful distinction between the demonized person and the satanic. In the New Testament, the demonized individual is a victim to be pitied and to be liberated from oppression. Such people are never rebuked, never told to repent, and never told that their sins are forgiven. The demoniacs are never aggressive unless one interferes with them or darkens the door of the places where they have withdrawn.
The satanic is another matter, however. There is a difference between being possessed by Satan’s minions and playing the role of Satan. The satanic is aggressive, responsible, and guilty. The satanic is a victimizer. It does not need to be liberated; it needs to be judged. A direct relationship exists between the sin and the predicament. The satanic needs repentance so that it will become submissive to the will of God. For example, we recognize that there is a difference between the drug abuser who has turned to drugs because he or she sees no other hope in a dreary and despairing life, and the drug kingpin who sells drugs simply to make profit and to live well off the suffering of others. This analogy breaks down, however, because in the New Testament no direct causal connection exists between the predicament of the demoniac and any sin he or she may have committed. There is no hint that the demoniac invited the demons to take control of his life. Therefore, those who are possessed are not told to repent. What they desperately need is a new, benevolent power to come into their lives and take control. This is what Christ offers the wreck of a man in this story.
Engaging a deranged human. The destructive power of the demonic that can take over a human life is an important ingredient in the story. One can also approach the story from the perspective of Jesus’ engagement with a human being whom everyone regards as a madman. This man has been written off by others as a hopeless, terrifying, rogue elephant. Others have so brutalized him that when he sees Jesus, he sees only another who comes to torment him—like a dog that has been mercilessly beaten or a child who has been outrageously abused. Evil has so completely taken over his life that it assumes a personality of its own. It distorts his perception of reality. The man has no sense of self-identity; he does not know who he is.
But when he meets with Jesus’ powerful mercy, he is restored to wholeness. His encounter with Jesus makes him fully human again, with a family, a home, and a mission in life. He no longer is a beast whom people thought needed to be tamed, but a human being called to proclaim the explosion of God’s mercy in his life. How is it that Jesus can transform this berserk derelict into a sane and well-balanced human with just a word? The incident is a perfect illustration of what happens in conversion. C. S. Lewis recalls the imagery of this story in describing his life before his conversion as “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.”21
Engaging a possessed community. Mark goes into detail about how others tried to overpower this man (5:3–4) and then describes how those who converged on the scene begged Jesus to leave their neighborhood. These details do not simply add color to the narrative but indicate that this incident also has to do with Jesus’ encounter with the community. It is a community that beats, chains, and dehumanizes other human beings. It knows only how to use force, how to crack down on madmen, and how to protect its property. But this community fears someone like Jesus, who wields a different kind of power. It expresses total indifference to the restoration of a human being to wholeness, particularly if they deem the cost too high. It prefers pigs to the healing of individual demoniacs.
The passage also reveals something about the societal nature of evil. Societies are no less possessed in their angry punishment of poor wretches who are discarded on the waste heap of humanity for interfering with normal society. This community opts for violent solutions to problems that solve nothing and only compound the agony. They ignore Jesus’ way of compassion and mercy. This facet of the account, which reveals a society possessed by violence and money, should not be ignored. Wink raises the issue:
What troubles me … is that by attempting to fight the demons “in the air,” evangelicals and charismatics will continue largely to ignore the institutional sources of the demonic. By so doing, they will fail to do the hard political and economic analysis necessary to name, unmask, and engage these Powers transformatively.22
In bringing the contexts to our lives, we may try to deal with all three different vantage points in presenting this story or we may focus on one or two. We cannot neglect, however, the focus on Jesus’ power to drive out evil, which is beyond any human power to control.
Contemporary Significance
MOST PEOPLE IN Western societies today do not fear the influence of demons. If modern movies and novels are any indication, however, people today do have a sense of foreboding that some supernatural, malicious evil is out there that haunts and assaults human beings in a seemingly arbitrary way.
Movie producers and novelists capitalize on this modern uneasiness in their science fiction thrillers and horror tales. In these plots, an insidious alien power bursts on the scene. It usually takes the form of some virtually indestructible being who can metamorphose into any shape and is bent on destroying individuals and eventually the whole world. Other movies have to do with an outbreak of some deadly, incurable disease that strikes fear throughout a region and threatens to devastate it. Still others center on a murderous human monster who has nine lives and comes back in sequel after sequel to savage his victims. The villains are usually dispatched by some violent means or scientific wizardry, which ends the movie but never completely solves the problem. These cinematic battles that pit the forces of light (so-called) against the forces of darkness show no knowledge of God’s purposes or power to overcome evil and have no awareness of how God works to defeat it. They assume that humans have the power and ingenuity to expel the evil from our midst.
Mark presents a quite different picture of the source of evil and how it is overcome. Evil comes from a demonic power that seizes human beings. It is not something that we can defeat on our own. It takes a greater supernatural power to vanquish it—the power of God. Martin Luther’s words are apropos:
Did we in our own strength confide
Our striving would be losing.
Only in Christ can we find “a shelter from the stormy blast” and the power to overcome demonic forces, which can swamp not only individuals but whole nations and continents. Only in Christ are we delivered from the dominion of evil powers. In Mark’s account we also see that this evil is dispatched when Jesus calmly speaks a word. All of the violence is caused by the evil spirits, not by Jesus. Mark emphasizes Jesus’ mercy (5:19), not his blustering power, that vanquishes evil. In Christ we see God destroying evil through love.
The exorcisms are visible aspects of God’s rule. Jesus routs the demonic forces; those who are in Christ may take their power seriously but need not fear them today.23 They also need not bemoan the sad state of affairs in our fallen world. One can confidently join in the battle against these powers that take others captive, knowing that God is on our side.
Sydney H. T. Page argues that we have much to gain from revitalizing a belief in the supernatural world and from renewing the biblical emphasis on conflict and victory. He offers several important cautions, however.24 (1) Such beliefs, if they become exaggerated, breed fear and paranoia. We should not see demons behind every rock and tree, ready to ambush unsuspecting, innocent bystanders. The exorcisms in Mark convey exactly the opposite mood. Jesus is always victorious. The enemy powers are being vanquished—usually with just one little word. (2) One may be tempted to blame demons for everything and thereby evade any personal responsibility. Some things that people call demons are simply the displays of human vices. (3) Some present-day expressions of belief in demons border on the superstitious and sub-Christian. One should exercise discernment and not accept every claim about the demonic at face value. (4) Scripture shuns any attempt to name and rank demons, and one should avoid any such speculation. We do not conquer demons by knowing their names. (5) Demon possession is a rare phenomenon. We should not explain every strange behavior as demonic or label every human opponent as demonic. Those who focus their efforts on a sensational warfare with demons and the rescuing of their victims may neglect the more mundane spiritual warfare that each Christian must wage in his or her own heart. People today are more likely to be controlled by a legion of cravings, captivations, and destructive impulses than by a legion of demons.
The story can also be looked at from the vantage point of the demoniac, who meets Jesus and is restored to wholeness. Those uncomfortable with the story about demons should not skip over it in embarrassment. The text also allows one to look at it as a struggle with a demented mind. This man is a rent soul, raw and infected with fear and fury. He inflicts wounds on himself in a vain attempt to relieve his inner torment. When the man sees Jesus, he sees only another tormentor because something has penetrated his being that prevents his liberation. The bonds of Satan are far stronger than the human chains. He is much like Benjy, the gelded man with the mental capacity of a two-year-old in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, a tale told by an idiot. Benjy would wail for long periods of time, and his brother Jason would beat him quiet. “Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”25 Like Benjy, the man in Mark 5 experiences a misery that does not know how to voice its pain except in loud groans. The pain is deep, whether it is from the torment within, from the times people trying to beat him quiet, or from the times he lacerated himself with stones.
We may see a mirror of ourselves in this disturbed man—beaten down by others, divided against ourselves, a civil war raging within, living among the gloomy tombs of life, and feeling all alone. Lowry has paraphrased this man’s response to Jesus:
I feel like 6,000 soldiers inside me … sometimes they all march left, sometimes right … sometimes in all different directions. I’m pulled one way, then another. There’s an army inside me, and I think I’m losing the war.26
If we can recognize ourselves in this tortured man, we can also see that deliverance is not something that someone else needs—derelicts and foaming lunatics. The power of the gospel is also for us. We are just as battered, though we may do a better job of hiding it behind our coherent words, our well-kept homes, and our smart attire. But deliverance can also come to us when Jesus lands on the shores of our lives. The great calm that came over the sea (4:39) matches the great calm that now governs this man, who now sits fully clothed and quietly at Jesus’ feet (5:15).
The problem is that those who need deliverance most sometimes offer the greatest resistance. The tormented man begged Jesus not to send his demons too far away, which reveals that he does not want to be delivered. He wants “Legion” to stay close by. Sigmund Freud said that there is something within the patient, “a force which defends itself with all its means against healing and definitely wants to cling to the illness and to the suffering.”27 Many counselors have experienced this resistance in their clients. Persons come for therapy, saying that they want to change, and then fight for all their worth against changing themselves. Some people find security in the demons they know and are afraid to be delivered from them. One can derive comfort from Jesus’ persistence in this account. He will not be put off by evasive tactics and does not give up the fight to deliver this one from his personal demons.
This incident also has to do with a community that resists supernatural power. They are callously indifferent to the restoration of a man. It is one thing to encounter the impersonal forces of evil in nature run amok in an individual; it is quite another to encounter them in a whole community. Whole societies and institutions can be caught in the grips of evil and never recognize it.
We might ask whether our society treats people like this demonized man in the same way. Do we beat and chain persons and drive them from our midst so that they must fend for themselves in the contemporary equivalent of the tombs? They are usually the kind of broken persons we label as dangerous. More often than not, we deny bearing any responsibility for their condition and shift all the blame for their problems onto them. We exonerate ourselves by making them the scapegoats for society’s ills. It is their problem, not ours. We allow them to hole up by themselves with their raging anguish in the graveyards of their lives. We may put blind trust in the use of force, stone walls, iron bars, and police crackdowns to keep them away.
The solutions to such problems are not more government programs, better housing, or prison reform, though these may alleviate some pain. People who live in such lonely despair need to meet Jesus Christ and allow that encounter to transform their lives. Churches, however, have fled the places where these troubled human beings usually gather to settle in more comfortable locations. Who will bring Christ to them? And when they meet Jesus Christ and there are no jobs, decent housing, or good schools and covert discrimination still prevails, major problems remain. Evangelism must go hand in hand with social concern.
The solution is a power that comes from without, but some may be too afraid to let that power loose in their own lives, let alone to unleash it on society. Healing, compassion, and evangelism have their costs, and many do not want to pay. Perhaps people fear that they will be healed at the expense of losing more pigs. Concern for the bottom line may outweigh concern for those caught in the grips of suffering. Calvin Stowe, for example, a professor of biblical studies, lived in the shadow of his more internationally famous wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the poignant denunciation of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When she toured England, he preached before a large crowd gathered to observe Anti-Slavery Day. He told the listeners in no uncertain terms that they were hypocrites. They were proud that slavery had long since disappeared in England, but 80 percent of the cotton picked by slaves in the southern states was bought by England. He said slavery would die in America if England would boycott its cotton and went on to ask, “Are you willing to sacrifice one penny of your profits to do way with slavery?” The crowd booed.28