Casting out Demons

 

Casting out Demons

22 June 2025 Proper 7C

1 Kings 19.1-4, 8-15a            ps 42               Luke 8.26-39

It’s heartening that even in dark and anxious times - like the times we are currently living through - you still sometimes get glimpses of how things should be. Maybe you came across this before I did - but just yesterday I heard of a movement spreading across Instagram called ‘New Evangelicalism’. A heavily tattooed former pastor who rejoices in the name of Brian Recker is spreading the message that Evangelical churches in the US have been hijacked by the far right’s rhetoric of exclusion and hate, hijacked to the extent that many churches in the US have become little more than barrackers for the boorish and divisive politics of Donald Trump. Jesus - Brian Recker says - is not about exclusion, not about deportation and attacking social cohesion and supporting genocide and lining the pockets of dictators - but about love. About building up, about being for others, not against others. Well, amen to that. Amen to the church taking a stand against wickedness.

And believe it or not, from there to this morning’s Gospel reading. At first glance, a rolicking good tale, and certainly one of Jesus’ grander-scale healing miracles!

 Well, I hope it’s obvious enough that the healing of the lonely swineherd that we read about both in Mark and Luke is one of those stories where we need to take into account the difference between our own modern worldview and the worldview of the first century, where demons and good as well as evil spirits were thought to take possession of people fairly routinely.

Certainly, a lot of what passes for demon possession in the Bible we would probably think of today as mental illness, and so the story of Jesus having compassion on this unfortunate man and expelling his unwelcome psychological tenants can be a real word of hope for people who suffer from depression or anxiety.  It makes the point that God’s intention is for human beings to be whole and free.  And the authority that Jesus shows over the evil spirits reminds us that what is sometimes too hard for us is never too hard for God.  

We can legitimately generalise this story of healing. The self-defeating habits of mind, the ways in which human beings limit their own potential through negative self-talk, the unwanted baggage of failure or rejection or shame left over from some ancient episode that we mistakenly believe defines who we really are – these things are demonic in the true sense of the word because they rob us of our true selves.  And so the first thing Jesus does is to force the demons to name themselves – the identity of the man in this story is so submerged that he can no longer even give himself a real name – he says, ‘I am Legion’ - he can only name himself as the mob battling for control within and over him.  

But Jesus sees the whole person underneath the seething conflict of the forces pulling him apart.  However we think about the demons who have taken up residence in him, it is clear that this man is alienated and split off from his own true Self.  It sounds like a very modern condition, the divided and distracted self that has lost its moorings and its centre, pulled this way and that by forces it has no control over.  In expelling the demons, Jesus reminds us of the divine will for wholeness that is always at work in us, whatever our circumstances, if only we are prepared to take notice.  

Maybe this morning’s story of Elijah tells us how to do that: we recover our equilibrium, and remember our connection to God, not in the busyness of life, not by listening to the loudest voices around us or by watching the most impressive displays but by attending to the stillness and the silence of God.

But I think we can take the Gospel story a little bit further, and that’s where Brian Wrecker comes in, a modern day opponent of demons.  Because there’s another aspect of the demonic this story tells us about, using a few not-so-subtle clues that Jewish Christians in the first century would have noticed straight away. This foray of Jesus into Gentile territory, the backdrop of a cemetery which Jewish people thought of as the abode of spirits and a source of ritual uncleanness, the comic image of demons sent packing firstly into a herd of pigs – also regarded by Jews as unclean – and then stampeding into the deep waters of a sea which in Jewish folklore represented the forces of chaos – it’s an epic tale of the holiness of Jesus coming into contact with a whole range of potent symbols of unholiness, which promptly self-destruct. 

It is a tale loaded with symbolism and even humour. The fact that the ancient town of Gerasne was about 60km from the Sea of Galilee tips us off that there’s been a bit of poetic licence in the retelling. Or else that the pigs had a mighty long run to throw themselves into it.  

But here’s the gospel writer’s real underlying joke – because the name the demons give themselves - Legion – isn’t actually a numerical reference at all, even though today we hear it as such. It’s not even a proper Greek word in the original manuscripts - just a transliteration of a Latin word, legio, which was the Roman name for a military unit of 6,000 men. And the legion stationed near Jerusalem during the first century carried on its standard the picture of a wild boar. It was even called the Legion of Pigs in some non-Roman references. So there is a coded political reference in the story. The demons possessing the unfortunate man in the cemetery are identified as the oppressive forces of an occupation army. 

It’s as if the story is reminding us that the external circumstances that control people’s lives can be every bit as swinish and demonic as the internal ones. Certainly, Jews in the first century would have had no trouble seeing the presence of Roman troops in the same terms as the madness of demonic possession. In our own time, Brian Recker and the new evangelicals are pointing to another kind of legion, the swinish brutality invading public life, destroying lives, distorting the rule of law and even the basic teachings of Christianity.

And Jesus releases the man from the demonic forces that are fencing him in. This is the point - at whatever level we want to interpret the story - that it is always God’s priority for men and women and children to be whole and free. There is a basic disconnect between God’s intention for human life and the legion of ways that human beings are enslaved and oppressed.

So this is the second essential thing about the truly demonic – which you’ll have realised by now I’m carefully distinguishing from the superstitious variety? As well as being that which robs human beings of their God-given identity, the power of the demonic is that it has a life of its own. It overwhelms human life because it is bigger than the individual. 

So, what’s to be done about it?  If the truly demonic is just as much at home in the 21st century as it was in the first, where’s the good news in this story? Is it just meant to impress us as part of the general miraculousness of Jesus’ career? Or are we claiming that Jesus still brings about a confrontation with the powers that hold people captive? Are we claiming that Jesus in some way can defeat the demonic circumstances of our own lives and the lives of other people in the world we live in?  Because if so, it begs the question – how?  What’s the good news in today’s gospel for women and men and children caught in the cross-hairs in Gaza or the West Bank or Tehran?

I hope you’ll forgive me for having to admit that I don’t know. The timetable of God’s promises does defeat our expectations. Except that what we proclaim about Jesus makes a claim on our own lives. If we look carefully, we see in this story a clue about how we ourselves might be transformed, and how we might learn to be a transforming community. Maybe that’s what this story is all about. God’s compassion doesn’t recognise geographic or ethnic boundaries but just travels outwards to wherever we are, refusing to believe there are some people in the world who just don’t matter.

Brian Recker, it seems to me, has one good answer to the problem. In the face of tyranny, just gossip the Gospel. Remind people what Jesus really said and did. God’s intention is always for human kindness, for people to be free. 

Amen