Luke 8:26-39:
26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27 As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me" – 29 for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)
30 Jesus then asked him, "What is your name?" He said, "Legion"; for many demons had entered him. 31 They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. 32 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. 33 Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
34 When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. 35 Then people came out to see what had happened, and 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.
36 Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. 37 Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.
38 The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
The basics here are pretty simple. Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee to a Gentile land. Right on the beach a wild-acting, naked man confronted Jesus and demanded to know why he was there. The man was possessed by many demons who referred to themselves as “Legion.” Jesus easily commanded the Legion to depart the man. They asked Jesus for permission to enter a herd of pigs, which Jesus granted. The pigs ran into the water and drowned. The man put on clothing and sat at Jesus feet, while the pig herders ran to town to tell the tale.
For Jesus this was pretty ordinary stuff, not a challenge at all. But when the people came out and saw the scene, they became greatly afraid and wanted to Jesus to leave. So he did. The healed man stayed behind and became the first missionary to the Gentiles.
As is usually so, there is some imagery in the story that Luke’s early readers would have picked up:
· the Holy Land was occupied by the Roman 10th Legion, whose symbol was a wild boar, which is to say, a pig. Pigs were unclean in Judaism. Luke may have been covertly identifying the imperial power of Rome as unclean, a sort of inside joke for Luke to pull, since Luke is usually careful not to offend Roman sensibilities. The destruction of the pigs and the healing of the man symbolically remove uncleanness from Gentiles if they follow Jesus.
· Jesus tells the healed man to “declare how much God has done for you,” but instead the man goes about proclaiming much Jesus had done for him. So we are led to understand that the acts of Jesus and the acts of God are the one and the same, and by implication that Jesus and God are the one and the same.
· the abyss that the demons begged Jesus not to send them to was a term for the prison for disobedient spirits. Basically, they didn’t want to go back to jail. There is no explanation why Jesus permitted them to enter the herd of pigs, but the pigs right away ran off a bluff into the sea. Since “abyss” in the Bible is also used to represent the deep waters of the sea, the joke’s on the demons – they wound up in an abyss anyway. Jesus’ hearers must have laughed aloud at that.
· No early Jewish Christian would have wondered about the ethics of Jesus letting the pigs be drowned. “Instead, the fate of the pigs would show that justice had prevailed all around: The man had been delivered from the demons’ torment, the unclean herd had been destroyed, the demons had gotten what they wanted, and in the end they had been destroyed along with the pigs. Jesus outwitted the devil. The demons that wanted most to avoid being sent into the abyss have been drowned in the lake.” The lesson: “When it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self destructive” (NIB, Luke, R. Alan Culpepper).
A popular explanation for the reason the townspeople wanted Jesus to leave was that he had ruined the local economy by causing the herd of swine to be drowned. I doubt it. That sounds like a twentieth century attempt to make the gospels rationally intelligible, to explain Jesus in natural terms. But this story is about the interaction of the supernatural evil of the demonic with the supernatural goodness of the Son of the Most High. And for some reason, the people were afraid of supernatural goodness, although they had learned to live with supernatural evil. They recognized the power of good but could not live with it. Perhaps their collective comfort zone was being too quickly disrupted, or perhaps they had never suspected that pure goodness could be so powerful and even include some destructive elements.
Jesus did not condemn their fear. His act of kindness for the fearful people was to send the healed man home to witness to his countrymen the power of God. The Gospel of Mark, in telling this story, reports that “all were amazed” at the man’s preaching.
Despite the between-the-lines meanings, our modern world cannot cope with the story very well. It begs the question: What about demons?
My conversations and email correspondence with my colleagues about this passage revealed a near-universal consensus that demons are merely metaphor for all the bad stuff in our society. Here’s a quote from a Canadian pastor’s sermon:
The demons faced by people in our society are very real. These demons are the things that lurk in our own families or within our own selves. . . . family violence, racism, self-centeredness, fear, poor self-image, drug addiction, alcoholism, and all of those other 'isms' which keep people from being the people God created them to be.
Such takes are mainstream biblical interpretation. Respected New Testament scholar R. Alan Culpepper wrote, “In our day, we have become far more accustomed to attributing calamities and disorders to the forces of nature or to internal mental or emotional problems. The remedy is not exorcism but counseling or medication. The story of the Gerasene demoniac should now be interpreted so that it speaks a word of assurance and hope to those for whom every day is a battle with depression, fear, anxiety, or compulsive behavior” (NIB, Luke).
Bringing the victims of these conditions to rest at Jesus’ feet is indeed a healing ministry, but I submit that pastors are cruel to label their illness or disorder as demonic. There is no therapeutic value or pastoral care in telling an alcoholic or addict or clinically depressed person that their problem is demonic. It has no biblical basis and pastors should not counsel along those lines.
The Gospels explicitly distinguish between natural illness and the demonic. So should we. In the New Testament, demons are not metaphors for human sin or dysfunction, they are supernatural beings, opposed to God, who can possess and control a human being.
Perhaps many clergy today crave the intellectual approval of our peers and parishioners. Perhaps we want everyone to know how enlightened we are and taking demons seriously as the New Testament presents them seems so superstitious and gullible. We have string of degrees from respected universities and seminaries, so we grasp for sophisticated modernity in interpreting these sorts of passages. But this is a disservice. Clarity is needed now. In 2009, Barna Group’s research showed that 59 percent of self-described Christians agree that Satan is not a living being, but 64 percent also said that persons “can be under the influence of spiritual forces, such as demons or evil spirits.” In 2014, a Public Policy Polling survey showed that among Americans age 18-29, that number still holds and is growing. Among young adults who said they professed no religion at all, 85 percent said they believed in supernatural events and beings.
Probably most Christians who have ever read about demons in Christian literature would say that they are fallen angels, in rebellion against God, who are allies of Satan. Only two New Testament verses indicate this, and they are too skimpy to draw a definitive conclusion about the origin of demons, even though the New Testament takes their existence very seriously. And so do many people today. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis conducted exorcisms and Francis increased priestly attention to and education about the demonic.
On the website Mental Health Source a psychiatrist replied to a question whether the standard psychiatric text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, recognized demon possession as real. “I'd have to say, no,” he wrote. “However, psychiatry certainly recognizes many instances in which an individual claims to be ‘possessed by demons’, or behaves as if he or she were ‘possessed.’ Psychiatrists would almost certainly attribute such behavior to one of several recognized psychiatric disorders; e.g., paranoid schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder or some other dissociative disorder … which includes so-called dissociative trance states. The [diagnostic manual] states that ‘possession trance involves replacement of the customary sense of personal identity by a new identity, attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, deity, or other person, and associated with stereotyped ‘involuntary’ movements or amnesia.’”
It would be pastoral malpractice to suggest that mentally ill persons need nothing but Jesus and not proper professional care. But mental and physical health does have a spiritual component, a position that medical researchers are increasingly adopting.
Rejection of demons as real beings began in the 1700s with the skeptical philosophers and was subsequently reinforced by rationalist philosophers. Since then, the supremacy of scientific materialism as the dominant world view of western cultures has reinforced this opinion. Westerners generally scoff at the very idea of the supernatural, not just demons, but also angels and even the traditionally understood activity of God directly acting in the ordinary affairs of persons and countries.
Judith Hayes, writing for the “Freedom From Religion Foundation,” said, “Belief in demons and fairies and goblins and dragons ended, for most people, ages ago, and is remembered only in some Fairy Tales. Such primeval superstitions should be left behind, in our colorful past, where they belong.”
A Reformed Scottish pastor named Jason Kortering disagrees. He wrote that he did not believe in demonic influences before serving many years as an exchange pastor in Singapore. After seeing pagan worship and its effects in one of its native lands he became convinced that, “Devils are real and the spiritual battle is intensifying.” Missionaries preparing for pagan lands, he wrote, should be trained to deal with demonic presences.
In 1994, I had a long conversation with the chief of police of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For brevity's sake, I will skip how this came to be. But he told me that there were entire sections of Rio that were so controlled by criminal organizations that the police would not go there and that even ambulance crews would refuse calls to go there. He described some of the crimes there and said they were simply demonic.
I was at that time serving as a principal staff officer for the US Army Criminal Investigation Command, which is basically the Army's FBI. Every day I received summaries of investigations initiated in the prior 24 hours. Most were ordinary kinds of thefts and fraud. But there were always violent crimes and many were so unspeakably horrific that I cannot describe them here. Were they demonic? I cannot say no.
To say spiritual beings such as demons or angels do not exist is to claim to know too much. We cannot sensibly claim that God created only physical creatures. To interpret demons in the Bible merely as metaphors for human frailty denies both biblical teaching and the lessons of history that there is a powerful influence for evil at loose in the world, prowling and looking to devour, as 1st Peter puts it. Not all human depravity can be attributed exclusively to human sinfulness. At the minimum there is a non-human magnifier of human sinfulness that operates in opposition to God. We can be biblically and psychologically correct, I think, to call this magnifier of evil the demonic. Just think of world history between 1933 – 1945. (Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said after the war that when planning military operations, “Violence took a seat at the table.”)
That being said, the clear testimony of the gospels, reinforced by two millennia of Christian faith, is that Christ overcomes the demonic. The destruction of evil does not necessitate the destruction of persons. In the working of God’s salvation, persons are saved even while the legions of evil are plunged into the abyss.
Martin Luther got it right when he wrote his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Verse three confidently proclaims:
Though hordes of devils fill the land,
All threatening to devour us,
We tremble not, unmoved we stand;
They cannot overpower us.
This world's prince may rage,
In fierce war engage.
He is doomed to fail;
God's judgment must prevail!
One little word subdues him.
