It might have been the sheer numbers of people who followed Jesus into the region of the Sea of Galilee that spooked the custodians of religious stability. On the one hand, it is not easy to fault them. Religious madmen and the gullibility of the throngs had caused considerable harm to the Jewish people’s destiny, encased as they were in Imperium’s airless wax.
Empires fear nothing so much as chaos. You can get away with almost any opinion in your head, express any murmuring within the family’s bosom, so long as the Empire catches no drift of scheming towards chaos. For Empire, chaos-making is the unpardonable sin.
We shall soon learn that Jesus knew of another.
The masses of Galilee who followed him to the sea-side were no esoteric bunch of theory-seekers. Galilee was no Mars Hill, no gathering place for thinkers and the curious who tagged along with them. One gets the sense these needy folk had earthier things on their minds. They press against Jesus to the extreme that he can avoid the crush only by borrowing a boat and speaking to them over the murmur of ripples splashing against its wooden contours.
It was not a decent scene.
He had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him. Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and shouted, ‘You are the Son of God!’
With so many sick, one must have had to step gingerly to avoid planting one’s foot in the unseemly stuff that desperate, ill people leave on the ground behind them. What is more, we are led to believe that the ‘unclean spirits’ did not go gently into whatever wasteland awaited them after their expulsion from human hosts.
No wonder good people grew worried.
They find an explanation for the bedlam in an unlikely alliance: Jesus, it seems suddenly to come clear, is in league with Beelzebul, the prince of flies, the captain of demons.
The theory bears an apparent coherence. It provides an opening for religion and its practice to return to the arenas of predictable serenity where Empires cannot be bothered.
Jesus, to the contrary, sees deepest evil in this counsel to calmness. He is incredulous before the cultivated capacity to see evil in the liberation of the sick and the mad. He hears blasphemy on the lips of those who should have been farthest from it.
Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin—for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’
Empires, it emerges, are not the only ones who fear chaos. So do the captains of an invisible world, one that thrives on possession, captivity, enslavement. One that does not give up its grip quietly. One that would rather not be noticed.
One that finds its most lethal adversary in a man who heals the sick and sets dark, fogged-in minds once more in the light.
Canter Bridge 
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