Canter Bridge

In a short career studded with the jaw-dropping actions we call miracles, Jesus’ most spectacular confrontation with the crowded spaces of the gospels’ spiritual geography goes under the title ‘the Gadarene demoniac’.

This was the fellow who wandered among the tombs, the ineffective chains of citizens’ arrest hanging from his body, cutting himself and crying out in a madman’s chaotic and irresolvable delirium. Every detail underscores that his life—if it can be described as such—takes place at the margins, in the netherworld of those who have been ejected from human society and will never return. To call this man a castoff is to underestimate the spiritual slavery that led to his ‘cutting off’—as the Pentateuch unceremoniously calls such a thing—from his people.

It is true that he is deranged, accurate that he looks and smells quite badly. It is honorable to recognize the self-imposed aspects of his exile.

Yet it is still more true to call him a slave. He is a man driven to madness by the demons that throng in his soul like hornets in a nest. We are not told exactly how he came to this desperate and irretrievable state, only that human efforts to control him have been and shall always be fruitless. His demons have made him ‘the Other’, too frightening for society. The only men and women with whom he will have truck are the dead ones in the tombs beneath his feet.

The story is familiar. The quintessential ‘runner away‘, this man comes running to Jesus and begs him not to torment him. A brief discussion leads to the recognition that this demonic swarm is best called ‘Legion’. They end up finding surrogate, albeit temporary, refuge in a herd of pigs. Yet these pigs throw themselves over a cliff and into the sea like porcine lemmings, leaving us to wonder what happens to demons when their hosts commit mass suicide.

Amid this flamboyant narrative, a quiet paragraph describes the now liberated and sane man’s desire to follow Jesus. His request is quite literally to follow him. No metaphor clouds the picture. No doubt his loyalty to the man who had freed him from the mad-making grip of evil is complemented by newfound desire to free others who are similarly afflicted. The recently rescued are often the most eager to return to battle, not least when triumph’s adrenaline still courses through the veins.

A miniscule vignette tells us something about where salvation puts down roots:

As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’

Go home to your friends ….

The stronger the poison, the more potent its antidote. The more visibly evil shows its face, the more climactic its failed confrontation with truth and light. The more demonic the chaos, the more violent its resolution into peace, clarity, sanity, wholeness.

Yet when the lighting ceases and confrontation’s dust settles back onto something like normalcy, Jesus has words for a man who had been chained and mad such a short time before:

Go home to your friends ….

It is in the textures, patterns, and rhythms of normalcy that salvation puts down its deepest roots.