First, let us ask about the man in chains. St Peter, who
would deny Christ and then be the foremost witness of His resurrection, would
also be chained up. St Paul, too; and none other than the Lord Himself was tied
up on His committal to Pilate. The man in chains we first meet consumed by a
host of demons, but in a few short minutes he is transformed into a man of faith,
bearing out in his life all that God has wonderfully done in him.
Second, we have the demons, who had caused the wild man in
chains to live among the dead. Where did they come from? St Luke tells us that
they came from the abyss, the depths of created existence, and did not want to
go back. Since they were causing the man to burst his chains and escape from
the city of Gerasa, perhaps Gerasa is the pit to which they did not wish to
return.
We will come back to the demons after we have considered,
third, the pigs. Instantly we think, “Ah, these are unclean animals in the Bible. No wonder
the demons flocked to them in their torrent of self-destruction into the lake.
But, if you think about it a little more, the pigs are innocent bystanders,
foraging on the hillside. The swine are not the people who reject Christ in the
city, or the demons who want to escape from them. Then we remember that the
Prodigal Son found refuge and a livelihood among the pigs as a swineherd. From
being the lowest of the low, the only way was up on his journey to
reconciliation with his father. So we begin to see the pigs in a new light, as
witnesses to the miracle of repentance and instruments of the faith bringing
light into a renewed human being. So
much for “unclean”; indeed, in other
religious cultures of the time pigs are not forbidden because they are unclean,
but because they are sacred and sacrificed to the purposes of God. So, contrast
how the two swineherds from Gerasa run off to their city to denounce Jesus; and
yet the Prodigal swineherd proceeds to rebirth in Christ’s resurrection, “I
will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, Father I have sinned
heaven and against you; I am no longer worthy to be your son; just hire me as
your servant.” In the same way, at Gerasa, thanks to the swine fulfilling the
saving purposes of Christ, a man returns home and declares how much God in
Christ has done.
What, then, happens to the swine? Some translations of the
Gospel say that, driven by the demons into the lake, the herd drowned. But the
word that St Luke uses means they choked. It is the same word St Matthew uses
to describe the tares and weeds that choke off the good seed of the Sower. The
demons kept escaping the city that rejected Christ, and it was their voice the
recognised Him as Son of the Most High God. Their distorted confession of faith
in Christ, by the operation of mercy and inexhaustible love, went from the perversion
of a man’s mind to his conversion by an underlying hope in Christ all along. So
do the demons plead: “Do not send us back to unfaith, we beg You. Confide us to
the swine that people scorn, that this bad seed may be choked, and free our
spirits in death.”
So this brings us to the fourth character in the Lord’s
enactment of His drama of salvation at Gerasa: the water of the lake. It was in
the same waters, when they reach the Jordan, that Jesus left the land of Israel
to be baptised and re-enter it as He Who Saves - hailed by St John Baptist as
the Lamb of God come to take away the sins of the world, and shown by the
descent of the Dove and the divine Voice to be the Son in Whom the Father is
well pleased. These waters, then, are the place where an old life dies and a
new life begins. As always, St Paul sees this, as he tells it in today’s
epistle (Ephesians 2.4-10): “We were
dead through our trespasses. Now we are alive in Christ.” There, with the
baptising waters in sight, the Lord recalls the great inaugural moment of His
public ministry, and before the eyes of the man who has been surprised by grace,
there go the swine taking the demons into death, and out emerges a people of
faith who are so alive that they describe themselves as already “raised up and
seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus.” This is what the Lord means
when he says to the man, “Return to your home”: he means, “Return to the house
of the Father, enter into the Kingdom, your true home.” It is the same situation for us, just as St
Paul confronts us with it (Romans 6.3-4):
“Are you not aware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were
baptized into His death? We were therefore buried with Him … in order that,
just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too
may live a new life.”
In a few short minutes, then, Christ has taken us from His
baptism, to our repentance in the wilderness of our living, to liberation from
the oppression of all kinds of influences and forces by His mercy and
compassion, to salvation by unexpected means from belief without hope, to faith
in what God does within us, to the Cross where the Kingdom at work is seen in
its most arresting power. It is as though Christ says to the man who was once
in chains, “Return to your home. Declare how much God has done for you. And, so
that everyone may see what you have seen this day, now let Me be crucified. Let
the work of the Kingdom that has redeemed you - the poor in spirit, the thirsty
for righteousness - now be shown upon the Cross.”
In the 17th century, the great Quaker spiritual
leader, William Penn was imprisoned (like many Catholics were) in the Tower of
London. There he wrote his spiritual testament, with its striking title: No Cross, No Crown. The profound lesson
of our existence as Christians is, as St Paul tells us today, that “we are what
God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good, which He prepared beforehand
to be our way of life.” Our way of life is the path of the Cross, taking us by
the lakeshore, to the unbelieving city, to the wilderness and the valley of the
shadow of death, and this is how we know that in the depths we are more
accurately realising that “we are seated in heavenly places” and that this is
the gift of God – we can share His crown if we share His Cross. And this is
what we recognise when we sing today, “The Giver of Life, raised us the dead
from the murky abyss and bestowed resurrection upon humanity: Saviour, the
Resurrection, the Life, the God of all. “ Glory be to You! (Kontakion of the Resurrection, Tone 6).
