NOTES for Mar 5:1-20
Today's reading tells us about Jesus healing a certain man whose name is not mentioned in the Gospel, and of whom the account says that he was possessed by a demon (v. 2). All this took place on the eastern shore of the Sea of Gennesaret, opposite the Galilean shore, in the southern part of the region called in the Gospel the "Decapolis" (v. 20; another name for it is Decapolis). In Gospel times it was inhabited mainly by Syrians and Greeks, who built the cities located there; but of course there were Jewish communities in those cities as well. Outwardly, the possessed man's behavior very much resembled the behavior of a mentally ill person: he evidently often had severe seizures (vv. 3-5), because of which he could not live among people. Perhaps he also suffered from persecution mania, because of which he hid in the tombs (in the Gospel account they are called "graves"), where he seems to have spent most of his time (v. 3). In the East, the dead are buried in such tombs to this day. They are caves, natural or artificial, hewn in the rock, where the deceased is placed after the body has been anointed with special oil and wrapped in a special cloth. Such places were considered unclean in antiquity, and a person who had to be there needed afterward to perform special purification rituals; otherwise he could not take part in ordinary life. Those who, because of their occupation or for other reasons, had to be at the tombs constantly were outcasts in society. No person in his right mind would, of course, condemn himself to such a life without extreme necessity. It must be said that in antiquity people did not always distinguish mental illness from such a spiritual condition as possession. On the other hand, possession quite often manifests outwardly precisely as mental illness. In any case, it is clear that Jesus frees the man spoken of in today's reading from a serious misfortune from which no one else could free him. His liberation from possession was a complete surprise to everyone, and the account of this liberation, as well as of the One who freed the possessed man, naturally spread quickly through the surrounding area, so that Jesus' name became known not only in Galilee but also in the cities of the Decapolis.