NOTES for Mar 5:1-20
The story of the healing of the possessed man from Gadara is remarkable not only for the healing itself, the casting out of demons, and the freeing of a person from the power of dark forces. It is remarkable above all for the reaction both of the healed man himself and of his fellow citizens.
Readers of the Gospel often ask: why did Jesus allow the demons to enter the herd of pigs and destroy it? Indeed, nowhere else in the New Testament do we meet anything like this. The simplest answer is that, from the point of view of the Torah, the pig is an unclean animal. Pork is fit neither for food nor, still less, for sacrifice.
The Savior, as we can see, acts according to the principle "the unclean to the unclean." But for the local Gentile inhabitants everything, of course, looks different: they have nothing against pork, and they evidently raise pigs, as we would say today, on an industrial scale. The loss of the herd is an undoubted financial blow to them. That may be one more reason they ask Jesus to leave: who knows what other loss this Man will bring them.
And yet the issue is not merely material damage. The issue is that the healing really happened. That means a miracle happened; otherwise the healing cannot be explained. Gentiles, of course, also believed in miracles, though in Gospel times the world in general was becoming more and more skeptical, and such faith was becoming rarer. But even those who believed in miracles did not very much expect them and were not always glad to receive them.
In the pagan world there had long been an idea that the favor of the gods was shown above all in their revealing themselves as rarely as possible. Their favor was thought to be expressed in abundant harvests, many children, and success in business and war. But when something unusual, supernatural, happens in a temple or at an altar, it certainly attracts attention and may even bring something good. Still, it is a disruption of the measured course of events, of the established order of things. Today such a disruption may even be useful, but what about tomorrow?
This kind of unpredictability turns out to be worst of all for fallen humanity. A person is even ready to give up the miracle altogether, if only he can live in a predictable world, where everything can be calculated and programmed in advance, where even surprise, in a certain sense, turns out to be expected because nothing truly new happens in such a world.
Jesus brought with Him precisely something absolutely new, something never before experienced or seen: the Kingdom. And the inhabitants of Gadara, if they did not understand this, then they felt it. They felt it with that half-conscious sense that sometimes warns us of a threat, a danger whose meaning we often do not understand, but whose presence we do not doubt. And they ask Jesus to leave. And He leaves, because the Kingdom is not forced on anyone. Yet as He leaves, He still leaves the city's residents a witness: the man whom He healed. Only witness to the Kingdom can change something in this situation and perhaps open the way of salvation for someone among the townspeople.