NOTES for Mar 5:1-20

It is true that Christ can give us much, but He can also deprive us of much. How will we respond to this? Are we ready to lose something familiar so that in our soul light may replace darkness?

Let us consider today's story. Before us are Jesus, a possessed man, a legion, about 5,000, of demons, and the local residents. There is a clear conflict, a clash of desires.

Jesus wants to free the man from the power of the demons and drive them out of that region.

The possessed man: his whole being had been suppressed by an unclean power. If he had any awareness of himself at all, his desire could only have been one thing: to be freed from this nightmare as quickly as possible.

The demons plainly want to remain masters in that region. Apparently they lived comfortably in godless surroundings. They even dare to ask the Lord not to trouble them. Incidentally, they are the only ones who fully understood with whom they were dealing.

The local residents paid attention to Jesus only after they had lost their herd of pigs. And the normal condition of the man freed from demons inspired only fear. People are always afraid of what they do not understand, and Jesus, having brought such turmoil into their measured life, was not needed by them.

Does something similar not happen in our own lives? How do we react to the Lord's unexpected "invasion" of our little world? The demoniac, after coming to his right mind, wanted only one thing: to be with Christ and obey Him. His preaching about the Lord's miracle is the best gratitude to God for His mercy. Can you say that Jesus has freed you from what bound your soul? If so, are you grateful to Him for it?

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.

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.

Reading the Gospel, we often encounter situations where Jesus is not welcome. They are very different, and each of those who do not welcome Him usually has his own reasons for it. But they all have something in common: He is not welcome when people do not want change. Of course, not everyone admits to such motives behind his own unwillingness to see Jesus. Deeply religious and often in their own way sincere people, such as the Pharisees, for example, would never have admitted, not only to others but even to themselves, that they feared not for the people and not for the true faith, but for themselves, for their religiosity, which Jesus' testimony threatened to destroy.

But in the region of the Gadarenes there lived the most ordinary secular people, whom we are accustomed to call pagans, though one cannot speak of any special religiosity of theirs, even pagan religiosity. Simple people, and in their own way frank. They were frankly afraid and just as frankly sorry for the lost herd of swine.

And as simple people they were not ashamed to say directly and point-blank that they did not want to see Him to the One whom they truly did not want to see. Of course, they had witnessed a miracle. And of course they understood it quite correctly; it was simply impossible to understand it otherwise. But the point is that fallen man does not really need miracles. At least not those that cannot be controlled. And fallen man usually does not need God. Fallen man needs not God, but a genie from a magic Eastern tale. One who could do everything, but would require nothing from his master and, when not needed, would sit quietly in his bottle or magic lamp, in no way revealing his presence.

The people who witnessed the healing performed by Jesus, for all their simplicity, understood that this Wonderworker was not a genie. If He were allowed to stay, He would not limit Himself to one healing. And no one could say exactly what else He would do. The matter might well not end with the loss of one herd of swine. But the main thing was not even material damage. Intuitively, in the depth of his own subconscious, each person understood: if this Man is allowed to act, you will lose not only your herds, but your life.

He will take your life for Himself. Yes, of course, not for His own sake. Perhaps for the sake of that Kingdom of which He speaks. But your life will no longer be yours. And you yourself will no longer belong to yourself, but will belong to Him, the King of an unknown Kingdom. And this is always frightening. The only question is whether to overcome this fear for the sake of the Kingdom or to step back. Into outer darkness. To one's herds, to one's life. And to one's death.