jeremyduncan.ca

Legions and Empires

// July 24th, 2008 // church, collected thoughts

[notes from my message last week at unedited]

This might be a story you’ve heard or read yourself before but hopefully we can look at it with fresh eyes all over again.

In the book of Mark Jesus is travelling with his disciples teaching and up to this point he’s been primarily teaching in Jewish areas of the Roman Empire. But at this point he decides to cross over to the other side. Now the “other side” is necessarily not the “dark side”. It has nothing to do with Emperor Palpitine and lightning bolt finger tips, although it might as well have for a lot of the Jews. The other side Jesus is talking about is the other side of Lake Kinneret, or more commonly called the Sea of Galilee.

At this point in history the Jews stayed on the west and the Romans lived on the east side of the lake. Technically the Romans controlled the whole area but they allowed the Jews to maintain a semblance of soverignity over certain lands, so on the west side of the lake were the Jews but the “other side” across the sea of Galilee were gentiles under Roman Control. There were some hard feelings there. In fact if you read the story in the gospels they refer to the area as the gerasenes, some manuscripts say the gadarenes, or the gargasenes. The confusion seems to come from a trio of little cities on the water in the area, Geresa, Gadara, and Gergesa, so we don’t know exactly where this happened but we can narrow it down pretty accurately. Now this word gerasenes seems to be a Jewish creation that some scholars suggest came to mean “the cast out ones”. Possibly it could have been in reference to the Jewish population that had left the economically depressed Jewish regions for the other side or it could have just been a reference to the gentiles who lived on the east bank and weren’t part of the chosen people. Either way a lot of the Jews were not impressed because this area represented for them all of the people who had occupied Jewish lands since before they were born. Everyone was waiting for the day that the interlopers would be thrown out of the land promised to the Hebrews. Especially the religious Jews had a fixation on the idea of the Messiah who would come return all of their land to the chosen people of God. So however you slice it when Jesus crosses over to the “other side” he’s stepping into a world that was significantly distinct from where he had come from with a lot of bad blood and a lot of political tension behind it. Now keep that in mind and let’s read through this story

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
[some translations say “evil” spirit, which is a fair translation but literally the word is unclean]

This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain.
For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
Mark 5:1-5

Luke also adds the fun little detail that this guy also hasn’t work clothes for a long time. So he’s naked, bleeding, living in the tombs and apparently also in charge of tourist information because this is the guy who meets Jesus and his dsicples when they step off the boat. (no wonder the Jews didn’t cross the lake all that often, the welcome wagon was a little lacking)

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!” For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!”
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
Mark 5:5-10

Now I know if you’ve read the story before you want to get on to the good stuff but this is where I think the story reaches its turning point. This is where things really get interesting. So I want to pause here because sure in a second Jesus is going to send demons into pigs, who are going to run off a cliff and then the locals are going to get all upset over the bacon shortage, and that’s fun, but there’s some neat stuff going on right here.

Think about this picture so far. Jesus has crossed over to the other side, the region of the cast out ones, where he’s met as soon as he steps off the boat by captain nude.

Now remember in Jewish custom nakedness was a big deal. They didn’t have the kind of soft-core pornography we have on billboards. They didn’t have nude beaches or nudist colonies or the internet. Instead they had stories about how shameful nakedness was. Now my point here isn’t necessarily about nakedness being bad, it’s that there was a large social stigma attached to it. You can go back to Genesis and read a story about Noah. One night he gets drunk one night and passes out naked on his front lawn where one of his sons, Canaan, comes by and is like, “that is hilarious.” He doesn’t have any Polariods to capture how funny this is to him so he goes and gets his brothers to come check out dad. His two brothers, Japheth and Shem are less amused and they actually get a blanket and walk backwards with it until they can put it over their father without seeing his shame. In the morning Noah is a little hung over and cranky and he hears about what happened and Genesis 9 records his reaction this way;

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”

Then he said,
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.”
Genesis 9:24-27

That’s the way he talks about his son for joking about his nakedness. So the fact this guy is naked is a big deal for the Jews.

But then again so was blood.

The Jews had a number of rules around blood too. It was considered unclean. In fact, they went so far as have a rule in Leviticus that says that if anyone even touches something that a women touches during her period, then they will become ritually unclean and must bath and clean themselves and not enter the temple for the rest of the day. So the fact that he’s cut and bleeding is a big deal too.

It doesn’t stop there though because in addition to being naked and bloody this guy is living in a cemetery.

Num 19:16 says this “Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days.”

So, what we have here is a man, naked and bloody and living in a cemetery in the region of the cast out ones. Is there any doubt why Matthew, Mark and Luke, all feel like this guy has, what they call, an unclean spirit. Think about it. In political terms the guy is unclean. He’s not just a gentile- he’s living in the Garasenes. In religious terms this guy is unclean. He’s bloody and living in cemetery. In social terms this guy is unclean. He’s stark naked and that tends to make conversation awkward at the best of times. Even the gentiles and the Romans don’t want him around and apparently went to great lengths to keep him away, they did chain him up in a cemetery after all. The gospel writers are going to great lengths here to make the point that this guy is the ultimate outcast. The outcast of the outcasts. The King of all the outcast.

But they’re not done making their point yet because what’s the first thing that Jesus asks him? He asks, “What is your name?”
To which our naked, bloody, cemetery dwelling friend responds, “We are legion.”

Have you ever seen the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose? It’s a creepy movie about a girl who may or may not have been possessed by a demon claiming to be… Legion. The Exorcist 3 mentions the demon Legion. All of our pop culture ideas about legions of demons come from this passage, this naked, bloody dude living in the cemetery, the outcast of the outcasts who says to Jesus, “We are called legion for we are many and he begged Jesus not to send them out of the area.”

I’ve already referenced how the situation plays itself out. The demons ask not to be sent into the abyss and instead ask to be sent into a herd of nearby pigs. Jesus agrees. They leave the man, enter the pigs and immediately run off a cliff, into the sea and drown. Not sure that was the best plan but then again I’m not a demon strategist, so what do I know?

Now if you’re like me, this type of story doesn’t fit well into your world. I haven’t had much experience with pigs… or demons for that matter and so my first response when I read these type of stories is to jump to the idea that this is obviously some kind of mentally unstable man and the writers of the gospels, not having the same medical understanding that we do, use the language of demon possession to make sense of what’s going on. I think that can be a fair way to interpret these kind of stories. Maybe that’s how you chose to interpret them, as a primitive to modern language gap, a simple story of a mental unstable man that Jesus helps, but maybe there’s something even more than that going on here.

Remember we talked earlier about the political situation between the east and west banks of the Sea of Galilee, how the Jews remembered the stories of their promised land and their hope for a Messiah who would one day rid them of the oppressive forces of the Roman Empire? Keep that in mind and look again at the language that’s being used. “We are legion for we are many” says our naked friend.

Now Legion was a very specific Roman term. In fact it was a Roman military term. A legion was a group of soldiers who would occupy a territory for the Empire. A legion was actually a very specific group of soldiers. At the time of Augustus it very specifically meant 6826 men, that is 6100 foot soldiers and 726 horsemen. That was a legion. So think about what’s going on. Regardless of how you want to interpret the specifics of this story, is it an allegory, is it an historically accurate representation of an event that really happened in time, is it merely a transposed story of a mental unstable man through the language and lens of a 1st century writer? Regardless of how you want to interpret it there is clearly something underneath the surface going on here.

Jesus crosses to the other side of the river and engages with a man who is ritually, socially and politically unclean. He then orders a legion of oppressive forces into a herd of animals that are unclean by Jewish standards. That legion then immediately runs off the cliff and leaves the very land that the Messiah is standing on. There is a lot going on in this picture. Add to that the fact that scholars like Dominic Crossan have pointed out that the pig, while yet another symbol of the unclean for the Jews, was also a symbol for the Romans. In fact the head of boar was the very symbol of the 10th Roman Legion Fretensis, the very legion that would eventually conquer Jerusalem for the Empire in 70 CE, about the time the gospels were being written.

This is more than a story of a mentally unstable man, and this is far more than a story about a demon. This is a story that is meant to show Jesus as the Messiah the Jews have been waiting for. Put yourself in the shoes of Jesus disciples watching this unfold. Imagine what the early Christians have going through their mind when they read this story. It starts and they can’t believe Jesus is even talking to this guy, if he even touches Jesus he’ll make him ritually unclean. And then the question of why this guy is even worth his time to begin with, the Romans don’t even want this guy around. But then this political allegory starts to unfold in front of them as Jesus, instead of walking by and brushing him off, actually stops and ask him his name. And all of a sudden this outcast, unimportant, less than human, being, steps in to represent everything that stands between the Jews and their destiny. He’s now far more than unclean. He is the enemy.

Yet Jesus, rather than choosing to dehumanize this man as a representation of everything that is wrong with the empire, does exactly the opposite. Rather than creating a casualty of war and advocating a posture that places us on one side and bad guys on the other, Jesus demonstrates to his followers that this Messiah can dismantle an empire without firing a single shot or drawing a solitary blade because his kingdom won’t be won through battles or force or coerscion but instead though the counter-intuitive practice of inviting those on outside of our story into our experience of God. Consider, the Jews were waiting for a Messiah that would cast out the legions of Rome and restore their political will, a Messiah who would cast down the empires of this world and create in their stead a new and more powerful version of the exact same kind of perversion. Those on the inside versus those on the outside. But Jesus uses the occasion to teach us that victory over empire is not going to be won though the military industrial complex. It’s won when we help people find a new identity outside the stories that have defined and limited them. This Messiah wasn’t interested in freeing his people from Roman occupation. He was interested in freeing them from a definition they held in their hearts as second class citizens. In our terms, our Messiah is not interested in freeing us from debt. He’s interested in freeing us from the consumer posture that defines our value. Jesus walks up to the epitome of the outcast and he asks, “what is your name?” What do you define yourself by? What do you feel is important about who you are as a human being, as a child of God and as a creation of the one great creator?

Some have read this as an allegory calling the Jews to rally behind their Messiah and rise up to help him throw the Roman Legions out of their land. Personally I think that completely misses the point. Christ is teaching us that as soon as we dehumanize our enemies we have already lost, but when we can invest, even those that would oppress us and hurt us with the value that requires us to ask their name and understand their story we can find a victory greater than politics or power could ever bring.

We have to ask ourselves what that question looks like in our lives. If God stood in front of you and asked what is your name? How would you respond? Would it be with the legion of things that have occupied you and enslaved your imagination? Maybe it would be all the things that you’re waiting for someone else to come along and fix for you or about you. Perhaps it would be the types of things that define our empire; our clothes, our cars, our DVD collections (that one’s in there for me). Maybe it would be your education or your job or your significant other. Or maybe, when God asks you, what is your name, you could respond with all of the things that you imagine for your life. The dreams that we have about how we could fit into the story of God’s great grace and redemption.

What is your name? Are you simply part of the empire, another cog in the machine, another consumer in the line, your identity subsumed in the economic narrative around you?

Or are you more than that?

Could you become, like Jesus, someone is able to look past the lines that define who is important and who is not? Could you and I be the kind of people that walk across religious and social and political lines to ask someone their name, the kind of people who create space in our lives to humanize the people around us with go out of our way to find the outcasts. And that doesn’t necessarily have to look like finding your neighborhood nudist, if you have one, I’m not sure what neighborhood you live in, because the truth is, if you think about it, the Jews probably wouldn’t have given much thought to this guy at all. In fact that’s kind of the point. Who are the people in your circles who are simply ignored? It’s probably not the crazy guy who won’t shut up. In our world it’s more likely the person who is sitting alone across the room, the one you never noticed because you were engrossed in a conversation on the other side. The story of Christ is about challenging us over and over again to see the world a new light. It’s about recognizing that the greatest battles in our lives are not won with more power, or more influence or more strength but with more compassion and more interest and more investment in the people around us.

Just like we do today, Jesus disciples had dehumanized anyone who wasn’t part of their story and with one simple question, “What’s your name?” Jesus reminds us that everyone, both the people we walk past and never notice and the people we rage against because they have wronged us in some way, everyone is worth our investment.

What’s your name?
How do you define yourself? Is it as the child of a God of endless love and wonder, or just another part of the machine, our identity consumed by the Legion of things that grasp our attention. Could we become the kind of people designed not only to notice, but to help others see the value they never expected to find inside themselves.