Out among the tombs

"When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he had not lived in a house but among the tombs.” Luke 8.27

There was once a man who lived among tombs. So begins what sounds like a ghost story, and perhaps it was, a story about a man good as dead. While he lived in the bad part of town the more antisocial part of his life was this: that he was filled with demons.

The demons physically and mentally abused him. They drove him into danger. When he was chained to a safe place they would break his bonds. When the poor, destitute, man was spoken to by Jesus the demons filled his mouth and spoke for him. He was oppressed, exploited, abused by evil. An evil that affected every structure of help in his life: familial, communal, civil, religious. He was beyond help. This is evil on a systemic level. The man's suffering leads to his rejection which leads to further suffering which leads to further rejection. Out among the tombs he’s victim to an evil cycle of degradation grinding him to dust. 

All of us have some for whom we are the walking dead. Those who have marginalized us as unclean. We have been driven there if not by evil spirits, then by our own evil, curated in our own hearts. Or by some significant failure, by unmanageable expectations, by suffering so steep that we believe ourselves to be cursed. Having nothing else to lose we occupy our day sleepwalking through work, parenthood, entertaining ourselves to death. Church speaks a language we can no longer understand. To unclean places we drive ourselves, and salvation’s time has passed.

Unless. Unless as homeless, harassed and weary ones, in Jesus we have found a place of greater possession. Unless it isn’t the end to be so full of scars that we have grown to love them, and so full of regrets that we have ordered the hours of our lives by them. What if Jesus’ healing of the Demoniac means that there there is no uncleanness so possessing that God cannot declare us clean? 

Jesus steps into the region of the Gerasenes. This is not the watercolor land of Galilee. Jesus steps into a region long-ceded by the religiously clean. Jesus confronts “Legion” and not for the first time; it seems the demons did not leave the first time he sends them out. Like the man whose sight is only half-restored until Jesus gives him a second healing, the demons are hanging on. They respond to Jesus’ command with a mockery of worship. The demoniac goes “prostrate” (that is, face-down) and prays for mercy. A televangelist in a polyester suit. But receiving perfunctory worship is not the victory Jesus is after. Our Lord goes to the land of the unclean, like a thief, into the belly of the beast, into their dominion, and he plunders their house.

A man given up on by social services, in an unclean land, among swine, under the overwhelming control of the devil. This is one we would throw away. The Demoniac does not even ask to be healed. He does not plead the mercy of God. He does not have any religious competency. He has nothing to recommend himself. He is what we all know, or fear to know, about ourselves: a man lost in the weeds, of no particular usefulness to anyone. He is so viciously self-hating that even the comfort of clothing is too much; he sheds them in agony. He wanders in darkness and falls further down the mineshaft. He is a man lost in his lostness, a hopeless case under lock and key. But by stepping off the boat, Jesus colonizes the unclean, unhealed, merciless ground beneath the demoniac’s feet. And now there is nowhere to which the demons may drive this man that it isn’t into the arms of his Savior. 

The ground may be where the dead lie in rest but it becomes a Graceland for this man restored, sitting now at the feet of Jesus, safe. It is this trait of Jesus to step into our places of exile, perhaps more than any other, which must define his people in an age where there seem to be more professed Demoniacs than there are actual demons, and where the ground is judged unclean, unworkable, beyond compromise. In an age of anxiety there will be more who walk among tombs, all of us at least some of the time. We might wonder if the Christianity of Jesus can be reconciled with a modern movement that increasingly looks to avoid the avoidable. This is miserably out of step for the God whose very work, not only out in the Garasene wilderness but in the wilderness of Golgotha too, is to stand on your ground with you out in the tombs, and to cast the deadliness out of you. All in the hopes that his church might follow him, finally easing suffering beyond the end of our own noses for the sake of those making homes the best they can, colonizing with grace those paths of sorrow, out among the tombs. 

[cover: Healing of the Garasene Demoniac, Cypriot, 1594]