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Luke 8: 26-39:
This story appears in all three synoptic Gospels: Matthew 8: 28-34;
Mark 5: 1-20; and Luke 8: 26-39.
After Jesus calms a storm on the Sea of Galilee (Luke 8: 22-25), he and his
disciples arrive on the other side of the lake in the countryside surrounding
Gerasa, present-day Jerash.
This city, also known as Antioch on the Chrysorrhoas
or the Golden River, was founded by Alexander the Great. It is 50 km
south-east of the Sea of Galilee and 30 km north of Philadelphia, modern-day
Amman.
However, Saint Matthew sets this story in Gadara (present-day Umm Qais), about 10 km from the coast of the Sea of Galilee. Either
location poses questions, for neither Gadara nor Gerasa
is near to the coast of the Sea of Galilee: Gadara was about a three-hour
walking distance, while Gerasa was well over twice
as far.
The differing geographical references to Gadara and Gerasa
can be understood in light of the social, economic, and political influence
each city exerted over the region. In this light, Matthew identified the
exorcism with Gadara as the local centre of power, while the city of Gerasa was a major urban centre and one of the ten cities
of the Decapolis.
Whatever the location and setting of this story, it takes place deep inside
Gentile territory. From the very moment they get off the boat, this story
involves a place and people regarded as unclean by the standards among the
disciples: this is Gentile territory, the people are ritually ‘unclean,’ the
man has an ‘unclean’ spirit, he is naked or a person of visible and public
shame, he lives among the tombs, which are ritually unclean, and the pigs are
unclean too.
In those days, demons were regarded as spirits of an evil kind that did
battle, as a ‘legion,’ with God and God’s allies. They were thought to invade
human bodies and personalities, causing psychiatric and physical illness, and
taking control of people. They found their abode in ‘wilds’ or the desert,
and ‘the abyss’ was the realm of Satan and home to demons. The name ‘Legion’
suggests great demonic power, for a Roman legion was an army unit of about
5,000 troops.
Prisoners or people who had been deprived of their liberty lost the right to
wear clothes. Tombs were ritually unclean places. Swine were a symbol of
pagan religion and of Roman rule, but even they are subject to Christ’s
authority.
This episode plays a key role in the theory of the ‘Scapegoat’ put forward by
the French literary critic René Girard (1923-2015). In his analysis, the
opposition of the entire city to the one man possessed by demons is the
typical template for a scapegoat. Girard notes that, in the demoniac’s
self-mutilation, he seems to imitate the stoning that the local villagers
might have attempted to use against him to cast him out of their society,
while the villagers themselves show by their reaction to Christ that they are
not primarily concerned with the good of the man possessed by demons:
‘Notice the mimetic character of this behaviour. As if he is trying to avoid
being expelled and stoned in reality, the possessed brings about his own
expulsion and stoning; he provides a spectacular mime of all the stages of
punishment that Middle Eastern societies inflict on criminals whom they
consider completely defiled and irredeemable. First, the man is hunted, then
stoned, and finally he is killed; this is why the possessed lived among the
tombs. The Gerasenes must have had some understanding
of why they are reproached, or they would not respond as they do. Their
mitigated violence is an ineffective protest. Their answer is: “No, we do not
want to stone you because we want to keep you near us. No
ostracism hangs over you.” Unfortunately, like anyone who feels wrongfully
yet feasibly accused, the Gerasenes protest
violently, they protest their good faith with violence, thereby reinforcing
the terror of the possessed. Proof of their awareness of their own
contradiction lies in the fact that the chains are never strong enough to
convince their victim of their good intentions toward him.’
On Girard’s account, then, the uneasy truce that the Gaderenes
and the demonic have worked out is that the evil power in him is contained
and so neutralised. The arrival of Jesus on the scene introduces a spiritual
power stronger than Legion, which upsets the societal balance by removing the
scapegoat. This reversal of the scapegoat mechanism by Jesus is central to
Girard’s entire reading of Christianity, and this reversal is on display in
this story as well.
Contrasting the self-destruction of the herd of pigs with the typical motif
of an individual evildoer being pushed over a cliff by an undifferentiated
mob (see Luke 4: 29), Girard comments:
‘But in these cases, it is not the scapegoat who goes over the cliff, neither
is it a single victim nor a small number of victims, but a whole crowd of
demons, two thousand swine possessed by demons. Normal relationships are
reversed. The crowd should remain on top of the cliff and the victim fall
over; instead, in this case, the crowd plunges and the victim is saved. The
miracle of Gerasa reverses the universal schema of
violence fundamental to all societies of the world.’
After this episode, the man not only sits ‘at the feet of Jesus,’ as
disciples did, but he becomes a missionary to other Gentiles. This is a story
of dramatic transformation.
Look at the changes in this man’s life: he moves from outside the city to
inside it; he moves from living in tombs and being driven into the desert to
being alive in a house; he moves from nakedness to being clothed, from being
demented to being of sound mind.
He moves from destructive isolation to being part of a nurturing, human
community. He moves from being expelled from the religious community to being
part of the Church and proclaiming the good news.
He is sent back to live in his house or home (verse 27). The word Saint Luke
uses here is οἶκος (oikos), which means a house, an inhabited house,
even a palace or the house of God, as opposed to δόμος
(domos), the word used for a house as a building. Those who live there
now form one family or household, and this comes to mean the family of God or
the Church (for examples, see I Timothy 3: 15; I Peter 4: 17, and Hebrews 3:
2, 5).
Without trying to read too much into this use of language, we could still
draw from this that the outsider, the person seen as unclean and defiled, the
scapegoat, is restored to a full place in the Church too, in God’s family.
Who do you think we see as Scapegoats today, as outsiders to be pushed to the
margins, so that we can maintain the purity of our family, church or society?
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