Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Luke today, we encounter the story of the Gerasene demoniac, the one possessed by a legion of unclean spirits. In the days in which the gospel was written, the word “legion” would likely have been a word groaning with an over-abundance of associations, the most weighty being a reminder of the Roman Empire’s occupation of the land, the oppression of the people, and the ubiquity of the Roman military presence.

One of the things a consideration of the word “legion” might lead us to ponder is that this story isn’t about a singular healing. It’s about a healing that suddenly happens to a community which is very unexpectedly given to understand that its own identity has been informed by evil spirits of a sort…and is, simultaneously, being given the opportunity to discover and receive a new identity that’s more than a little scary for being so extraordinarily new.

For the sake of honesty, I should say here that I’m indebted to the work of The Rev’d James Alison for my reading of this story (I cannot recommend highly enough his book on original sin: The Joy of Being Wrong). Fr Alison is a Dominican priest and one of the keenest theological interpreters of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory which holds, among other things, that the largely unconscious social processes by which we make scapegoats are generally the processes by which communities, cultures and individual identities are formed and maintained. Group cohesion and a sense of self more often than not arise from the rejection/destruction of a community member or group of community members, and that cohesion and sense of self are stabilized (insofar as we can use that word unironically in this context) through additional rejections should crises of cohesion or identity arise again (and they always do). Girard calls this process of group-building and identity formation “the scapegoating mechanism” and Alison understands it (rightly I think) as another way of talking about what it means to be run by and ruled by death, what it means to be captive to original sin.

In the story of the Gerasene demoniac, what so clearly reveals the scapegoating mechanism at work is the community’s fear at seeing the demoniac cured. Think about it: for as long as the poor man was afflicted, the people could understand themselves as relatively prosperous and unafflicted; for as long as the poor man was living in the cemetery and a figure of death, they could understand themselves as living, alive and better off; a source and sign of shame, uncleanness and degradation, the demoniac nonetheless guaranteed to them a measure of honor, purity and uprightness—at least they weren’t that!

Now that the demoniac has been healed, though…who or what does the community understand itself to be? Where do they put all their baggage now? Where are they to find their sense of self? The healing of the demoniac has exposed the scapegoating mechanism, and the community is reeling in fear at what they might be or become without it. Which is to say, from Jesus’ perspective: Healing is at hand!

When Jesus tells the man that he’s to return to the community and declare what God has done for him, Jesus isn’t rejecting him, but inviting him to become an agent of transformative healing to the community, a sign of the goodness and wonder of grace, a living door opening out onto a living and life-giving healing that is indistinguishable from the man’s own God-given and God-rooted joy. Jesus has given the former-demoniac a new life, a new identity, and the man’s presence in the community will be a sign that God desires wholeness for them, too, and not at the expense of another’s rejection, affliction or suffering, but through receiving a joy, a life, a love, that builds us up into the people we were always meant to be. The healed man reveals and names the community’s sickness by unmasking the scapegoating mechanism at work, but the man’s joy figures the community’s healing as real, present, already underway.

Friend, it is the Cross that reveals our sickness most clearly, and it is the Resurrected Jesus—the one we rejected and nailed to that Cross but who rose again with healing in his wings—who calls us out of scapegoating, out of patterns of violence and death and sin, and into a new life of joy! How might we, today, lay aside fear of what God is calling us to be, allowing the Cross to reveal in us how we might yet remain in bondage to scapegoating, violence, and sin; allowing us to discover ourselves, through the Cross, invited by Jesus into a new Way, illuminated by the Resurrection Light that is his very Loving Presence by which we are healed, by which all shadows of death are banished away? Or, more straightforwardly: how might we, today, be asked to receive the ministry of joy of those we might want to reject?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+