Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Gospel lesson is the story of Jesus healing the Gadarene Demoniacs, Matthew 8:28-34.

One way to understand this story is to talk about the significance of demonic possession. Fr. Thomas Hopko enumerates several kinds of such possession here.
The first is the more spectacular, dramatic possession of the demoniacs, who are so utterly controlled by demonic power, they are running around naked and ‘out of their minds’. Jesus reveals the nature of this insidious power when he casts the demons into the pigs, and they rush down the hill and perish in the sea.

Although we may not have experienced demonic power like this, there remain more subtle expressions of it, to which we are all prone.

A second type of demonic control was displayed by the townsfolk, who told Jesus to leave because he had healed the demoniacs. This is a more subdued possession, in which we can cling to the status quo: to our possessions, to our education, to our aesthetic principles, to our jobs, to our investments, to our respectable lives, while at the same time, telling Jesus to leave.

But the third type of possession, not necessarily present here in the text, but attested to in the larger Christian tradition, is the most dangerous. It is the one in which we say they are with Jesus, when we say we belong to the Church, but in fact, we really don’t want God, and we don’t want to change our lives, or be agents of healing to the world. This is the very real temptation towards religiosity, but without the substance of faith and obedience.

This very brief genealogy of demonic possession is convicting to me because it suggests there is no objective 'middle ground' when it comes to my agency. I either act, through repentance and faith, in accord with the grace of God, or self-ishly, through demonic impulses.

This story prompts me to repent daily, to pray the Lord’s Prayer — ‘and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one,’ — so that I may follow Christ whole-heartedly, love my neighbor, and become what God desires me to be.

Yours in Christ,
Justin