Fr Peter Helman
"The spiritual life is not a way of tranquilizing oneself
against the anguish of the world."
(Jan van Ruysbroek, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, ca. 1350 CE)
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Dear friends,
They traveled by boat that day to a strange place, across the sea to the land of the Gerasenes. They stepped from the boat and were met by a man greatly afflicted. He ran to Jesus from the tombs, for he lived among the dead. He was kept there under guard, but he tore away the iron shackles and chains used to bind him. Night and day, his screams echoed among the graves and upon the hillside.
From a distance, the man saw Jesus approach, and he flung himself to the ground before him.
“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me” – for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. “What’s your name?” Jesus asked. “Legion,” said the spirits, for many demons had possessed the man. The spirits begged Jesus not to cast them back into the abyss. On the hillside, a large herd of swine was feeding, and the spirits begged Jesus to let them enter these. With permission, Legion left the man, and entered the pigs, and all at once the swine rushed down the bank into the sea and drowned.
The swineherds ran off and told what they had seen in the city and in the countryside, and people came to see what had happened. They found the man sitting with Jesus, freed of Legion, dressed and in his right mind. Hearing of the man’s healing, the Gerasene people were seized with great fear and begged Jesus to leave.
As Jesus got into his boat to return, the man once possessed begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him back to his people. “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And so the man went off, and proclaimed throughout the region what Jesus had done.
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Here we read of a scapegoat, a man bound in chains like an animal. He is tortured by his own mind and tortured by his own kin. The only people he knows leave him to die, yet Jesus is neither violent nor afraid. Jesus brings the man once made to dwell with the dead into the light of life. Jesus neither condemns nor recoils, but speaks to him and restores the man to the man he was. Jesus loves him as himself.
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We learn something about Jesus and our calling as Christians from this morning’s Office reading from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. He traveled into the far country to find the outcast. He stepped into the valley of deep shadow of another’s pain and bewilderment. He absorbed the terrifying conflicts in others.
And we follow Jesus and stand where he stands, finding ourselves in the dark night of the world’s yearning for healing and love. That is frightening for us because caring is costly. Our courage falters in the face of the anguish of those we meet, and we know the feeling of wanting to escape. But Jesus strengthens us with his mighty love to be with him with others. We are compelled, as someone wrote, “to seek and serve Christ in the poor, the ragged, the despised and the broken. […] They need solidarity and companionship, reassurance that they are still themselves, and where possible, help in distinguishing the voice of God from the many conflicting voices within them.”
Let us not shrink today from loving all people, and let us pray for strength to spend and be spent for the souls of our neighbors, for whom Christ gave his life.
In Christ,
Fr. Peter