This morning, imagine you have set down a book and then had to go back and reread the last chapter or two to remember what had taken place, or you watched a season finale in a television series and then had a couple of months to forget what had happened. That is where we find ourselves this morning. Because while we are in the “year of Luke”, the third year of the revised common lectionary cycle, we’ve had only one Gospel lesson from Luke since Easter. So it may be helpful to be re-introduced to the third gospel.
Luke’s gospel is one of the three synoptic gospels with Matthew and Mark, and while they each have different purposes, these three gospels share common sources and content with each other. Luke’s gospel, the latest of the three, was written more than ten years after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Roman army and, at the time it was written, the people of Israel were living under occupation and subject to Roman law. The contemporary belief is that the writer of the gospel was a member of the Christian community, and at home in the Greco-Roman culture. Perhaps he was a Gentile Christian or a covert from Hellenistic Judaism.[i]
Certainly, one of the prominent themes in Luke’s gospel is that Jesus Christ is not only a prophet like Moses and the Jewish Messiah but that Jesus brings Good News to the whole world, especially to those who are excluded or marginalized.[ii]
Earlier in Luke’s gospel, Jesus was traveling from town to town in the region of Galilee with his disciples. When, in verse 26, it says “they arrived in the country of the Gerasenes,” they had just crossed the Sea of Galilee.
It’s helpful to remember that anytime in Scripture when water is crossed – the crossing of the Reed Sea when the Israelites fled Egypt, the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land of Canaan , or the crossing of the Sea of Galilee – it signals to us that God is at work doing something new.[iii]
Today’s gospel tells us that Jesus willingly went to a Gentile or non-Jewish land. We know that first from the geography of the region, which shows the Decapolis east of the Sea of Galilee; the Decapolis being a region of ten cities that were “centers of Greek culture.”[iv] But it’s also clear from the text because there are swine or pigs that wouldn’t have been found in religiously-observant Jewish households where people would have believed that contact with the animals would have made someone ritually unclean.
But Gentiles and pigs aren’t the only untouchables in this story.
Luke tells us that when Jesus came ashore, he was met by a man from town who was possessed by demons, naked and lived among the tombs. (v. 27) Both his illness and his living conditions assured that he was cast out from the town and by the people in the countryside. Luke goes on to say that the man had been bound and chained but he always broke free from his shackles and withdrew to deserted places. A street person – unnamed and experiencing homelessness – he is only identified by the ones who possessed him – the thousands of demons called “Legion.”
Recently I heard again a TED talk given by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie who talks about the risk we take when we let ourselves define a person or a group of people by a single attribute. Citing the danger of what she calls “a single story”, Adichie describes times when she has been subjected to a single story from people who “only knew about Africa from popular images… of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, [and] dying of poverty and AIDS.” And then she confesses times when she, in turn, has been the one who has told a single story, such as the flawed one she learned from the American debate over immigrants and refugees, the one that says that Mexicans and Central Americans are animals and rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the single story told by the Nazis was heard in their “portrayal of the Jews as disease-spreading rats feeding off the host nation, poisoning its culture and polluting the Aryan race… as butchers and …as aliens.”[v] That single story was accepted as Truth even as millions of Jews were deported and housed in concentration camps where six million people were executed.
Adichie reminds us that,
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.She offers that listening to many stories about a people or a place restores dignity to the people to whom the stories belong and gives us a way to engage with each person as wholly human. [vi]
Refusing to fall for the single story, Jesus sees the Gerasene man as more than just the demons who possess him. He recognizes him as wholly human, a beloved child of God, created in God’s image.
What struck me in reading the gospel this time wasn’t the miraculous healing that the man experienced, with the demons driven into the herd of pigs and sent down the steep banks into the water. (v. 33) What caught my attention was the reaction of the people who saw what Jesus did
First Luke tells us the swineherds who witnessed the events ran away to tell others. Now when we hear the story of Jesus’ birth, we’re told those shepherds made known what had been told them and all who heard it were amazed” and, picturing Bethlehem, I imagine that they told the story with reverence and awe. But when I hear that the swineherds ran away to report the incident of the man’s deliverance, their actions sound much more ominous, like people inciting a mob to riot.
Perhaps that’s because when the people do come to see for themselves, Luke tells us they were seized with fear. (v. 35, 37)
They didn’t throw their arms joyfully around the man who’d they seen tormented and tortured. They didn’t find a place where he could live or offer him food, or even listen to his story. They were afraid.
They were so afraid that they asked Jesus to leave. (v. 37)
As often as we witness suffering from a distance and pray for people who are living with illness, I want to believe if I witnessed a miraculous healing, I would rejoice and give thanks, but whenever I think I would have been more faithful or obedient than the biblical characters, I know I am probably fooling myself.
They may not have liked having a demon-possessed man in their midst, but he had lived imprisoned or alone, always keeping his distance. They thought they knew this man’s story and where he belonged. They had succumbed to the allure of the single story.
Jesus challenged their understanding of the world around them. And that was unacceptable, so they asked him to leave. After all, the problem wasn’t with them. It was that troublemaker Jesus.
But when Jesus troubles the waters, it is what’s known as “good trouble.” There are a lot of single stories out there and it’s easy for us to point at others and think we know their story, but Jesus calls us to be united under one Lord and reconciled with one another. And to help us on the Way, Jesus shows us another story, where each person is afforded dignity and seen fully, where we are asked to listen and hear how much God has done for them. Because each one of us, with our stories, is a beloved child of God, created in God’s own image.
Let us pray…
Holy and Redeeming Lord,
Thank you for creating each one us wonderfully in your image; forgive us when we will not listen to another person’s story or see them as your beloved child;
Forgive us when we are afraid.
Open our ears to hear and open our hearts to love each person with the love you have first given us.
We pray in the name of Your Son Jesus.
Amen.
[i] Fred Craddock. Luke. 16.
[ii] Craddock, 19.
[iii] “Pulpit Fiction.” https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/proper7c, accessed 6/18/2019.
[iv] “Decapolis.” Enter The Bible. Luther Seminary. https://www.enterthebible.org/resourcelink.aspx?rid=1277, accessed 6/22/2019.
[v] “Propaganda and Hoaxes in Nazi Germany: 80 Years Later.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201811/propaganda-and-hoaxes-in-nazi-germany-80-years-later, accessed 6/23/2019
[vi] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en, accessed 6/22/2019
No comments:
Post a Comment