FINDINGS II
Proper
7 - C - June 20, 2010
Isaiah 65: 1-9 and Luke 8: 26-39
 By Harry T. Cook
6/14/10
RUBRIC
The slogan "Jesus is the answer," or some variation upon it,
shows up on bumper stickers, outdoor church signs and here and there across the
intellectual flatlands of fundamentalist Christianity. The slogan generally
means that Jesus is the answer to everything and to anything. The observant Jew
or practicing Muslim would dissent from that baseless generalization as would
the secular humanist, all of whom find such a claim to be not only without
warrant but silly besides.
Though none of the canonical gospels makes that claim
overtly, it is made in more nuanced ways. Luke 8: 22-25, 26-39, 40-48 and 49-56
basically set forth that claim as Jesus is said: to have calmed a storm at sea
by the mere speaking of a word, to have cured a man's insanity by driving the
demons out of him and into a herd of swine, to have passively cured a woman's
hemorrhage without having noticed and to have called a child back from the
dead. Just an ordinary day in the life of a savior, I guess. No wonder an
uncritical reader of the bible could come to conclusion that "Jesus is the
answer." No wonder also that 19th and early 20th century hymn writers of
evangelical Protestantism would descend to such doggerel as this to express
their raw and unrationalized faith:
I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore
Very deeply stained within, Sinking to rise no more,
But the Master of the sea heard my despair cry,
From the waters lifted me, now safe am I.
--
James Rowe, 1911
WORKSHOP
Much of Luke chapter 8 feeds the belief that Jesus is the
cure-all. The passage immediately preceding the one at hand in this proper
begins a series of several so-called miracle stories that were clearly related
to bolster the image of Jesus as a doer of extraordinary, even supernatural
deeds. Luke 8: 22-25 is the story of his command to a stormy sea to subside
meant to show Jesus' mastery of such natural phenomena as wind and waves. Luke
places the word "epistata" (master) on the lips of the frightened disciples as
the inland lake known as the Sea of Galilee kicks up a storm that threatens to
capsize their little vessel.
Once the storm is banished and the boat comes ashore,
another storm, so to speak, shows up in the person (or persons) of a madman
from whose chaotic madness Jesus will be depicted as wresting control. One may
be put in mind of the image struck at Genesis 1:2 in which the gods (elohim)
are said to have "moved over the "formless void" (in the Hebrew idiom "tohu va
bohu," meaning something like our idiomatic "helter skelter") and wrought the
beginning of order from it.
Now with the apostolic company back on dry land comes the
possessed man who had been living in the local cemetery ("among the tombs"). He
was naked and no doubt wild-eyed. It is said that no mesh of chains could
restrain him when the demon exerted itself over and in him. Having taken over
the distressed man's larynx, the demon Jesus had exorcised is depicted as
crying out: "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?"
Luke makes an interesting point without actually saying so to the effect that
even if the average sane person doesn't get who Jesus is, a demon does.
At v. 30, Luke has Jesus ask the creature his name. "What is
your name?" (onoma). The word can also mean "character" or "nature." That's how
the demon takes it as the answer is: "legiōn," a Latin word remade into Greek,
meaning in practice "six thousand" as a Roman legion numbered 6,000 soldiers.
In case we do not understand, Luke adds, "for many demons had entered him."
Luke depicts the demons as beseeching the exorcist not to
send them "back into the abyss." Here the Greek is "abussos," or the dwelling
place of the dead with their warden Satan. It is interesting that "abussos" is
the word the Septuagint uses to translate the Hebrew "tehom," the "deep" of
Genesis 1:2. "Tehom" is the rough equivalent of "Tiamat," the monster of chaos
in the Babylonian creation myth. The herd of swine is substituted for chaos.
Luke's story is 1) that the swine are driven by the demons into the sea (shades
of Exodus 14: 27-28), 2) that the people are generally frightened by what they
have seen and (3) the demon-less man wants to join up with Jesus but is told to
go home and tell his story.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
Among the homiletic opportunities this passage presents I
would emphasize two: 1) an exploration of what it meant that Luke did not
depict Jesus as simply destroying the demons, that he was not allowed by the
narrative to send them into the abyss for good and why some practitioner of
animal husbandry was the financial victim of the exorcism; and 2) a creative
commentary on why the exorcised, who would have been great p.r. for Jesus, was
told to stay home and tell his story there.
As to the first: it is an interesting worldview that Luke's
disposition of the demons represents. In contemporary terms it could be said
that evil, as such, is not easily brushed away, that it is ever-present in the
evolving world and that the abyss is never as far away as we think. Even a
cursory review of the horror of the Nazis' near-annihilation of European Jewry requires
a look directly into that abyss. The growing xenophobia in America with regard
to gay and lesbian persons, Hispanic immigrants in the Southwest and the
obvious Tea Party hatred of Barack Obama are foul emanations of that vile stink
hole.
As to the second: One does not need ordination or a
commission to go to a far land to preach the gospel. One does best to grow
where he or she is planted and to do the good thing right there. For example,
if you live in Arizona, you might join Episcopal Bishop Kirk Smith in his
denunciation of that state's recent Nazi-esque immigration law. That would be
an exorcism well worth doing.
Since we began with a Sunday school hymn, we may as well end
with one:
Brighten the corner where you are;
Brighten the corner where you are;
Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar.
Brighten the corner where you are.
-- Ina Duley Ogden, 1913
|
|
