Text: Mark 5:1-20
What have you to do with me? This is, not only the question with which a tortured soul, or the spirits within him, challenge Jesus upon encounter in our reading this morning from Mark chapter 5. It would also be a fair, if provocative, question to be pressed by modern hearers of Gospel exorcisms, who struggle with psychological trouble. Or by those who walk closely with them. What have you to do with me
could be asked of the text itself.
What have you to do with me could be asked yet again of Jesus,
whom the Gerasene or Gadarene demoniac announces as Son of the Most High God. But more importantly, modern sufferers of mental illness might reasonably ask of the man among the tombs himself,
what have you to do with me?
Are your struggles really my struggles?
Could Jesus or his followers really heal me with a few simple words?
Doubtful, at best, might understandably come the answer.
Better, it would seem, to pass over such texts altogether when thinking about the vexing issues around contemporary psychiatric care.
Now there are a number of approaches that Christians have taken when thinking through mental health and New Testament exorcism texts. We’ll consider some of those approaches this morning, but let’s begin here, with a viewpoint which insists that these texts and mental health have nothing to do with each other.
It may or may not be where we will end up this morning.
But a denial of relevance is, nevertheless, the beginning of wisdom when approaching the Gerasene demoniac and other such texts in the New Testament.
Conservative literalism, taken to its logical conclusion, would suggest that many of those who suffer acute psychiatric problems are not sick, but possessed. I sat next to Harris, a good friend of mine from the streets, and listened as he wept last year. His girlfriend, he insisted, was not afflicted by a bipolar disorder, she was under the influence of demons. That’s what the Bible said.
Liberal scientism, on the other hand, has a tendency to blithely universalize human experience. It often assumes, in this regard, that there is little to no difference between our world and the world of the text. The major difference being only that we have progressed beyond “them”;
we understand things scientifically where they understood them magically. A skilled practitioner, on this view, might possibly diagnose young children, supposedly healed or exorcised by Jesus, with epilepsy. Many of the prophets, especially Ezekiel, seem to be suffering from schizophrenia. Our subject this morning, among the tombs?
Multiple personality disorder. We are legion. But wait a minute, we now call that Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is not to be confused with dissocial personality disorder. But there are strong clinical arguments from a large faction of psychiatrists that there is no such thing as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or that if there is it is only brought on by the problems of talk therapy. Who knows what this disorder will look like by the time the Bible of psychiatry, the DSM, publishes its fifth edition in 2013? And that isn’t even to mention the self-harming aspects of the text, which could suggest a borderline personality disorder. To get into the diagnostic and treatment possibilities of these disorders leads into an incredible morass.
A woman we know very well at Sanctuary displays almost all of the signs of what is currently known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, especially a very convincing range of multiple personalities. And get this, when she tires or is ejected from wherever she has most recently been living, she often winds up sleeping and wandering among the tombstones at a church with a large graveyard not very far from where we are sitting this morning.
Nevertheless, it is very hard to see how Jesus’ exorcism of the Gerasene Demoniac can readily be applied today to our friend among the tombs, whom I’ll call Rhonda. Rhonda, from what we know about her and her past, which is quite a lot actually, may very well have been exorcised at some point over the last thirty years. As evangelical as we are at Sanctuary, none of us for a moment think that we have the power to see Rhonda healed with a few spoken words. Those of us who know her best have not even discussed it. We all suspect, I believe, that such an attempt would end disastrously, or even if it ended well, the rite would have to be performed and reperformed continuously as is so often the case with those who claim the power to exorcise. But modern medicine, a liberal or scientific point of view, also offers very little by way of solution. Identity and personality disorders have proven fairly impervious to modern medicine. A number of initially successful sounding therapeutic suggestions have failed when attempted in widespread fashion or controlled clinical settings. A very substantial number of august medical bodies recommend against attempts to medicate individuals afflicted by such disorders.
So if Liberal Scientism and Conservative Literalism are unsuccessful, perhaps we should simply affirm that we cannot compare the situation of the Gadarene Demoniac and that of my friend Rhonda, at least not where the question of treatment, healing, or help comes in.
Before we get to that point, however, let’s have a closer look at the text this morning:
Jesus arrives in the region of the Gerasenes which, we are told, is on the other side of the sea. This is significant. If I had been more diligent, I would have the main map from Marilyn’s sermon up behind me … In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus crosses and returns across the sea three times. On the Western bank of the Galilee are towns and countryside which are predominantly Jewish. Predominating the Eastern shore and extending considerably South, primarily along the Eastern side of the Jordan River, is the region which eventually became known as the Decapolis. The Decapolis was a region of ten cities – or so, it fluctuated over time. These cities, this countryside, was dominated by Greco-Roman culture and often proved to be the site of incredible conflict as well as of creative encounter between Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures. Aldred spoke marvelously of the conflict between Roman values and the Kingdom of God. It would take a very long time indeed to go into the contours of creative encounter between the Greco-Roman and Semitic culture. Ched Meyers’ writings on the Gospel of Mark tell us that this was a region, in fact, where retired military personnel settled upon land given to them for their service to the Roman Empire.
Immediately when Jesus steps out of the boat he is greeted by a man with an unclean spirit living among the tombs. Now, “immediately” in Mark’s Gospel signals a narrative shift, and there is much that is different from the surrounding texts – most significantly, Jesus uncharacteristically abandons the mode of secrecy when he concludes his time here. (We all remember chanting, “shhh, don’t tell, it’s a secret” during Tim’s introductory sermon, do we not?)
The text spends several verses describing the terrors of this man: breaking chains, howling, bruising himself with stones, awake both night and day.
In verses seven through nine we witness a subtle, but unmistakable supernatural power contest. The power to name was very genuinely understood as the power to control. The loud voice coming out of the man attempts to control Jesus by naming him: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” And then comes a stern command: “Do not torment me.” The command sits side by side in Mark 5 with the naming of Jesus, though in the following verse we are told that the attempt to control Jesus had been preceded by an initial command from Jesus himself: “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit.” Notice here, how Jesus takes a slightly less confrontational route. Where the man with the unclean spirit has forthrightly named Jesus, Jesus instead asks the man “What is your name?”. “My name is Legion: for we are many.”
In our language, and very much on account of this text, legion has multiple meanings, including simply a reference to a large number. In Jesus’ day, it clearly referred to a troop of Roman soldiers numbering from three to six thousand. This was the Decapolis, remember. This is where senior Roman soldiers are retiring on newly settled lands. This is a contest between Jesus, Son of the Most High God and a Roman Legion, commanded finally by Caesar, Son of the Most High God.
Soon the spirits beg and are granted leave to enter into thousands of pigs, grazing nearby. And then pigs fly … off the cliff and into the sea where they drown. Now, it is often noticed by commentators that pigs are unclean in Jewish culture. But this does little to advance our understanding of the text. More helpful is Ched Meyers’ further notice that “pig” was a derisive term for a newly recruited Roman soldier. It’s like the contemporary use of the term “pig” for police officers. In other words, Jesus, Son of God, ruler of the Reign or Kingdom of God has just symbolically become a new Moses figure; he has drowned the armies of Caesar in the Sea of Galilee as Moses is said, by the power of God, to have drowned the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea.
The swineherders, the people in charge of these “Pigs”, are understandably shaken. They run into the surrounding cities and country to spread the alarm. And when people arrive, there he is, the unsubduable terror of the entire region, “the very man who had the legion,” “the demoniac sitting there and clothed and in his right mind.”
“And,
they were afraid.”
So they beg Jesus to leave the neighbourhood. And he does. And the man who has been healed begs to go with him. But Jesus refuses. And Mark’s Jesus does something remarkable. He abandons his concern with secrecy. “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord” – the Lord, master of the universe, conqueror of the Romans, winner of the contest, THE Son of God – “tell them how much THE LORD has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” There are two really, really tremendous things afoot here, in my view. First, Jesus didn’t let this guy become a follower. He immediately becomes a proclaimer. No discipleship training. No church. No community. I frankly don’t understand this. And, where Jesus’ presence leaves the citizens of the Decapolis terrified, the man’s ministry among them bears fruit. By the end of these verses, the sending of the healed man results in the turning of fear into amazement. A local messenger of Jesus succeeds in bringing the good news where Jesus’ presence itself reduced the citizenry to terrible fear.
Michelle’s sermon a few weeks back made use Lydia Harder’s book on Mark which treats the parable of the sower as a template through which to read most of the rest of the Gospel. Lydia notices something interesting when using this methodology for Mark 5 and the Gerasene demoniac. The sower, often thought to be Jesus himself, does not determine whether a good harvest comes forth. It is the soil, which is seen to be either good or bad soil. According to Lydia, the Gospel of Mark as a whole has three types of people as varying kinds of soil: the insider, the outsiders, and the potential fruitful followers. The insiders and the outsiders are flatter characters, they are good soil and bad soil respectively and there is little to nothing that can be done to change this. The potential fruitful followers are rounder and more nuanced characters. Most of us would fit into that category. We need to be convinced and shaped and encouraged to be the right kind of soil, the kind that can produce fruit.
The insiders and the outsiders, meanwhile, fit into a dualistic mode where some are for and some are against the kingdom of God. But Lydia notices something truly wonderful, the demoniac brings forth an abundant harvest to the amazement of all. Jesus, as the sower, needed to sow the seed for the harvest to come forth, but we must notice that for the Reign of God, the one afflicted by demons turns out to have been an insider all along! He needs no training or encouragement or cajoling once the seed is sown. As Lydia puts it, “insiders that bear fruit can be identified because of the unexpected bounty of the harvest.” A recent and very long article in the New York Times may be helpful in conclusion here. The article is entitled “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” It argues a number of things very persuasively. The major point, however, is that madness or what we now generally call mental illnesses are, in fact, localizable phenomena. Different regions and different countries have very different mental disorders. And we do the world and ourselves a disservice when we attempt to categorize everything around the world according to American psychiatric diagnoses. Eating disorders in Hong Kong, for example, showed a dramatic and alarming shift and increase when local terms, diagnoses, and treatments were replaced by North American categories and treatments. We do the same thing when we think we can readily understand and diagnose what was happening in the world of the biblical text. Yes, the man among the tombs was a personality on the border of two worlds, one Jewish and one Greco-Roman. But we do no one any favors by assuming that we have progressed beyond “them”, that here we have a borderline personality disorder just like those in our world, and that Jesus may have been even more effective if he could have been privy to modern medicine. [***At this point, for a couple of reasons, I set aside my written text, and concluded mostly ad lib. The part below in italics is a brief, idealizied summary of what I remember adlibbing, the part in regular text, I read, though not necessarily word for word. I apologize for the inconvenience! Perhaps in an upcoming P.O.M. I’ll write what I think I would have really liked to have concluded!***] And now we come to the point where I wish that the fire drill had been scheduled. Right here, near the end of my sermon! It could have rescued me! I’ve turned over far more soil than I could possibly bring to harvest in the few minutes I have left! So I’ll leave you this morning without a rousing conclusion, even though I have much more that I would like to say. Sometimes turning over the soil and letting it sit is the best thing to do anyway. The one thing I will say, is that caring for people in a different kind of political community, a community striving to embody the Reign of God makes a difference for mental health issues. People often ask us at Sanctuary how much of our community is afflicted by mental illness. We often say, it depends on how you count, 15, 25, 60, 70, nearly 100%? Part of the problem is that the DSM that I referred to earlier has such a wide range of diagnoses and symptoms that nearly everyone of us, staff included, could fit into some sort of diagnoses. It’s hard to imagine, really, what normal is supposed to look like in our world. At Sanctuary we are striving to include the widest number of poor and marginalized folks in our community as possible, and it makes a difference. People who in other churches would seem like the odd person out, the one who needs to be cared for, or watched carefully, would be the most high functioning members of our community. I remember leaving Simeon in the care of one such fellow quickly at one point when I went to help break-up a big fight that had erupted in the midst of a drop-in. And it was just fine, the way things turned out. What have you to do with us, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? And with Rhonda? And with all those who are psychologically afflicted? [I promised someone that I’d include a link the the NYT’s article I referred to here. Her it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?scp=1&sq=americanization%20of%20mental%20illness&st=cse]
The insiders and the outsiders, meanwhile, fit into a dualistic mode where some are for and some are against the kingdom of God. But Lydia notices something truly wonderful, the demoniac brings forth an abundant harvest to the amazement of all. Jesus, as the sower, needed to sow the seed for the harvest to come forth, but we must notice that for the Reign of God, the one afflicted by demons turns out to have been an insider all along! He needs no training or encouragement or cajoling once the seed is sown. As Lydia puts it, “insiders that bear fruit can be identified because of the unexpected bounty of the harvest.” A recent and very long article in the New York Times may be helpful in conclusion here. The article is entitled “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” It argues a number of things very persuasively. The major point, however, is that madness or what we now generally call mental illnesses are, in fact, localizable phenomena. Different regions and different countries have very different mental disorders. And we do the world and ourselves a disservice when we attempt to categorize everything around the world according to American psychiatric diagnoses. Eating disorders in Hong Kong, for example, showed a dramatic and alarming shift and increase when local terms, diagnoses, and treatments were replaced by North American categories and treatments. We do the same thing when we think we can readily understand and diagnose what was happening in the world of the biblical text. Yes, the man among the tombs was a personality on the border of two worlds, one Jewish and one Greco-Roman. But we do no one any favors by assuming that we have progressed beyond “them”, that here we have a borderline personality disorder just like those in our world, and that Jesus may have been even more effective if he could have been privy to modern medicine. [***At this point, for a couple of reasons, I set aside my written text, and concluded mostly ad lib. The part below in italics is a brief, idealizied summary of what I remember adlibbing, the part in regular text, I read, though not necessarily word for word. I apologize for the inconvenience! Perhaps in an upcoming P.O.M. I’ll write what I think I would have really liked to have concluded!***] And now we come to the point where I wish that the fire drill had been scheduled. Right here, near the end of my sermon! It could have rescued me! I’ve turned over far more soil than I could possibly bring to harvest in the few minutes I have left! So I’ll leave you this morning without a rousing conclusion, even though I have much more that I would like to say. Sometimes turning over the soil and letting it sit is the best thing to do anyway. The one thing I will say, is that caring for people in a different kind of political community, a community striving to embody the Reign of God makes a difference for mental health issues. People often ask us at Sanctuary how much of our community is afflicted by mental illness. We often say, it depends on how you count, 15, 25, 60, 70, nearly 100%? Part of the problem is that the DSM that I referred to earlier has such a wide range of diagnoses and symptoms that nearly everyone of us, staff included, could fit into some sort of diagnoses. It’s hard to imagine, really, what normal is supposed to look like in our world. At Sanctuary we are striving to include the widest number of poor and marginalized folks in our community as possible, and it makes a difference. People who in other churches would seem like the odd person out, the one who needs to be cared for, or watched carefully, would be the most high functioning members of our community. I remember leaving Simeon in the care of one such fellow quickly at one point when I went to help break-up a big fight that had erupted in the midst of a drop-in. And it was just fine, the way things turned out. What have you to do with us, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? And with Rhonda? And with all those who are psychologically afflicted? [I promised someone that I’d include a link the the NYT’s article I referred to here. Her it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?scp=1&sq=americanization%20of%20mental%20illness&st=cse]