This is the sermon I gave on June 30, 2013, on Luke's story of the demon named Legion and Jesus' approach to dealing with the issue of empire.
The Empire Within
Rev. Tom Sorenson,
Co-Pastor
June 30, 2013
Scripture:
Luke8:26-33
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
The people who lived in what we
call Israel in the first century CE, during the time that Jesus lived there,
had a lot of problems, poverty being one of the dominant ones. They had, however, one major problem that
dwarfed all the others. They lived under
foreign military occupation. Several
decades before Jesus was born Rome occupied Israel. Rome was at that time the greatest empire
with the most powerful military establishment that the world had ever
seen. Like all empires ruling foreign
lands Rome ruled for the benefit of Rome, not for the benefit of the people of
the occupied land. Israel got some
benefits from Roman occupation I suppose.
The first century CE was a time of relative peace and of economic
prosperity for the wealthy, albeit hardly for most of the people. Yet the Jewish people, or at least most of
them, hated Rome. Rome exploited the
land and the people economically, imposing harsh taxes that drove most of the
people deeper into poverty. Worst of
all, the Romans were Gentiles. They
worshipped false gods. They even
worshipped their emperor, a mere human being.
For the Jews of the time it was an abomination for the followers of the
one true God to be ruled and oppressed by infidels. The Jews hated the Romans. They wanted the Romans gone. They rebelled violently against Rome several
times, always with dire consequences when the Romans crushed the
rebellion. Liberation from Roman
occupation was the great dream and hope of nearly all of the Jewish people.
Many of those Jewish people
expressed that dream and that hope by talking about someone called the
Messiah. The Messiah was one who was to
come and deliver Israel. There were
different understandings of the Messiah in circulation in Jesus’ time, but one
of the major ones saw the Messiah as a new King David. In this understanding he would raise an army
and drive the Romans into the sea. He
would then reestablish the Davidic Kingdom, a long lost kingdom that the Jews
had come to see as a golden age from the past and a model for liberation in the
future.
Now, the Christian tradition has
called Jesus the Messiah—or the Christ, the two words mean the same thing—from
the very beginning. That claim was a
really hard sell to first century Jews.
It was a really hard sell because Jesus didn’t look, act, or talk
anything like the Messiah so many of them were hoping for. They wanted a Messiah who would make war on
Rome and drive the Romans into the sea.
Jesus, of course, didn’t do that.
He didn’t try to do it. He had no
intention of ever doing it. He just
wasn’t that kind of Messiah.
He wasn’t that kind of Messiah;
but however one approached it Rome was Israel’s biggest problem, and any
Messiah of whatever type had to deal with Rome and the Roman oppression of the
Jewish people. Any Messiah of whatever
type had to give the people a way of dealing with Rome and the problems it
created for them. That, I believe, is
what our story of Jesus and the exorcism of the demon named Legion is all
about. In that story we see how Jesus
understood the problem of Rome and how to deal with it.
In that story a man is
powerfully possessed by a demon. The
demon renders the man what we would call mentally ill. The man couldn’t control himself. Other people couldn’t control him
either. So Jesus comes along and exorcizes
the demon out of the man. Jesus asks the
demon its name. The demon says “Legion,”
and Luke tells us that the demon’s name was Legion because many demons had
entered the possessed man. The demons
get Jesus’ permission to enter a nearby herd of swine, who immediately rush
into the Sea of Galilee and drown, taking the demons with them.
And you may be asking: What does that story have to do with
Rome? The answer to that very legitimate
question lies in the name of the demon, in “Legion.” What does Legion mean? That word has entered our language as a common
word that means “a great many.” Luke
suggests that meaning of the word when he says that the demon’s name is Legion
because many demons had entered the possessed man. OK.
That explanation of the name Legion is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go far
enough. In the first century CE the word
legion didn’t just mean many. It had a
related but quite specific other meaning.
Back then everyone who heard the story Luke tells would have known that
a legion was a unit of the Roman army.
It was a major unit of the army, sort of like our army division,
although not quite as big. A legion
consisted of three to six thousand infantry troops and one to two hundred
cavalry troops. To Jesus and his
audience a legion represented the military might of the foreign power that
occupied their land and oppressed them and their people. Legion meant Roman power and Rome’s military
occupation and tyrannical rule.
So in our story the name Legion
represents the Roman empire. It
represents the ways of empire. More
broadly it represents the ways of the world.
Legion stands for the world’s dominant power, and it therefore stands
for the world’s ways of violence and oppression. It stands for all of the ways of the
world. It represents considering worldly
power and success to be the highest values.
It represents seeing other people as objects rather than persons,
objects for us to use, exploit, and abuse as we will to achieve our own selfish
purposes. It represents all of the ways
in which the world stands for values contrary to the will of God.
In our story Legion isn’t
literally a division of Roman soldiers.
It isn’t an external image at all.
It is an internal one. In the
story Legion isn’t the Roman military encampment outside the city, it is Rome
internalized. In this story demonic
possession by Legion represents all of the things that Legion stands for taken
inside and made part of a man’s life. In
this story the worldly values that Rome represents control the man who has
taken them in. He doesn’t control them,
they control him. The possessed man’s
problem isn’t so much that the Roman Empire occupies his home country as it is
that the Roman Empire occupies his soul.
His problem isn’t that Rome is out there. His problem is that Rome is in here, within
himself, controlling him not from the outside but from the inside.
In this story Jesus launches not
a military assault on an external Rome but a spiritual assault on an internal
one. He doesn’t drive the external Roman
army into the sea. Metaphorically
speaking, he drives the internal Roman army into the sea. He doesn’t physically attack Rome’s
soldiers. Rather, he exorcizes the Roman
legion that the possessed man has internalized.
He drives that Legion into the
sea. Jesus frees the man not from
external occupation by Rome but from internal possession by Rome. Jesus deals here not with imperial possession
from outside but with imperial possession from inside.
In this story Jesus shows us
where our adversary really lives.
Empire, and more generally the ways and values of the world, are a
problem for us not because they exist outside of us. They are a problem for us because they exist inside
us. They are a problem because we
internalize them. Our problem isn’t that
the world’s ways are what they are. Our
problem is that we take the ways of the world into our hearts. Our problem isn’t the ways of the world per
se. It is the way we have internalized
the values and methods of the world and made them our own. This story says that the world wins not so
much through brute military power as it does by capturing our minds, hearts,
and souls and by bending us until the world’s ways become our ways.
The story of Jesus’ exorcism of
the demon named Legion calls us to look first of all not outward into the world
to find evil. It calls us to look
inward, into ourselves, into our minds and our hearts. Have the ways of the world that contradict
and deny God’s ways taken possession of us the way Legion took possession of
the man in our story? Do we support the
world’s ways of violence when we think we benefit from them? Do we dehumanize any of God’s people, seeing
them as objects rather than as beloved children of God? Do we strive for worldly success measured in
money and power rather than for the wisdom and peace that come from pursuing
the life of the spirit?
Let’s be honest. We’ve all internalized at least some of the
ways of the world. It really isn’t
possible to grow up in the world and not internalize an awful lot of it. The world of Rome possessed the man in our
story. The world today possesses
us. Jesus exorcized Rome and its world
from the man in the story. We don’t have
Jesus physically present with us to exorcize our world from us. So this story calls us to do the work of
exorcism ourselves. Jesus calls us to
look deep into ourselves. What do we see
there? The ways of the world or the ways
of God? Jesus calls us to the immensely
difficult work of replacing the world in our souls with God in our souls. For Jesus, for God, we don’t transform the
world through force and violence. We
transform the world by starting with ourselves.
When we transform our hearts, when we exorcize the world’s violent and
unjust ways from our souls, we transform the world. When enough people have, with the help of
God, transformed themselves, the world will be transformed. That’s why Jesus exorcized an internalized
demon named Legion and didn’t raise an army to attack Rome. He calls us to do the same. Amen.
