The Empire Within

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.