The Demons Within

The Demons Within

©Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2020. All rights reserved.

I’ve written here before about the Bible story of Jesus’ exorcism of the demon named Legion from a man who lived in the tombs and whom no one could control. You’ll find it at Mark 5:1-20. Recently I have been working on revising and reissuing my book Liberating Christianity. As part of that work I started writing about that story again. I’m going to post what I wrote here because I think what I wrote is really important. I have thought for a long time that this story is key to understanding both Jesus and how God wants us to live in the world. The more I think about it the more convinced do I become that that is true. So here for what it’s worth are my latest meditations on that story.

Jesus’ teachings are radically political. They are in fact nonviolently revolutionary. Jesus wanted to transform the world in a radical way, but he wanted to do it in a radical new way too. He wanted to bring about the realm of God with its peace and justice not through violent revolution but through the radical transformation of individual hearts and minds one person at a time. We see that intent of his in this exorcism story that is little known and less understood. We need to see it as central to Jesus’ message of the realm of God. It is usually called “the healing of the Gerasene Demoniac.” I call it “the exorcism of the demon named Legion.” It goes like this.

Jesus and his disciples have been crossing the Sea of Galilee after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. A storm came up as they were out on the water that threatened to sink them. Jesus calmed the storm. They reached the other side of the lake in a place called the country of the Gerasenes. A man from the tombs with what the text calls an unclean spirit meets them. Here’s how the text described him:

He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. Mark 5:3-5.

He must have been quite the frightful sight. As Jesus comes ashore this man runs up to him and bows down before him. It seems the evil spirit within him recognized the superior divine spirit of Jesus, for as soon as Jesus called the unclean spirit out of the man that man shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” I want to ask if unclean spirits really use obscure words like “adjure,” but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Then Jesus does something unexpected. He asks the demon, “What is your name?” Mark 5:9a. Two things strike me as odd about that question. First, wouldn’t Jesus already have known the demon’s name? The demon knew his. Second, what difference could the demon’s name possibly make? Well, it turns out that the demon’s name makes all the difference in the world for the meaning of this story. The demon, still possessing the poor man, says, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” We’ll turn to the significance of that name anon. It seems there was a herd of pigs feeding on a nearby hillside. There wouldn’t have been any pigs in Israel, but recall that Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee. They are on the eastern, Gentile side of the lake. The many unclean spirits possessing the man beg Jesus to let them enter the pigs. Jesus gives them permission to do so. “And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.” Mark 5:13. A couple of verses later we’re told that the people of the region found the man whom Legion had possessed “sitting there, clothed, and in his right mind.” Mark 5:25.

This might be just another story of Jesus exorcising an evil spirit but for one thing. In this story the demon has a name. Usually demons don’t, but this one does. This demon’s name is Legion. Now the word legion has come to mean just a large number of something. In the Roman Empire, however, the word had a much more specific meaning. A legion was the major organizational unit of the Roman army. It was roughly the equivalent of a modern American army division. The size of a legion varied, and they weren’t always fully manned, but every legion consisted of at least several thousand men. The possessed man in this story was possessed by at least two thousand demons, as we see in the number of pigs the story says were on the nearby hillside that the demons entered. Together their name is Legion. When Jesus exorcised Legion out of the man he returned to his normal, healthy state.

What does this story tell us about Jesus’ program? There is no doubt that Jesus preached radical social transformation. Yet Jesus never called for violence against the oppressive, occupying Romans. This story tells us what he did call for. In the world of the possessed man Rome was out there in the world to be sure. Rome was everywhere. Rome used violence against any perceived opponent. Rome taxed the people into abject poverty. Under the Romans the economic elite prospered and everyone else suffered. That was the possessed man’s external world.

Rome was out there, but that wasn’t this man’s problem, or at least it wasn’t his primary problem. His primary problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, his primary problem was the Rome was in here. We must understand that the fact that the possessing demon was named Legion tells us that this man had internalized Rome. He had taken the violent, unjust ways of Rome into the heart, into his soul. The Legion inside made him behave like Rome outside. He was violent. No one could control him. Rome was violent. No one in the Mediterranean world could control it. No one could stop it. To the Jews the Romans were impure Gentiles. The possessed man lived in the tombs. To the Jews tombs were impure. Everyone who heard this story in first century Israel knew what a legion was. They’d immediately associate the demon in this story with the oppressive Romans.

So what does Jesus do to help the unfortunate man who had internalized Rome? He didn’t try to control him by force. Instead he exorcised unclean Rome out of the man. The unclean demons entered unclean pigs, who rushed into the lake and drowned. I worry some about whoever it was who owned the pigs. He just lost a valuable asset. That wouldn’t have been the reaction of the first century audience for this story. They would have howled with glee. They dreamed of rising up and driving the Romans into the sea. In this story the unclean Romans inside the unclean pigs got themselves into the sea, where they drowned.

What do we learn from this story? We learn that transformation of the world begins with internal transformation of the individual. Yes, Rome out there in the world was a big problem for people in Jesus’ world. Jesus knew that, but he also knew that violence wasn’t the answer. Violence against Rome was worse than pointless, as violence usually is. The Jews couldn’t defeat Rome militarily, and it was suicide to try. More fundamentally Jesus knew that violence was not the proper response to Rome because he knew that God is radically nonviolent. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence because nonviolence is the way of God.

Jesus knew that Rome was a problem out there, but the story of the demon named Legion tells us metaphorically that all of us who live in worldly empires, or for that matter who just live in the world, have a more profound problem Our true problem isn’t that empire is out there. Our true problem is that empire is in here. We have internalized the ways of the world. We have made the world’s ways of violence and injustice our ways. We are willing to fight and kill when our nation tells us to. Even if we claim to stand for justice we white Americans benefit every day of our lives from our country’s system of white supremacy and institutional racism. We consume a wildly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources and rarely if ever give the matter a single thought. We pollute the air and warm the earth with our big, gas-guzzling cars and can’t imagine being without them. Even those of us who say we condemn the ways of empire have made the ways of empire our own. We have adopted them as our own. We have taken them into our minds, hearts, and souls. They have distorted our lives, debasing them from the life God intends for us into a demonic way of life that perpetuates the worldly ways Jesus came to transform. In our Bible story here the man from the tombs was possessed by a demon named Legion. That man is us.

Of course, our demon isn’t named Legion. It is named Uncle Sam. It  is named mammon. It is named success and prestige. It is named American First. It is named military might and the claimed right to police the world for our own benefit. It is named institutional racism. It is named American exceptionalism. It’s named massive economic inequality between the enormously wealthy few and the impoverished many. It is named homelessness and lack of medical care. It is named environmental irresponsibility. No, our demons aren’t named Legion, but we’ve got more than our share of internalized demons every bit as demonic as Legion is in the Bible story we’ve been considering.

Jesus exorcised Legion out of the Gerasene demoniac. He wants to exorcise our demons out of us too. Or rather, he wants to help us exorcise those demons ourselves. Many of us want to transform our world even in some quite radical ways. Jesus does too, but he knows what so many of us don’t. We don’t start to transform the world by attacking the world. The world has a nasty habit of attacking back. We don’t start by changing things out there. We start by changing things in here. In our minds, hearts, and souls. We do that relying on Jesus to help us and guide us, for we surely can’t do it alone. That’s the lesson we learn from the story of Jesus exorcising the demon named Legion.