Fear

Scripture: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 12), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Fear. You can smell it all throughout the Gospel text this morning. This is a story about fear.

It starts off with a small boat crossing deep water. The Sea of Galilee is about eight miles wide and 13 miles long—not huge, mind you, but no small jaunt either in an age before outboard motors. As Jesus dozes off, a mighty windstorm suddenly sweeps across the surface of the water, tossing the ship about, with high waves sloshing such volume into their craft that the Apostles are certain they will soon be swamped and drowned.

Throughout the ancient world, and certainly in the Bible, the sea represents death. It is the realm of chaos, of darkness, of monsters in the deep. The people of the Bible are terrified of open water, yet when they cry to Jesus, “Master, awake! We are perishing!” Christ seems almost nonchalant about their plight. “Where is your faith?” He asks, and with but a word He rebukes the wind. Suddenly the storm falls silent; suddenly the waves collapse. And in many ways that calm is more terrifying than the fury of the sea. In ancient mythologies, the strongest of pagan gods is always the storm god, the thunder god. But to Jesus the storm is nothing, absolutely nothing. “Who is this,” whisper the stricken Apostles, “Who commands even the winds and the water, and they obey Him?”

Having passed through the rages of the storm and waters of death, the Apostles now find themselves on the other side: amongst the tombs; amongst the dead. In this pagan land of the Decapolis, in the city of the Gergesenes, a raging lunatic comes crawling out of the graveyard to meet them. He is bound with broken chains, feral and unkempt, clothed in rags at best. He is a wild man, a wolf-man. In biblical times, being unclothed—or at least, improperly clad—was indicative of a living death. Slaves, prostitutes and madmen lacked true clothing as a sign of their loss of personhood. This unclothed fellow here lives in tombs, driven by wild voices, expelled even from his own heathen community. How would you react if such a creature met you on shore? I might get back in the boat!

And as if all this weren’t bad enough, the Apostles have to face the horrific reality that the voices in this man’s head might not be of his own generation. There are powers at work here even deeper and darker than the subconscious human mind. This man’s head is full of demons—a possibility so disconcerting that many today would dismiss it out of hand. Yet the ancient world was quite familiar with demons. They didn’t understand them as fallen angels but as infernal gods: dangerous lords of the underworld, whose unholy pacts could unleash great power but only at great price. These things dwelt in caves, in deserts, and here in graveyards.

Yet these demons, these unfathomably dark and ancient gods, suddenly recoil in fear. “What have You to do with us, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” the devils shriek. “We beg You, do not torment us—do not cast us back into the Abyss!” First storms, then madmen, now demons? It seems no matter how terrifying the foe, Jesus is yet more fearful to them.

Who is this Jesus, that even the winds and seas obey Him? Who is this Jesus, that even the black spirits of the Abyss rear back in stammering terror? And so with but a word, this Jesus banishes an entire legion of demons from a man who for years has shattered chains and raged savagely amongst the tombs. When the townspeople come out to see what has occurred, they are shocked to find their demoniac, their local madman, clothed and in his right mind. Christ has returned to him his sanity. Christ has returned to him his personhood. He is a man again.

And how do the townspeople react to this astonishing turn of events? With joy and celebration? With rapture and awe? No. They respond as I’m sure we would, were we to witness such inexplicable happenings. They react in fear. Who can this be, this unprepossessing Jew from across the sea, that the devils flee headlong into swine, and drown in the foam of the sea rather than stand before His face? “Please, Jesus,” the Gergesenes ask, “please, we beg You, just go away.” He is too much, it seems, for them to handle. Too much, really, for any of us to handle.

Amazingly, Jesus does precisely as they ask. He gets back into His boat along with the Apostles—who by this point must have white hair and high blood pressure—and He returns to the Galilee. Jesus, it seems, has come all this way, rebuking storms and banishing demons, for no other reason than to cure this one lowly outcast man: a man who had no home, no family, and no hope of salvation; a man who was already living amongst the dead. Yet for this nobody, this non-person, Jesus crossed the stormy sea and faced down the powers of hell itself, all for someone whose name God alone appears to know.

Little wonder that our former demoniac begs to return with them to the Galilee. Oddly, this is the one request in today’s story that Jesus denies. But notice what He does say to him, because it proves to be the point of our entire twisted tale: “Return to your home,” Jesus says to the man, “and declare how much God has done for you.” It is perhaps the most shocking thing that Jesus could possibly say. Right here, at the climax of our story, Jesus answers the question which the Apostles have been asking from the beginning. “Who is this,” they wonder, “that even the storm and the wind, the devils and demons, obey His command?” And now Jesus answers quite clearly: God. God has done this. In Jesus Christ, God Himself walks upon the earth. Terrifying doesn’t begin to describe it.

Within the hierarchy of the human soul, fear is a passion. It tells us when to flee, and when to fight. Like fire, fear can be a good servant but a terrible master. We cannot let our fears control us. And we cannot allow others to control us through our fears. Here we are, modern Americans, so rich, so powerful, so free—and yet so fearful. Afraid of getting old. Afraid of dying alone. Afraid of watching our world come tumbling down about our ears. Some of our fears are justified: fears of war, of violence, of political demagoguery. Some of our fears are foolish: fears of the unknown, of the alien, of the other. But we must not let our fears rule us. We must not let them rage like wildfire, out of control.

We must harness our fears to steel ourselves for the hard work of healing, defending, and forgiving; the hard work of loving our neighbor, and welcoming the outcast, and building a community founded upon justice and mercy and mutual love. We must be brave enough to live virtuously. We must be courageous enough to pass on to our children the goodness and truth and beauty bequeathed to us by our forebears. We must be bold enough to live in such a way that we will not allow violence and fear and prejudice to divide us, to cut us off from the love of God found only in loving our fellow human beings.

Every day we hear of wars and rumors of war. Every day we read of senseless killings, of fatherless 20-somethings lashing out in anger with their society’s rifle of choice—the AK in the East, the AR in the West—at groups they blame for their own hopelessness and anomie. And yeah, it’s scary. And yeah, we need to act. But not in fear. We cannot respond to hatred with ignorance and anger. We cannot demonize our opponents as if they were some species separate from our own. Christians have always been called to a third path, a way between violence and surrender; a strong and active love that embraces faith and reason, outreach and defense; a path that fights darkness with light, hatred with forgiveness, and death with everlasting, superabundant life.

We are not just called to stand against unjust death. No, ours is a charter more scandalous than that. We are called to stand against all death, everywhere, against the grave itself!—to proclaim the Good News that Jesus is Risen and we shall arise! Hallelujah!

Ours is a world filled with storms and devils. We find ourselves cast out upon deep waters, or living already amongst the tombs. But no one who has seen the face of Christ can ever seriously fear madmen or chaos or even death itself. God walks upon this earth, wonderful and terrible and mysterious and inscrutable and unstoppable and all-loving. He is more terrifying than our terrors, more monstrous than our monsters, and He will walk upon waters and stultify storms and damn all the devils to meet us in our madness, to free us from our fetters, to raise us up from our living death amongst the tombs and send us out to “Go! Go and declare what God has done for you!”

God is stronger than fear, stronger than hatred, stronger than death itself. Remember that, when evil seems ascendant and terror gnaws our bones. Remember that Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again. Remember that He is on the march even now, and His victory is assured. Remember this, and rule your fear. For the very things that we are afraid of, the things that cause us to quail, are themselves utterly terrified of the face of God made visible in Christ Jesus. And if He is for us, brothers and sisters—then there is nothing in this world to fear.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.