Hell across the Sea

Propers: The Second Sunday after Pentecost, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

This man is in hell. That’s the shortest and clearest way I can think of to describe the condition of the Gerasene demoniac.

He lives across the Galilee, beyond the borders of the Promised Land, in Gentile territory; that is, amongst people who do not know God. He wears no clothes, which is deeply dehumanizing in an honor-shame culture. He consumes swine flesh, violating the bedrock of kashrut law. And if that weren’t ritually defiling enough, he lives amongst the tombs, amongst the dead, divorced from the land of the living, and thus from the living God.

He is shackled, fettered, unfree, like a prisoner or a slave. And worse than this, his very mind is in bondage, robbed of reason by a hive of demons hiding in his head. And if all this weren’t symbolism enough, he lives by the sea, by the waters of chaos. In the Hebrew Bible, and around the ancient Mediterranean more generally, water represents wildness, danger, destruction. It knows no order.

Greeks and Jews alike profess belief in the Abyss, a bottomless chthonic pit, the underworld beneath the underworld. Here were housed the giants and titans and demons of old, the fallen angels imprisoned until the end of the world. And sometimes the Abyss indeed is portrayed as a yawning, gaping hole. But it can also be seen as a sea, a bottomless black ocean, full of drowned gods and monsters.

Spine-chilling stuff all around, wouldn’t you say? A raving lunatic, spirits of darkness, rattling chains, open tombs—and this episode even began with Jesus calming a tempest: “It was a dark and stormy night!” This is a scary story, a horror story. The fact that everything’s over the top is the point of the whole tawdry tale. To a first-century Judean audience, you could not be more lost than this man. We all have our devils, so to speak, but this guy’s here were legion. He is already in hell.

And Jesus bulldozes right in, doesn’t He? He plows straight across the lake, straight through the border, rebuking a storm on the way like Hercules cuffing Cerberus aside. And He steps off into the darkest of the dark—the 5000 or so demons who have taken up residence in the skull of a man in the tombs. And they know exactly who He is, don’t they? In contrast to the Apostles’ confusion, the demons immediately recognize Jesus as the “Son of the Most High.”

And they’re afraid. They’re terrified! There’s a powerful irony in that, almost comedic in its reversal of our expectations. Demons and devils and darkness and storms were the biggest, toughest, scariest things in the Classical world—well, that and the Roman legions, which is what these devils call themselves. It’s a hodgepodge of monsters, like a horror movie marathon, and one and all they cower before this ragged Galilean rabbi, this hayseed son of a carpenter in off the desert.

How that must have thrown the people. How it must throw us! We don’t see anything special, in this Jesus. In fact, it won’t be all that very long before He ends up on a Cross, the ignominious death of a nobody. But the devils see, and tremble. Imagine the biggest, scariest, toughest biker dude you’ve ever laid eyes on, all scars and tattoos and steel rings, really more orc than man. And now imagine that this uber-biker reacts in utter terror to, oh, let’s say a small, calm duck.

You’d be confused, wouldn’t you? You might even laugh, assuming the biker couldn’t hear you. But I bet you’d give that duck a pretty wide berth—because obviously the resident tough guy knows something you do not.

The demons in this story fear that now their time is up. The Messiah has arrived, the Christ! What will He do to them? Will He throw them into the lake of fire prophesied in Revelation—there to burn up death and hell forever? They aren’t going to stick around long enough to find out. Instead they leap from man to pig, and in their utter terror to escape back into the Abyss, they rush a heard of swine down into the waters and there they all drown.

Now, the significance of the pigs could be debated. It could be that Luke seeks to show us how Christ purifies everything around Him, reclaiming the land from the ritual defilement of swine. Or perhaps it’s as an example, to demonstrate what the devils would do to us if they really had their druthers. I’m not sure, and the very weirdness of this episode, the ambiguity of it, adds to the overall eeriness of the scene.

The fact that the people of the surrounding area, and likely owners of the pigs, were terrified strikes a very human note of verisimilitude. Because what would our reaction be to a holy man casting out a legion of demons? Why, abject terror, of course. At least with the demoniac they had a sort of system. They could chain him up, avoid the tombs, and not go out at night. But this Jesus who so effortlessly overturns their world—what are they to make of Him? Better the devil you know, it would seem.

As for the man himself, the nameless yet eponymous demoniac, he is completely transformed. The encounter with Jesus Christ changes everything for him. He is sane, he is calm, he is safe. He is clothed and in his right mind. No more chains and tombs for him. No more suffering, screaming, self-destruction. He has been restored to his humanity, restored to his community. He can now go home. And he is so relieved, so overcome, that all he wants to do is go with Jesus.

He knows better than anyone what Christ has done for him. He had nothing left, yet Jesus gave him everything. He didn’t earn it, didn’t ask for it—“sought by those who did not ask and found by those who did not seek.” It was all grace, pure grace.

But Jesus says no. It is not for this man to be an Apostle, at least not one of the Twelve. Rather, he is to go home, to go to his own people his, own family, and to tell them all that God has done for him, and thus what God is like. God came to him in the midst of a living hell, batted aside storms for him, cast out devils for him, raised him up and set him free: body, mind, and soul. And so the man does as Jesus bids: he goes home and tells the story of how Jesus saved Him.

Did you catch that reversal? Did you see the switcheroo? “Return to your home,” Jesus says, “and declare how much God has done for you.” And so he went away, proclaiming all that Jesus has done for him. It’s really not that subtle. As if we hadn’t had enough hints already, here Luke has shown his hand. It could not be clearer. “Say what God has done.” “Yes sir, I’ll say what Christ has done.” This Jesus, who calms the storm and walks on waves and tears the damned from hell—this Jesus is our God, the One and only, in the flesh.

And this of course is a preview, a prophecy, a parable. For when Christ is Crucified, where does He go? “He descended into hell.” He descended to the dead. And there He conquered! What Christ has done for the demoniac, He does now for us all. He flings the storms aside for us; He casts the devils from our minds; He clothes us and forgives us and He heals us and He saves! Hell is harrowed.

There is nowhere you can go, nothing you can do, no-one you can be, that could ever separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ. He will come for you, He will find you, He will raise you from the dead. And you don’t have to ask for it. You couldn’t stop Him if you tried. There’s nowhere left to escape His grace. And all we can do in response to this is to say what Christ has done.

I wonder about the people who are in living hells today. Deracinated, disconnected, absorbing life through little screens with 10-second attention spans. People who don’t read, don’t love, don’t risk. Who never go outside and rarely make a friend. Who have no idea what it’s like to live within community. People wracked by anxiety and loneliness and nihilism, whose only god is the belly, whose only hope is “likes.” We have a generation of isolation, who know only the opiates of outrage and entertainment. And that’s just the zeitgeist, the baseline.

It’s as bad a living hell as any that I could imagine. And we just pour gasoline on the fire with our politics, our economics, our pandemics, and our wars. Yet Christ has entered into our darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome Him. We are never so far gone that we are not loved, are not known, are not upheld in every moment by the graces of our God. Jesus Christ will never let you go, not even in hell. And you’d best square with that.

There is much work to do to heal our world, but it begins with gratitude and truth. It begins with we who know Jesus proclaiming the God who saves us all.

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