A sermon on Luke 8:26-39 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

In tonight’s gospel reading, we heard the story of Jesus encountering a man who was infested by a legion of demons in the town of Gerasa, and healing him by sending the demons into a mob of pigs who then hurtle over a cliff to their deaths. It is one of the best known and most dramatic and memorable stories of Jesus casting out demons. I’m sure most of you recognised it, even though it only comes up once every three years in our cycle of Sunday Bible readings and I seem to have not preached on it for many years. It actually appears in three of the four gospels, but since only Luke’s version is in the lectionary, I may comment on details from the other versions too. 

There’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye. Most of us have grown up hearing it as just the most dramatic of a series of stories which show that Jesus is stronger than demons, whatever they might be. For me, there has been two rounds of new insights that made this story far richer and more relevant to our lives in today’s world. 

The first came to me via a sermon preached by Garry Deverell in our church way back in early 2003. Garry is not the only scholar who has made these observations, but he was the first one I heard it from. He pointed out how many of the exorcism stories, and especially this one, point to an understanding of demons that is connected to the effects of living under the oppression of an invading and occupying colonial power. 

In this story the demons identify themselves as “Legion” which was a name that usually referred to garrisons of the Roman occupation forces. It’s not a coincidence. Garry, being an Aboriginal man, could explain this much better than me, but his point was that invaders don’t just colonise your land, they colonise your heart and mind in horribly destructive ways, in demonic ways. Australia’s quest to close the gap on Aboriginal disadvantage will probably never get very far until it properly reckons with this.

I recommend that you go back and read Garry’s sermon on our website, but I’m going to focus more tonight on my second round of new insights which came to me from one of my heroes, Rene Girard, and a number of other scholars who have picked up and developed his insights into this story. Girard’s insights don’t contradict or disagree with what Garry said, but they show how the destructive demonic dynamic that occurs in a colonialist occupation is even more widespread than that in human experience. It is in fact something that we are all caught up in in multiple areas of our lives, and not just in the ways we are entangled in colonialism.

Girard noticed and drew our attention to a number of features of this story which might otherwise be overlooked as just random details, but which, when recognised, turn out to be extremely significant and bring this story right into our own stories.

The key thing to notice is the strange relationship between the demon infested man and the townsfolk of Gerasa. He is from their town and has lived for years on the edges of their town, and the people have often tried to chain him up, as if to prevent him getting away, but they are unable to restrain him, and yet he doesn’t flee. They seem kind of scared of him and kind of disgusted by him and yet, when Jesus heals him and he is no longer scary or disgusting, they are so freaked out that they run Jesus out of town and tell him never to come back. The story emphasises that it is all of the people of the town, not just a few. All. What on earth is going on?

Well, one of the things that social psychologists often point out is a thing called the black sheep syndrome. It seems that social groupings like families or neighbourhoods or towns – perhaps even churches? – often need a black sheep, a misfit, a failure, or an outcast. Family therapists will tell you that most dysfunctional families have a black sheep, and everyone else in the family is convinced that they are all perfectly healthy and all the family problems are attributed to the black sheep. The therapists can see that the whole family is deeply unhealthy, but having a black sheep enables the rest of the family live in denial and believe themselves well. And the therapists say that if you suddenly removed the back sheep from the family, the rest of the family’s dysfunction would be exposed and they would descend into chaos.

This doesn’t just happen in small groups like families. Nations do it too. Look at the way the USA at present is attributing all its problems with violent crime to illegal immigrants, and seeking to drive them outside the borders of the town. It is perfectly clear that immigrants are not over-represented in the crime statistics, but blaming them serves the socially desirable function of enabling the rest of the country to live in denial about their cultural addiction to guns and violence. Of course, this happens in Australia’s reaction to any crime committed by asylum seekers too, but these dynamics are often easier to recognise first in someone else, and America always seems to do everything on a more exaggerated and dramatic scale.

The demon-infested man at Gerasa is the black sheep of the town. The townsfolk go through the motions of condemning him and expelling him and despising him, but they need him. He is the social reference point that enables them to feel sure that they are healthy and good without ever looking at themselves too closely. By having someone to look down on, they are reassured of their own goodness. We actually all do this, far more often than we would like to admit, and in fact, doing it is precisely what enables us to avoid admitting it or even recognising it in ourselves. We know we are good because bad looks like that, and we don’t look like that, do we?

When we recognise this dynamic going on in the story, we realise why the whole town was so freaked out about Jesus healing the demon-infested man. Jesus has totally torn apart the social fabric of the town. He has deprived them of their black sheep. How are they going to know who they are now? 

Well, whenever this kind of confrontation with the truth happens, we have two alternatives. We either face the truth, face up to our own complicity in scapegoating the black sheep, and begin the hard task of repentance and change, or we expel the disrupter and create a new black sheep to replace the old one. No surprise then that the people of Gerasa ran Jesus out of town.

Want to see that dynamic on a national scale? Look at what happens any time an international human rights agency turns its attention on us and characterises our treatment of refugees or indigenous people or prisoners as being comparable to that of “bad” countries. We are much more prone to running them out of town than we are to listening to them and beginning the work of repentance and change. Look at how quickly western governments condemned the International Criminal Court when it issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Having black sheep countries that we can label as human rights abusers enables us to reassure ourselves that we are good countries, but don’t let the ICC play family therapist and ask whether the family of “good” nations is really healthy and good.

Now you might wonder why the demon infested man doesn’t leave Gerasa entirely. He can break the chains, but he still doesn’t leave. Well this is where these insights reconnect with Garry Deverell’s insights about the impacts of colonialism. Not only does the town need their back sheep, but the black sheep has become equally dependant on the people of the town. They have colonised his heart and mind so much that he no longer has much understanding of himself other than inhabiting their understanding of him. 

Psychologists and family therapists tell us that the black sheep in a family system often cooperates with the family pathology by believing and living up to all the shit that the family is projecting onto them. The mob now lives in the man’s head, and speaks as one but many – Legion or Mob.

In another little quirk in Mark’s version of the story, the demon ask not to be “sent out of the country”. Out of the country? These demons are intensely local because they are the demonic projection of the town and its population themselves.

Some of you know this experience only too well. I’ve had pastoral conversations with several of you about the ways that what someone or some group did to you in the past is continuing to impact your mental and emotional health in the present, and in I’ve said to some of you that the reason it is still impacting you so much is that you’ve allowed them to take up residence in your head. They might have long forgotten you, but you’ve allowed a demonic replica of them to infest and colonise your heart and mind and torment you mercilessly.

One of the ways that we know this about the man at Gerasa is the detailed description of his self-harming. Mark tells us that he is always attacking himself with stones. What do you know? Angry mobs attacked people with stones a lot in biblical times. It is the most common form of summary execution in the Bible, often at the hands of a mob and without trial. This man has so internalised the mob’s condemnation of him that he attacks himself with stones.

Perhaps you know people who self harm. How much of that, I wonder, is because people are punishing themselves for the shit that others have projected onto them and which they have internalised. Demonic torment indeed.

Speaking of ancient punishments and mob executions, let’s turn to the most dramatic moment of this story. Jesus banishes the demons from the man into the pigs, and the mob of pigs stampede over the cliff to their deaths. Another frequent form of lynching was for an angry mob to crowd their victim towards the edge of a cliff until they fall. Luke has told us that that very nearly happened to Jesus in his home town. Ask Uncle Den and he’ll confirm that many massacres of Indigenous people in this country in the not too distant past happened the same way. Like stoning, it was a favourite form of lynching precisely because the mob does it but every individual in the mob can still think it wasn’t their stone or their step that killed the victim. Plausible deniability. 

But here in this story, we see Jesus not only disrupting the social fabric of Gerasa, but turning the whole system of victimisation and lynching on its head. In a dramatic symbolic reversal, the victimised individual is saved, healed and set free, while the mob goes over the cliff to its death!

Which brings us to the most important question. What does all this mean for us, now? What is Jesus offering us, or asking of us through this story? Much of it will already be clear to you from what I have said, but let me sum it up by way of conclusion. 

All of us live our lives embedded in various social groupings, ranging from family units right up to nations and ethnic groups. Human social groupings all have their own cultures, and those cultures all have their own pathologies, and one of the most frequent pathologies is the tendency to perceive or define our health and goodness by reference to some “other”, a black sheep, some fatally flawed version of ourselves who we can look down on and identify as the picture of sin or sickness that we are not.

Some of us have sometimes been the designated black sheep, the outcast victim onto whom the group projects all its shit and then despises us for it. Will we continue to internalise that and cooperate with it, or allow Jesus to set us free?

All of us, even those who have sometime been the victim, all of us have sometimes been among the mob who who have reinforced our sense of being healthy and good by looking down on a designated black sheep and projecting our shit onto them. You might not feel like you’ve ever knowingly done that, but I’m sorry, that’s just that plausible deniability thing. In the anonymity of the group, none of us experience our own culpability. 

But Jesus comes to expose the truth and save us all from these demonic lies. Jesus wants to set us perpetrators free too. He saves the victim, yes, but he is equally eager and willing to save the town, if only they will respond to his invitation. When Jesus heals their black sheep, the invitation into a new culture of love is there. But as I said before, groups are even more likely than individuals to respond by protecting the status quo and expelling the would-be saviour. 

The man healed and restored and in his right mind is an acutely uncomfortable encounter with the truth for the town. For the first time they see the man as fully human, and thus as a challenge to the way they have seen him before. And this is not the only time Jesus does this. He does it himself. When Jesus is lynched by a chanting mob who demand Rome’s cooperation to execute him – more plausible deniability – Jesus comes back as the forgiving crucified victim, exposing the lie of the mob’s projection of all their evil onto him and thus inviting them to repent and change, and that’s a whole cultural change there.

And so for us too that challenge, revealed at Gerasa and revealed again at Golgotha, sits before us like a formerly demonised man now healed and in his right mind. Are we going to run the truth out of town and find ourselves another black sheep to project our shit onto? Or are we going to follow the way of Jesus into a new land of freedom, love and life? The invitation and the promise are before us.