Jesus, The Healer
Mark 5:1-13
Today, we’re continuing our series about Jesus, turning to the oldest existing book about Jesus written between 56 and 60 AD. Mark is writing to the Roman Christians just after the persecution of Christians had started. He wants his readers to understand who Jesus is really and what his life means for their lives. After Jesus was baptized he set out to begin preaching the good news, healing the sick and casting out demons. In looking at the healing ministry of Jesus, it’s important to remember two things. First, Jesus’ healings were a tangible witness to the kingdom of God he was proclaiming. So he opens the eyes of the blind, heals the ears of the deaf, enables the lame to walk, casts out evil spirits and even raises the dead all as a sign of what the kingdom of God when it is fully realized will be like. In this kingdom, there will be no more suffering or sorrow or sickness or pain. And so Jesus shows us tangible signs of the kingdom.
Second, the healings of Jesus show us the heart of God. Jesus can’t help himself when he sees the sick, the broken and the hurting who wanted healing. He is drawn to them and has to heal them. This became a problem for Jesus because when he healed someone they went and told everybody who would listen. As a result, there were large crowds gathered around Jesus, waiting for healing. This is why Jesus is constantly telling people after he heals them, “Don’t tell anybody.” Scholars call this the messianic secret and have theorized that if Jesus didn’t tell people that then he would never have been able to do anything else, especially proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. In Mark 1, Jesus has spent the day ministering to people. The sun is setting and the time is approaching for dinner and time with the disciples but he can’t do it. “That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.” Because the crowds had so dominated his time and ministry, verse 35 says, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” Jesus could not go in public without the crowds pressing on him because he simply could not say no. This shows us the heart of God.
Then in verse 40 Jesus encounters a man with leprosy. Lepers could not live in town, or get within 6 feet of people and had to call out “unclean!” when someone was approaching them They had to wear a cloth over the bottom of their face and they forbidden to ever wash your face. If you’re caught in town, you are subject to 39 lashes. But this leper comes to Jesus and says, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” And then it says, Jesus, filled with compassion, reached out his hand and touched the man and said, “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” This is the heart of Jesus. It is what we see again and again throughout his ministry.
Among the variety of healings Jesus performs in the Gospels is the exorcism of demons. Our Scripture today is a classic example of that. Yet this also raises questions for us today. What are demons and how did they look at demons in the first century? In Jesus’ day, most cultures believed in demons and that they were all around them. Some believed that demons were demi-gods. In fact the word demon itself means the knowing ones. And in some cultures, they thought that some demons were good and others were evil. In the biblical context, there were only evil demons who had rebelled against God and good beings or angels. Now the demons were led by the chief rebellious one, Satan, and they were seen as his subjects doing his will. And yet, we see that even the demons are under God’s power because ultimately God is in control. Some people believed demons were spirits who had not departed from this world yet and so there was a belief they lingered around cemeteries more than anywhere else. Our Scripture today takes place in a cemetery.
Today, there are parts of the world which still believe that there are demons and that demons are all around us. This worldview is of a cosmic battle between God and Satan, good and evil, light and darkness. You’ve seen a caricature of this with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on another and they are vying to get you do what they want. We call this spiritual warfare and it is Satan who is trying to get you to do his will and God who is calling you to be obedient and do His will. In other words, there is a cosmic battle going on and we are caught in the middle. But because of the gift of free will, we always have a choice. We are never the victim. We always have a choice in what we do and which path we take. Does that mean that every bad thing we may do is demon inspired? No. We are plenty capable of doing evil on our own but it does not negate the battle which is flaring all around us and sometimes within us. This is the worldview of the Scriptures. And one of the issues we need to wrestle with as followers of Jesus is whether we accept the worldview of Jesus and what implications does that worldview have on how we live our life and the temptations we face. If we are under attack, does that change how we live and what we do in our lives? Author CS Lewis says there are two extremes that we can fall into: we can either deny the presence of demons or we can have an unhealthy interest in demons and he says that the Evil One is pleased by both. Some Christians focus entirely on demons and spiritual warfare and that can be unwise and unhealthy. We as Methodists propose more of the middle ground recognizing this reality of good and evil, of demons and angels. But we should always be aware of the battle which is going on around us and the influences we face. Thus we are always to seek holiness and purity in life.
Mark tells us that this demon exorcism happens in the area of the Gerasenes. If you look at the map, Gergesa is on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. This is the land of the Gentiles and Jews were forbidden from traveling there because it would make them unclean. In this picture you will see the hillside of Gergesa which today is called Kursi. There are excavations going on there of a monastery commemorating this event in Jesus’ ministry. It was here that swine ran down the hillside to the water and were drowned. What’s interesting is that swine are very good swimmers and yet these drowned, indicating that something more was going on.
Now by the time that Mark was written, Jews in the synagogue had decided Christians were no longer seen as a part of Judaism. Up until this time, Christianity was a sect of Judaism who claimed that Jesus was the Messiah. When that happened, they were no longer protected in the Roman Empire and could be persecuted because they did not follow the Roman gods. So now the church starts to become primarily a Gentile faith. At the same time, the Roman Emperor Nero began putting Christians to death, including Peter who was crucified upside down, Paul who was beheaded and many other Christians were burned at the stake for dinner parties held by Nero. With that in mind, you begin to see how early Christians read this story. First, this is the only account where Jesus asks the demon for his name. Jesus gets out of the boat and a man who is dirty, had matted, wild hair and worn clothing runs to Jesus. Now that’s interesting in and of itself since there are dozens of demons in this man. This man falls on his knees and begs Jesus not to torment him. Now the first thing we need to realize is who is in power here. It is God who is over all things. Jesus is not terrified but the demons inside this man are. That tells you who is in power. When Jesus asks the demon’s name the answer is, “Legion, for we are many.” Now after Rome had a conquered a people, they left an occupying force and what were they called? Legion. And so the early Christians would love this story thinking what an appropriate name for a demon. We’ve known these demons and we’ve seen what they did to our own people, never to be seen again.
And so there was a story being told on two levels: the literal level of the story and then from the perspective of the people who were being oppressed by the legions. Both of these were evil and what they had seen happen to their brothers and sisters in Christ was demonic in nature. A Roman legion had 6000 soldiers but we don’t really know how many demons were in this man. Now the demons ask not to be sent out of this country. Demons were thought to be assigned to an area and so this may be their request not to leave the place where they could afflict humans. So they ask to be sent into swine. The early Christians would have loved this because swine were unclean and not very smart and the demons were showing they weren’t very smart either and the early Christians would think, kind of like the Roman legions. Jesus allows them to go into the swine which spooks them and they run down into the Sea of Galilee and drown and we believe ultimately defeated by Jesus.
What this told the early Christians is that Jesus has ultimate power in this world, that even though the demons and legion may triumph for a season, Jesus Christ in control and will have the ultimate victory. He has the power and thus we don’t have to be afraid of the demons. And so the lesson for us is that God has the ultimate power over the Devil and will have the victory. He has the power and the devil doesn’t. In the Book of James it says, “resist the devil and he will flee from you.” He has to because you place your faith and trust in God. I Peter 5:8-9 says, “our enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” Paul says, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” Ephesians 6:11 The message is, You don’t have to be afraid because God is in control and He has the ultimate power.
Now for the disciples, this was an earth shattering event and part of what Jesus seems to be doing is putting the disciples in situations which totally question their long held beliefs. In many respects, they are in a spiritual bootcamp to detox from their culture and their faith. Unless they started from scratch and dropped all of their faulty assumptions, they could never embrace the kingdom of God. And so early in their ministry, Jesus takes the disciples to a forbidden land, Gentile territory which made anyone traveling there unclean, to a cemetery where a man was living which made him unclean, to minister to a Gentile who is filled with an unclean spirit. This makes him thrice unclean. And Jesus heals him so that then he could call him to be a missionary to the Gentiles. Jesus touched this man and declared him unclean.
But there is another key to this passage. This demoniac is meant to represent you. Without Christ, we are broken inside and tend to follow the spiritual forces of darkness in this world. Like this demoniac, we tend to live among the living dead. I remind you that Jews considered life lived apart from God to be the equivalent of being dead because you were created for relationship with God. And just as the demoniac was unclean so too we are unclean by the sin in our lives. Yet Jesus comes to us and touches us and makes us clean. No matter what you have done or what you have thought, Just comes to you and touches your heart, your life and your soul and makes you clean. So don’t ever come before God and receive his forgiveness and then consider yourself unworthy to be his missionary. Don’t discount what God has done in you or what God can do through you, for he has made you clean and worthy by death on a cross. You were unclean and he declared you clean, you were sick and he healed you, you were imprisoned by evil desires and he set you free.
In my last church, we had a middle aged African American man who started coming to church. He was the only African American in the church. Everybody in town knew him. He was a Viet Nam war vet who had been mentally damaged by his experiences over there. He went from one part time job to another and I would often see him on the side of the road cleaning up someone’s yard. He didn’t have a car but rode his bike everywhere in a town where the car was needed to get anywhere. He was afflicted, caught by the demons of war, alcoholism and marijuana which dominated his life. He rode over three miles to get to church. Many times when he came to worship, he smelled of alcohol. He never threatened anyone or harmed anyone but one Sunday his behavior, as docile as it was, scared one of our members. Unbeknownst to me, two of our Trustees came to him and asked him to leave and he never returned again. I was crushed. When I saw him, I thought of the demoniac and I wanted our church to become a place of solace and healing as Jesus was to the demoniac. And I want Gretna UMC to be that kind of place too. Because the reality is, we are all broken, we are all imprisoned by some battle, we are all sick whether that be physically or mentally, either severely so or just by the misguided way we look at and treat others. And we are all hurting. We are all fighting demons, whether that be drugs, alcohol, pornography, resentment, bigotry. And we are all here today seeking the healing of God. Jesus can set you free. He can break the power of that demon in your life and its grip that it has had on your heart, mind and soul. He can deliver you. Jesus has the power to set you free, if you just turn to him.
