Opening Convocation, Spring 2006

Presented by Academic Vice President Gene Bales

Feb. 1, 2006

Demons (Mark 5:1-20)

This passage we have just heard occurs early in Mark’s gospel, and is one of the most picturesque in any of the Gospels—so much so, that many skeptics concede that it is almost certainly an eyewitness account with considerable detail.

Jesus chose to begin his preaching, his proclamation of the kingdom, not in Jerusalem the capital, but in Galilee, the backwater. In this story he crosses the Sea of Galilee into what was for most Jews foreign territory, an unclean place with unclean people. Jesus hardly gets out of the boat than he is confronted by what we would describe today as a mentally ill person, or to use the slang, as a “certifiably crazy person”. He lived among tombs, which in ancient times were often caves. The reason for this seems to be clear: he could not be restrained by anyone. He howled and injured himself with stones. On all counts he was possessed by a demon. For demons deny people a place in the world; they tend toward suicide and self-injury in this case. That is how we know them: they destroy what is genuinely good and human about us. This poor individual lived with no clothes apparently, without what befits the dignity of a human. He was homeless, banished from normal places of life.

Jesus commanded the unclean spirit to come out of this unclean non-Jew, and the demon, recognizing his power, begged not to be tormented. Jesus then asked him his name—the name of the demon. This was a very important kind of question in the ancient world, since a name conveyed the power and authority of the individual named. So knowing the name, addressing the individual by name, gave authority over that individual.

The reply sounds odd to us, and frankly I think many commentators play down the significance of it. The reply was that the name of the demon was Legion, for “we are many”. First, the text itself provides an explanation of the curious use of the term Legion here, by saying that all it really means is “many”. So the man is possessed by many demons, not just one. Jesus’ attempt to get the name has failed, because the list of names would be very long.

But why use this curious term “legion”? The term in the Greek is not Greek but Latin, as though the hearers should get the message that this has something to do with the occupying army of the Romans. Ëåãéùí in Greek, legio in Latin, refers to a large number of soldiers, perhaps six thousand or so. But while this conveys the sense of “many”, it conveys more than that: it conveys the sense of a very strong occupying army—an army here associated with evil. The political overtones of this could not be lost on Jews who would fight against the Romans a generation later only to be mercilessly slaughtered.

So the face of the demonic can be understood not just in terms of being outside society, living in tombs and caves without clothes, but also in terms of an invading, occupying army. The strength of this army, and not just its large numbers, is spoken of in the term Legion.

The demons beg Jesus not to be sent out of the country. Presumably this is because they are at home in this unclean land. They do not want to be homeless. So they plead further with Jesus: rather than make them as homeless as the man they invaded, how about just sending them into the herd of swine. Jesus grants this apparent grace. But demons being what they are, even entering an unclean animal such as swine drives their hosts over a cliff—symbolically and really the same the sort of thing the poor demoniac had already been suffering from. And this is how we know the demonic—despite its great strength, it leads inevitably to oblivion and death.

The swineherds instantly tell everyone in the area about this miracle. And they all come to Jesus with what—astonishment and praise for his mighty deeds? No, to our astonishment their sole reply to his work is to ask him to leave the neighborhood. We aren’t told why, but the reason stares us in the face. These are unclean Gentiles living in an unclean land who rely on herds of swine, unclean animals, for their livelihood and presumably diet. Jesus’ miracle has had deleterious effects on their gross domestic productivity in the form of losing bacon to go with their eggs. Jesus’ healing may have side effects on the economy that are not well received in some quarters. Such belies the current faith that following Jesus and never having to say you’re sorry economically always go together.

When the townspeople see the demoniac, we are given a brief dramatic vision of him by Mark: the demoniac is sitting there, clothed, and in his right mind. This is what Jesus’ healing, his mission, leads to: a normal life, one with dignity and full use of one’s rational and other faculties.

The story does not end there, because the news of the healing will not end with the performance of a miracle. The miracle leads straight to the question of discipleship. The demoniac begs to stay with Jesus, to walk with him. Jesus actually declines the request: he does not want this man to walk with him, but to proclaim what had been done for him to the other Gentile cities in the Decapolis. Discipleship is not simply enjoyment of the Master’s presence, whether real or symbolic, but a sending forth into a world not entirely open to the message of a Jewish messiah who himself was deemed crazy by his own relatives and spent time at the tomb of Lazarus.

When I discovered this reading appointed for the day, I did have the thought of turning this narrative of exorcism into a symbolic tale of the process of education, with students as a whole playing the part of Linda Blair, and professors posing as the priests they sometimes want to be. Add a little holy water in the classroom, and voila, a perfection concoction. But of course this is absurd.

But then how does the subject of the demonic pertain to us today at all? Since the time of the enlightenment rational folks have been very skeptical whether the noun “demon” refers to anything at all in the metaphysical zoo of the universe.

I have long been asked, I guess because of my philosophical and religious interests, what I think about all this. I have always deferred to the experience of those who claim to have personal knowledge of the subject. I have never encountered a demon personally, though a few individuals I have known might qualify.

But if I am not certain whether the noun “demon” refers to something real, I am quite a bit more certain about the meaning of the adjective “demonic”. The demonic in our lives is quite real and very apparent. It has the strength of a Roman legion, occupying land and people against their will. It desires to harm itself and others.

I have long concluded that there are two kinds of evil: there are those evils which are like annoyances in life which, with dutiful application and the help of friends and therapists we can readily overcome. These are the kinds of evils which give support to the eternal optimists in the human race, those who believe in its perfectibility and inherent goodness.

But there is another kind of evil: the kind that won’t let me go, that tortures me, leads me to do stupidly evil things I don’t seem able to prevent, things that harm myself and others. I think of “demon” rum, or drugs, or addictions of many kinds. Pizza has a kind of demonic presence in my life, but there are seriously many kinds of horrifying events and people that affect all of us in a direct way on many days of our lives. The demonic appears in rapists and murderers, in those who sexually violate their own children, those who flee from one sexual encounter to another with abandon, those who deliberately ambush their friends and loved ones and others in a desperate search to feel superior or take vengeance. The demonic infects those who want to purge our society of anyone who is different or other, those who beat the homeless and kill them, those who are frenzied with the will to punish or to kill.

Jesus’ mission was to heal those possessed by demons. He exercises power against them. That power is rooted in his embrace of every homeless person, every person suffering from indignity, every person driven to despair. For he too suffered from having no place to lay his head, from being thought to be crazy, for speaking the truth.

In the academy, the peculiar form of the demonic stems from the will to deny the truth. Ignorance is not demonic; but deliberate ignorance that refuses to learn is. Refusing to learn may stem from fear or from pride among other things. And both fear and pride resulting in deliberate ignorance may be found among students and teachers, and even administrators.

How is this? What am I talking about? I have met both students and teachers who are clear that they do not want to read anything that challenges the certainties that they know they received from God in a blinding vision. This is true in religion and philosophy, but is just as true in literature and business and biology. There is the fear of having one’s favorite beliefs challenged. It is the kind of fear that will trivialize in advance any perspective that makes us feel uncomfortable. But it is not only fear, it is also pride. All of us imagine we are God’s gift to the unenlightened. Perhaps at moments we can be. But often our pride gets in the way.

These are not minor issues without moral and religious impact. Religious fanaticism, to take one possible outgrowth, is built on willed ignorance, pride and fear. It seizes a person like an occupying army, and at its worst engages in the same kind of rape and pillage that occupying armies have always demonstrated. Terrorism has often been rooted in religious fanaticism. Terror and the demonic go hand in hand. We complain about how bad it is now in the shadow of 9/11 and Oklahoma City, but one does not need much imagination to see what genuine terror and demonic fear can be unleashed by those who would plunge over the cliff of human sanity and explode dirty nuclear bombs or biological weapons in one of the major cities on this planet.

Willed ignorance founded on fear and pride is nothing to sneeze at. It is the mark of a crazy person, of a person who is capable of violence to him or herself and toward others. It is precisely this kind of understanding of the demonic that infused Dostoevsky’s great novel about modern terrorism, which is called simply “The Devils.” It is worth taking a look at this work, which has in my judgment been unfairly neglected.

Let us all pray for the grace of being restored to our family and friends, of leaving the world of tombs and unclean swine. And let us ask, in the words of Mark’s Gospel, for the grace of being put into our right minds.

--Gene Bales