Luke 8.26-39 Commentary

There is no doubt that this is a difficult passage to preach. Very few of us will feel like we have real world, modern experience with demon possession—and some of us might not even believe it’s a real thing in this age. For those of us who look to match trouble and grace in the text with our congregation’s lived experience, we’re faced with a challenging task.

This is not deny that parallels exist. We have many people living among the proverbial tombs, struggling with mental health challenges and conditions that alter their mental and physical state. There are any number of ways that we are like the pig farmers and townspeople, seeking to control and contain others who are suffering.

So I do not mean my hermeneutical choice to be a cop out in order to avoid discussing demon possession head on. Instead, this choice to take a step back and understand the larger thrust of Jesus’s powerful act of healing is to try to draw our attention to the message about God this story is telling, and to wonder about what invitations there are for us.

Much fascinates me about this story. First, it is sandwiched (something we usually associate with Mark’s gospel), between Jesus calming the storm and healing a woman of her bleeding and restoring a young girl to life. In other words, we can read the sandwich as two “power over the natural realm” stories enclosing the meat of a “power over the spiritual realm” story. As we digest these stories, we feel full of awe and amazement—and not a small bit of our own fear of this Jesus.

Actually, there is a lot of fear going around in this passage. The demons know that Jesus is the one powerful enough to bring their demise. Through the man they torment, they beg Jesus to not treat them the way they have treated and have led others to treat the man they possess: they ask to not be tormented. Then, they beg Jesus to not send them back to where they came from, to the place of evil and chaos. Even the forces of evil hate the company of evil! That’s something to let sink in…

We never actually hear the command Jesus gives these demons, and Luke tells the story in such a way that he mirrors the way the evil spirits haunted this man with the way his fellow humans treated him. It’s as though the two, likely without realizing it, partnered together to strip the man of his humanity. He was left to roam around the tombs, unhoused and naked; they would unsuccessfully shackle him in chains until the demons would strip him of any human contact and drive him out into the wilds. It is no wonder that the demons did not want the same fate.

The demons know Jesus will bring their end and we see that foreshadowed in this passage. As they enter a herd of pigs, they send the livestock over a cliff to drown in a lake. It reminds me of the promise of all evil being swallowed up into the sea that is “no more” in Revelation 21.

When the herders go and tell others what they have seen, everybody wants to investigate. What they discover is the person that they have treated as a thing, that they have tried to control and contain, is a human being. He is clothed, and notably, in the posture of a disciple, sitting at the feet of Jesus. In short order, Jesus has done what they have failed to be able to do. Not only that, he’s shown immense power in sending the demons into the pigs (with quite negative economic consequences for the owner). Jesus has disrupted every norm (as unhealthy as those norms were) in their system.

And so they ask Jesus to leave because they are afraid of that kind of power. When confronted with impossibilities and the power that proves them possible, it’s our human instinct to shrink away. We see it in other stories in Scripture (think of Peter’s reaction to the miraculous catch of fish). Jesus lets it be—for now. But he leaves the man there to tell his story. Restoring his humanness, Jesus also restores him to life, sending the new disciple back to his home (i.e., his family) so that he can “declare how much God has done” for him. The people in this town and city will not be able to forget or pretend that this ever happened, they have a living witness in their midst.

Textual Points

John Nolland helpfully points out in his Word Biblical Commentary on Luke that “Exorcism into animals is well documented in ancient Hellenistic demonology.” And particularly among the original audience, the demons going into pigs (an unclean animal) would make logical sense.

It’s also worth noting that this is the only thing Jesus does in this Gentile region—he lands on the shore, then he leaves again and returns to Israel side of the Sea of Galilee. It’s as though we are meant to understand that healing and restoring the humanity of this man was worth the trip (and perhaps even the danger of the storm from the night before).

Illustration Idea

I think we’re all more familiar with the townspeople’s reaction than we care to admit. When it comes to trying to control evil or manage someone else’s unhealthy behaviour, we do a lot of managing and containing what we can. As the systems thinking adage goes, “Systems gonna system.” Narcissists and abusers are “contained” by so-called accountability relationships… family members ignore signs of addiction for fear of driving a loved one away or being powerless to help…. Capitalism always drives us to the cheapest or least costly option, no matter the non-economic costs… the list could go on and on.