The Madman – Part I

Luke 8:26

I read this one verse and go no farther. Something in its few words grabs me. “They sailed to the other side, to that side of the lake.”

“They” are Jesus and his disciples. “The lake” is the Sea of Galilee, a mere 14 miles at its longest stretch, and home to several of the disciples. “that side” is foreign country to them, the land of the Gentiles, a group of Greek towns known as the Decapolis stretching south and east from those shores.

I wonder why Jesus makes the effort to come here. It’s not that far, but he rarely ventures outside of Jewish/Samaritan territory. It is light years away by cultural and religious standards. I know why Jesus has come; I’ve read the passage many times. How he heals the man possessed by so many demons and living in isolation from any form of human community. But that only tells me what he does when he gets there. It doesn’t really answer why he comes and does what he does.

Is it to show that he loves people more than pigs? Any follower of Abraham’s God knew the answer to that one. Is it because he wanted to demonstrate that he’d go to great lengths to reach just one person? Maybe, and it makes a great sermon, but the text doesn’t make this point obvious. Is it to prepare the disciples for reaching beyond their own kind? Lots of good ideas here, but the fact is that the text provides no overtly stated reason.

Greater scholars than me may find something solid on which to hang their shingle. I am left with just a feeling, a sense that whatever cosmic reason Jesus may have had – and the violent storm they had to breach to get there lends itself to a cosmic connection – he doesn’t reveal the reason. He only leads his disciples into Gentile territory to rescue, redeem and restore this wild and crazed man.

Before jumping into the encounter with that man and his tormentors, I linger at the arrival on the shore of Jesus and his band. The disciples must be still in awe of what they’ve just experienced. All three of the synoptic writers link the calming of the storm with this visit to this pitiful loner. There is no reason to doubt the chronology.

You experience something like that storm and how Jesus shuts it down and you don’t move on to something else very quickly. And yet here they are. On foreign turf, forbidding territory, the stuff of uncleanness – and that was before they even saw the man known only as “Legion.”

As a kid there were always places you just didn’t go. You knew better than to get near them – either because your mother said “no” in terms you understood all too well or because the place just left you with the feeling that it was not worth a dare. These guys weren’t the touristy kind anyway, let alone the type that would venture into the land beyond the covenant of protection.

Yet here they were. I wonder what was going on in their minds – something like, “Jesus, you are out of yours”? Or were they in that misty state between having just seen the miraculous and having just entered the unmarked door, the haunted house, and their brains were still in neutral.

They knew better than to let Jesus move ahead without them – no way were they going to allow him out of their sight here. So they followed. They went with Jesus into the unknown.

He doesn’t beckon them to come along, but they do. For they’ve learned that he is the man to follow, no matter what may come.