The Madman - Part II

Luke 8:27-30

Every small town seems to have its crazed person. Everyone else relates to the “Crazed One” mostly by staying as far away as possible – and every kid in the neighborhood quickly learns the rules of the game. Avoid at all costs, joke about to calm fears, and if you do encounter, make fun of or throw sticks and stones. Name calling, at least, is harmless, or so we chant when we are young.

Jesus makes it a point to go out of his way to relate to people others only avoid. There was that odd trip to Tyre and Sidon where he healed the Greek woman’s daughter. And those passings through Samaria – the most direct route to Jerusalem, yet out of the way as people of the day measured convenience. And then there was this madman living in the hills on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. The Master seems to have had no reason to go all the way over there other than to see this man. Go, he does.

As the Gospels put it, the man meets Jesus and his disciples at the shore as they are getting out of their boat. He probably saw them coming off in the distance and like any naturally curious mad man, he went down to see what these unusual visitors were up to. The locals had long ago learned to avoid the whole area.

Jesus seems to have commanded the evil spirits to leave the man first thing. Only after that does the man speak to Jesus, asking him what he wants with him and pleading with Jesus not to torture him. Whether that is the demons’ request or the man’s request is not clear, but in either case, Jesus does not leave him – or them – alone.

The man’s condition was such that he had been chained up and put under guard to keep him from bothering the locals more than to protect himself. Sometimes he’d break the chains and escape the guards, wandering off into isolated places. Such is the case now, for he is unchained and alone when he meets Jesus.

What the disciples vividly remember from this story is the question that Jesus asks the man, “What is your name?” I’ve heard people use this as a basis for asking demons their names before exorcisms. Partly because I don’t see this being a normal practice of Jesus or his disciples and partly because I see something else in the way Jesus relates to people, I rather think that Jesus had a different purpose in mind in asking this question.

This man, this mad man, who called himself “Legion” because he was tormented by so many evil spirits, was as far outside of human community as one could get. The only people who related to him were the guards who feared him and probably reviled him and treated him like an animal.

But when Jesus meets him for the first time, while he is sharp with the man’s unseen tormentors, he treats the man warmly as a human being, desiring to call him by name. To have a name and to be known by your name are important characteristics of being human. Even Adam is presented as giving the animals names as his first assignment from God.

Names establish relationship. Years ago I watched as a friend of mine, Brady Bobbink, asked a waitress her name and instructed, as Brady is inclined to do, that calling a person by name is important. Name basis changes the interaction equation from object to relational.

Furthermore, in giving his answer as “Legion” the man identifies himself by his condition. He had been somebody before, but since the demons had come to torment him, he had lost all identity other than as “the home of demons.” Such is the dehumanizing objective of evil. Jesus, of course, does not leave the man in that condition, but the change starts with helping the man see his own situation.

Jesus prefers to speak to even the most miserable and forlorn human as a person created in His Father’s image. And so he chooses to speak to this man on name basis. “What is your name?” asked in calm and warmth is one of the most humanizing questions we can pose to a fellow human being. In contradiction to the children’s ditty, name calling does hurt, but naming can also heal.