Homily for the 4th Sunday after Trinity - 19th June 2016
(Isaiah 65.1-9; Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26-39)
Jesus arrives in the country of the
Gerasenes and straightaway, we’re told, even as he steps from the boat onto
land, he is met by a man “who had demons.” He’s naked – “for a long time he had
worn no clothes” – “and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.” Perhaps
we need to pause and try to take in that encounter. Think of how it looked… The
terror the man must have inspired in others who had tried to bind him with
chains and shackles, who had thrown him out of their community, who must have
feared his brute strength, his unpredictability and screaming rages, who tried
to keep their children from this terrifying creature. Think of how you would
feel if you were approached by that crazed man who had torn off all his clothes
and who has now set eyes on you and is heading your way. It’s not an everyday
encounter. But neither perhaps is it outside our experience… We’d simply rather
not be there, we’d rather keep it outside our imagination and consciousness.
Where might you meet someone like this? I
realise looking back that it was an almost everyday reality when I was a
student – or rather a real possibility which most of us chose to avoid. Cambridge Trinity Street St. John’s
College
These were my earliest encounters with
people who might be like that man who nearly two thousand years earlier had
lived among the tombs. When the living fail you, where else is there to go? –
perhaps that’s the reasoning. When I worked in Sunderland, it was outside our
church in the city centre that I would find people lying under a blanket of newspapers
on the park benches in what had once been a churchyard. Quite a few of them
would find their way into the church. These were people whose problems were not
going to go away – even if most people wanted them to go away. So they’d converged on that particular area. Many
more lived in the squalor of bedsits, an almost completely separate culture
from the one surrounding them. The churchyard was one of the places where those
cultures met.
It’s in the meeting of Jesus with the man
possessed by demons that there’s a meeting of cultures and understandings which
most of us prefer to avoid. The man no longer has a place in the city which is
his true home. He lives amongst the tombs – the place of the dead shunned by
the living, the place of ritual uncleanliness and contamination which a good
Jew like Jesus should seek to avoid. The demoniac puts himself outside the
acceptable norms with his refusal or inability to wear clothing. The way he has
been bound in chains speaks of a society’s despair at its members for whom
there is no recourse except to use secure units, locked wards, sedating drugs
and straitjackets. What can you do for people like this? And there’s no easy
answer. It would be easy to point the finger at the people who seemingly have
excluded this man. But how much had they put up with? Don’t they bind him with
chains and shackles not only for their own protection but to keep him from
self-harm too?
There are some words of one of the
Church’s Collects which come back to me again and again: Speaking to God we
admit, “You see that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” There
are things about some people which we just cannot deal with. And if we’re
honest there are things in ourselves which are beyond our capacity to cope with
too. “You see that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” It’s a
beautifully reflective admission of our self-failure. Less beautifully put,
it’s what we see in that man who comes out to Jesus and screams at him: “What
have you to do with me, Jesus… do not torment me.” It’s the man’s voice but
it’s that which is within him – over which he has no control – that speaks. An
“unclean spirit” as the Gospel writer puts it – these are real demons by which
he is possessed, so many they are called “Legion.” This is the encounter of all
that is beyond human control with one who is recognised to be God’s Son. And
it’s the recognition that is important. There is nothing that can be done for
this man. The people of the city know it. He knows it himself. It seems the
demons know it. And we know it. And we see “that we have no power of ourselves
to help ourselves.”
The demons of the man who encounters
Jesus need to be recognised. That man – distraught and dangerous as he probably
is - has to be able to approach Jesus before Jesus can drive the demons out.
His humanity needs to be recognised by Jesus before he can be healed.
The events of the last week, its
atrocities and the shock felt so widely in the communities of our nation and
further afield are a reminder of what goes wrong when we treat people as
something other than ourselves, as an
enemy, as people to be kept at a distance, as less than human. From the
slaughter of so many young people in a night club in Florida because their
sexuality identified them as a rightful target to the murder of an MP in a
Yorkshire street, the fundamental failing is to create an enemy because he or
she is perceived as something alien – as someone who needs to be erased from the
world which another individual wishes to inhabit. The gunman in Orlando might
have had his mind poisoned by extremist Islamist notions of right and wrong or
he might have been directed by his own conflicted sexuality – or both. The
killer on the street in Birstall might have had psychiatric problems with his
mind still further poisoned by politicised racism. What we can say is that both inhabited worlds which denied a
place to other people. Both failed to
see humanity in their neighbour. Neither
could have recognised that to be human is to be created in the image of God.
Religious people need to be careful in
all of this. Those in today’s Gospel identify the spirits possessing the
Gerasene demoniac as “unclean.” Things that are unclean have no place in their
community – as surely as the Jews of Jesus’ day would have identified the pigs
into which the spirits are sent as “unclean.” How do we perceive other people – of different race, nationality,
religion, sexuality? – people who are unemployed, people who are an economic
threat? – people who are wrong where we are right? – people who (as far as we
are concerned) don’t belong?
Jesus comes into the situations of
conflict and disagreement – and brings healing… But not without risk. Not
finally without losing his life.
The point is not to suffer wounds –
though that may be the cost – but to bind them up. It starts when we can look
beyond difference and what we wish to reject to recognise a common humanity by
which we might be formed.
It’s there in those most critical verses
from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians which we read today:
27 As many of you as were baptized
into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ; 28 There is no
longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and
female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Do we believe that? Can we act as if it
is really true?
Here are the words of the Collect – that
prayer – to which I referred earlier:
Almighty
God,
you
see that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves:
keep
us both outwardly in our bodies,
and
inwardly in our souls;
that
we may be defended from all adversities
which
may happen to the body,
and
from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul;
through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
