Mark 5:1-20
5They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes.* 2And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain;4for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. 6When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; 7and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ 8For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ 9Then Jesus* asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ 10He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. 11Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; 12and the unclean spirits* begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ 13So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake.
14 The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. 15They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. 16Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. 17Then they began to beg Jesus* to leave their neighbourhood. 18As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19But Jesus* refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ 20And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.
I recently went vegan, so this passage was interesting. I feel like little piggies got a bad biblical wrap (and in the Torah..and Koran).These little piggies never made it to market. Also, I recently started a trolley ghost tour company in Brooklyn, and we talk a little about exorcisms. So much came up for me in this reading. On the surface, the vegan thing popped up and the thought "of course the ghost tour guy gets the passage loosely describing some sort of exorcism". But something else came up, too. The Legion, referred to in this passage, to me, are the mentally ill, the forgotten, the lost. Or anyone in shackles both literal and figurative. The spirit and the man. And today, like in the time of Gerasenes, they are treated like animals. And perhaps our treatment of animals on this planet can be seen a transference (in the psychological sense) of how we treat those deemed weaker than us. We possess them. Because we can.
I read a statistic recently that "human activity" has caused more than half of the documented species on the planet to go extinct in the past 50 years. It makes me think that we're collectively experiencing this crescendo of human experience, and none of us can hit the pause button so as to enjoy it, because it's overwhelming. Perhaps not even enjoyable.
This season of Lent offers up a number of particularly complex paradoxes. We’re experiencing a moment where we’ve created a world of such incredible abundance. We're able to provide unprecedented basic needs to every living soul on earth. Yet, we might be killing the planet. We have achieved this heightened level of individual expression, independence, and convenience through technology. Yet we seem collectively crippled under the tangled weight of power structures and the few people that wield them. We keep advancing medicine and our smartest scientists postulate that death will be the last human disease that we will need to cure. Yet we’re in throes of a global pandemic and we’ve entrusted our health to a greed riddled and broken system shielded by corrupt governance. Proverbial shackles.
So perhaps what’s old is new again. Another paradox. Those pigs belonged to the rulers. Let them take your burden. Yes, they’ll die. But go into town and tell them why they did. And how. And for what purpose. And let it not be in vain. Jesus, the master of paradox. In the midst of this pandemic (of which I will not name, because it’s all we see on our various screens all day), may we have the hope and clarity of mind to cast our modern Legion of disease and inequality into the metaphorical deserved pigs, and let them take a turn at carrying our burden and counting their losses.
And maybe eat less piggies!