What to do when all your pigs die. Part II

Mark 5:1-20

You have to wonder about a city that has a man possessed by thousands of demons. You have to wonder about a people who would send away the Man that others were flocking to see. It must have been a place full of darkness. A people full of fear.

What is the story of this man who Jesus healed? How did he come to be in such a desperate situation? Did anyone in that place still know him as the man he had once been? Did anyone still love him?

For so long he had lived without love. He had lived with the dead, waiting for death himself. When he looked into the face of Jesus, he saw love that set him free. He saw the joy it brought Jesus to do this. He saw peace, power, compassion.

He saw hope.

Surely anyone who came from such darkness and who then looked into that face and saw the truth of Jesus, surely he would never want to leave him.

But behind that man stood a host of people just like him. They may not have been demon-possessed, but they came from the same world, the same influences.

They had also seen the man in his raving. They themselves had bound him with chains and watched him break those chains in madness. They had seen his demons. They knew who he was.

They knew his secrets. His shame. His nakedness.

Who wouldn’t want to get as far away from that as possible?

And while the healed man was looking at Jesus, they were looking at a heap of dead pigs.

Though they may have stood in judgment, they were imprisoned in the same darkness. They needed the light; they just didn’t know it.

But Jesus knew it, and he sailed right into their lives and upended everything with a single word. He wasn’t about to let them go now. They were too afraid to listen to Jesus, but maybe they would listen to one of their own.

“Let me come with you,” the man begged.

Jesus shook his head, smiling gently, and pointed at the people watching from a safe distance away. They need me. And you can show them.”

He must have looked a little desperate at that point. Me? Stay in this place? Among these demons? With the people who hated and feared me?

“Tell them what I have done for you. Show them the way.”

Sometimes following Jesus means going back home. It means watching everyone else sail away and standing there alone, wondering what comes next. Then you follow that well-known path back among the people who gawk at you in suspicion. You go back into the place of your death and you open your heart to those who have seen your deepest shame.

Jesus knew that man had everything he needed. He had been through death and found life.

And it seems the man knew it too, because he obeyed. He went back and told everyone what had happened. He told them of his shame and of his healing. And the people marveled. They wondered about this man Jesus. And just maybe, as the man lived among his own and they saw the change was real, just maybe they began to seek this Jesus too.

What to do when all your pigs die. Part I