Those of you who tune in regularly to my online forum will know that there’s been a lot of discussion lately about Christopher Hitchens’ new book, "God is Not Great - how religion poisons everything".
The publishers, Allen and Unwin, had sent me a review copy that I passed on to someone else on the forum, who wrote a review of it for us there, and we’ve been talking about it online ever since.
Christopher Hitchens is one of these new breed of atheist academics who, along with people like Richard Dawkins, bear a surprisingly close resemblance to the last generation of atheistic academics. The arguments have not changed, and neither has the air of intellectual superiority that these characters tend to emanate.
One thing that most of these critics of religion generally have in common, is a tendency to offer a psychological explanation for religious belief. Religious belief is, such persons say, a form of wish-fulfilment. We wish so deeply that there were such a thing as ‘God’, that we will not accept his or her absence. Therefore we create a mythical being who satisfies our unsatisfied hopes and dreams.
Freud’s analysis is one of the most well-known. To Freud, God was an idealised father-figure, who offered real (if illusory) protection from the many dangers of the world. As a child grows up, she learns that dad cannot really shield her from all the vicissitudes of life, so she creates an ideal father who will ultimately shield her even from death, and in the case of a boy, there is the additional incentive, that the idealised Heavenly Father is not in competition with the lad for the affections of his mother (though that takes us further into Freudian theory than we need to go).
The guts of it is, at any rate, that we grow up wishing that we had a true father-protector, and since we cannot find one, we create one in our imaginations - an ideal Heavenly father who is the fulfilment of all our hopes and dreams.
One of the difficulties in maintaining this sort of analysis of religion, at least when we look at the religion of the New Testament, is that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ does not appear to be the ideal answer to all our hopes and dreams.
The God of the New Testament does not fit our human hopes very neatly. Our Lord Jesus was not the person that religious people of the first century were expecting or looking for. Instead of being the answer to everybody’s dreams, Jesus had a tendency to upset people‘s hopes and dreams, and on some occasions at least, as in today’s Gospel reading, an encounter with Jesus concluded with people pleading with Him that He might go away and leave them alone! So much for Freud!
The story I’m referring to is one that I suspect many of us are familiar with. It’s the story of Jesus and Legion - the crazy, demon-possessed psychotic - that we read of in Luke chapter 8. It’s a story that I remember well from my youth, and one that I always felt would make a great movie (perhaps with Arny Swarchzenegger playing the role of Legion)!
I remember wondering as a lad what it would have been like to have seen this strange and dishevelled, yet powerful and muscular 1st century version of Conan the Barbarian! I remember, as a boy, even feeling a bit iffy about catching ‘Legion Taxi Cabs’ on account of this story.
The story takes place in the Gadarenes or the Gerasenes, or the Gergasenes, depending on which version of which Gospel you read.
It is indeed one of the problems with this story that none of the three Gospel writers who recorded this incident - Matthew, Mark and Luke - seemed to be entirely clear about exactly where Jesus had this encounter with this shadowy character, and even the earliest copies of Luke’s Gospel that we have, are not in complete agreement as to exactly which of these three places it was.
There is a good and straightforward explanation for this I think, as whichever place it was - the Gadarenes or the Gerasenes, or the Gergasenes - they all had one thing in common. These were places outside of Israel. This was pagan country, on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. No self-respecting Jew would visit any of these places, and I suspect that the reason that nobody could quite remember which of these places it was, reflects the fact that none of these Gospel writers had ever been there - neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke. Nor were they ever likely to go there!
The place where Jesus decides to travel to is somewhere out on the periphery of the civilised world. Strange people live there, who worship strange gods. They eat pigs over there, which no self-respecting Jew would do, and they have one very strange ambassador, coming out to meet Jesus - dirty, dishevelled, completely naked, and moaning with some horrible guttural moan that echoes the darkness that infests his system.
It’s important to realise that this is a key point that the Gospel writer is trying to make, for it would have been clear to his original readers that Jesus is very deliberately overlooking the fact that everything he touches here is unclean!
Jesus has walked into an unclean land, full of unclean people - to hillsides covered with unclean animals, and he makes a beeline for a crazy, demon-possessed man, who lives amongst the tombs - as unclean a character as you could find!
I’ve always imagined this guy as being very hairy, though there’s nothing in the text to suggest that, apart from the fact that he’d evidently been surviving out there in the bush for some time without clothes. What we do know about him was that he was homeless, naked, and not right in the head. We’re told too - here and in the other Gospels - that he used to deliberately physically damage himself, and that even when he had been restrained, he had managed to burst free of the restraints!
Some of these symptoms seem familiar to those of us who have worked with mentally ill persons - cutting themselves with razor-blades, a highly fragmented personality, getting into fits of rage such that no one was able to control them.
What goes beyond our normal medical analysis though is the bizarre request that comes from the voices inside the man - that these spirits that torment him might be allowed to go into the pigs, presumably in the hope that there they might continue to live on unmolested. If so, the request had not taken proper account of the effect that their dark presence entering the pigs would have on the poor animals’ minds, as it seems to drive them mad, with the result that they promptly destroy themselves!
Even so, the incident concludes with a wonderful sight: the man sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. It’s a happy ending to a bizarre story … sort of. I mean, it’s sort of a happy ending. Well ... to be exact, it would have been a happy ending, had the story been concluded there, but instead a postscript was added.
I hadn’t thought about this before reading this passage, but most stories of the miraculous healings of Jesus never tell us what happened afterwards. They generally end with Jesus saying, “Go in peace” or “your faith has made you well” or some other command or exhortation that Jesus gives to the healed person and we just assume that those persons went on to live happily ever after.
Even with that wonderful story that we had last week, of the highly emotional sex-worker woman who anoints Jesus’ feet, it concludes with Jesus telling her that her sins are forgiven and that she should “go in peace”, and she does, and we just assume that she went on from there to get a job in a bank, and that she eventually settled down and raised a family (as unlikely as all that is).
Well, in this case we are told something of what happened as a result of Jesus’ healing of the crazy man, and the aftermath is not encouraging. We are told indeed that “all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes (or wherever it was) asked him to depart from them.” And it says that they asked Jesus to do this because “they were afraid“.
This is the one part of the story that, as a youngster, I could never figure out. Why would they ask Jesus - Jesus, the miracle-worker, Jesus, the man who had been able to solve a problem that no one in that region had been able to tackle before, Jesus, the answer to all their hopes and dreams - why would they ask Him to leave? Because they were afraid? Afraid of what?
Were they afraid, perhaps, that the dark and mysterious powers that had controlled the man were now on the loose and would seek vengeance on them? This is possible, as I’m guessing that they were a superstitious people. Remember that we are not in Israel here. We are in a bizarre pagan place, and it is quite possible that these people had both feared and revered the man who had been possessed Indeed, I can’t think why else they would not have just shot the possessed man years earlier if this was not the case.
I mean, if this guy was the public menace he seems to have been, possessed with power such that no shackles could hold him, and subject to murderous rages, why hadn’t someone just put a few arrows into him by this stage?
I’m guessing that the locals were afraid of what this man might do to them and to their children, but may well have been even more afraid of what might happen if they killed him.
There were dark forces at work in this guy, and so long as he just stayed out in the cemetery and fed on creatures of the bush and raw fish, that sort of kept the whole thing at a safe distance.
Maybe that was it. Maybe their fear had a much more mundane basis - namely, they feared losing another herd of pigs!
After all, that many pigs (and Matthew’s Gospel estimates 2000) would have been worth a lot of money! Jesus had a habit of upsetting economies and divesting people of their wealth, and maybe these people just felt that they weren’t willing to pay the price necessary to see all their sick people healed, thank you very much!
I mean, I know it costs a lot to keep mentally ill persons in hospitals and in prisons, but ain’t it worth it, not to have to worry about integrating these difficult people into our daily lives? Do we really want to bear the cost of having to deal with these people and treat them as normal human beings?
Perhaps this was it? Perhaps it was a combination of these things? Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that these people did not like change!
They say that if you give people a choice between freedom and security, 90% will always choose security, and maybe it’s that simple!
Either way, they beg Jesus to leave, we are told, and indeed there is a lot of begging of Jesus that goes on in this story: the demons beg Jesus to let them go into the pigs, the people beg Jesus to leave, and the healed man begs Jesus to be allowed to go with Him.
In response, Jesus grants the demons leave, tells the people that He will leave, and the man that he can’t leave, and none of the parties involved, it seems, is likely to benefit from these decisions!
And this is the bizarre thing! Everybody does not live happily ever after here - not the demons, not the locals, not the healed man and certainly not the poor pigs!
These people have an encounter with Jesus, and the result is that everyone is left in turmoil! OK. The man who has been healed is full of joy, but Jesus very deliberately leaves him there, in a town where he will face an uncertain future amongst people who won’t know what to do with him.
In this case, as in so many instances in the Gospels, people do not know what to do with Jesus. They are scared by his awesome, life-changing power. They do not want to have their lives turned upside-down. They do not want to stand that close to the fire!
This is where Freud and Hitchens and Dawkins and their mates just get it wrong! There may be a fanciful god who is the happy answer to all our longings and desires, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not that god!
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”, says the author of the Letter to the Hebrews (10:31), and this is true to our experience!
To following Jesus is to choose not to follow the easy path in life. It is the road less travelled, and it is a road that is guaranteed to lead us to places where we do not want to go - places on the edge of society, places where strange people live with strange beliefs, people who are not like us and who suffer from problems that we do not understand!
I do personally believe that the greatest thing that holds people back from following Jesus, and that so often holds us back from truly giving ourselves to Him, is fear - the same fear that those villagers had: fear of economic loss, fear of change, fear of being taken places where we do not want to go. We must pray for courage, and the that ‘perfect love that casts our all fear’, and for the faith to know that wherever we are asked to go, our Lord Jesus has got there ahead of us.
