Demoniac
(Adapted from a drama originally performed by Curt Cloninger)
“You go way from me.
You go way from me.
I know who you are, Jesus; I know who you are!
You a holy man; You a holy man
Don’t come up here by me; don’t come up here by me!
No! No no no no no!
Don’t come up here; don’t come up here!
My name Legion; Legion
No you don’t come up here, no!
No don’t’ come up here, no!
Send me to those pigs over there!
No don’t come up here!
No don’t; don’t!
No don’t!”
COLLAPSES, THEN TAKES HIS TIME GETTING UP. He has been delivered and gets up from his face a different man. He begins to slowly toss off the chains that have bound him.
(Speaks in baby-like, child-like wonder) “This is, this is, way I was.”
You…you, you, you don’t know what it’s like…what it’s like…live in caves, and that’s where they put dead people, and you live in caves and people run away from you and they scream things when they see you and they run away from you and you live in caves and nobody touch you, nobody touch you…
‘Fraid they might get what you got. You don’t know what that’s like, do you? It’s not good. I…I just wanted someone to not be afraid of me.
He’s not afraid of me. He touched me on the hand, see, made the bad things go away. And now, I can breathe again. That’s good. That’s very good. He…he told me if I wanted to, if I wanted to, I could sing songs, I could sing things if I wanted to, I could sing songs.
(SINGS) “Shout for joy…” (pause) “shout for joy, o heavens; rejoice o earth, and burst into song, o mountains, for God comforts his people, God comforts His people”. SHOUT FOR JOY O HEAVENS!”
SERMON
The Wild Man
Mark 5:1-20
April 13, 2003
The “chamber of horrors” at the amusement park isn’t really all that frightening, nor is the Halloween fright house. Why? Because we know that it is all staged, it is all an act, and there is no danger to us. None of the boogers will jump out and get us; none of the blood is real; the frightening, haunting sounds are just clever sound effects, and have no connection to reality.
But imagine traveling by boat down the coastline of a large lake and hearing hideous shrieking, screams of dementia, sounds of the possessed echoing among the caves on the shoreline and bouncing across the water. Imagine looking up and seeing naked wild men, prancing about and menacing any who would dare come near. And it is all a reality, not something out of Waldemere’s House of Horrors or out of a Stephen King novel. You sail along hoping that you don’t get a leak in the boat and have to go to shore anywhere near there!
This is the picture we get when we read Mark’s account of this story in chapter 5.
A young, unconventional professor at a stuffy New England prep school succeeds in instilling in his young charges a deep zest for life, for becoming more than the program had called for, for living life to its fullest. This is the plot line, of course, of the critically-acclaimed film Dead Poets’ Society. Early in the film, in a poignant scene which sets the tone for the remainder of the movie, the teacher, played by Robin Williams, takes his students to view the school archives, to look at the dusty, musty images of their predecessors, members of a bygone generation, dapper, nattily-attired young men full of the vigor of youth. After paying due deference to their memory, the young teacher points his charges to one important fact: all of these once-noble, once-optimistic, forward-looking young men were now…dead. The inference was that, of course, one day it would be the faces of his students who would be looked back upon by future generations; these young men would one day be dead as well. And the conclusion? Carpe diem; seize the day.
For the individual upon whom we focus today, as has been true of Bartimaeus and Jairus, our two previous studies, it might be said that opportunity knocks once. This is a truism for many people. Bartimaeus had one opportunity to seek healing from Jesus; Jairus’ daughter lay dead in her bed. Both seized the opportunity to receive healing from Jesus; today, we look at a wild man with the same opportunity.
Jesus’ one recorded visit to this wild man’s territory is recorded for us in Mark 5. The region is described for us as the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. In this area, there was a sharp dropoff from the mainland to the sea. Caves in this hillside served as tombs for citizenry of the predominantly Gentile territory. Christ’s ministry here set a precedent for His teaching later that the gospel would not be the exclusive domain of Israel, but rather that it represents good news to the nations.
According to Matthew who writes the parallel account, when Jesus and His followers disembark, two men come running. There is no contradiction with Mark here; we hear from the spokesperson, possibly the one with the greater affliction. These were men possessed by demons. They lived as animals, wearing no clothes, wild, making their dwelling among tombs, death and destruction being the domain of Satan, the prince of the demons who inhabited them. Undoubtedly, they had been banished from civilized society. Literally, they were uncontrollable. It is interesting: though we don’t know the exact circumstances of the men’s demon possession, we know that Satan’s demons will not possess a person yielded to God, but rather one who has turned his/her back on God completely. The men had made conscious decisions to turn away from God, to be free of God’s laws. And they lived free; well, sort of ! No longer are these men bound by society’s conventions; society no longer wants them. But their freedom cost them far more than they no doubt ever imagined that it would!
Notice first that the man here in Mark was
1. Chained
The man mentioned here in Mark had been shackled many times, but these chains had proven insufficient. Supernatural demonic strength had broken all restraints. This man is representative of sin taken to its logical extreme; it controls us. The man succeeded in breaking his chains, but was he not still bound? Throughout time, people have been in various bondages.
As the Pharisees asked Jesus if they ought to pay tribute to Caesar, they said, “we have never been in bondage to any man”. Jingling in their pockets were the coins bearing Caesar’s insignia; were they blind to this fact?
The bondage of these atheist friends of mine is palpable, bondage and blindness to their own narrowness of thinking, their own arrogance in some cases, the irrationality of their own cases even as they chide me for the irrationality of a belief in God.
This week, we have once again seen, in scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the incredible joy of freedom. Did you get a tear in your eye as you watched the joy of the people of Baghdad as the statues of Saddam Hussein and his pictures came crashing down? I’ve refrained from political commentary on the whole issue of this war, and I will still here. But for those who wonder what the Iraqi people felt about our coming in to remove Saddam Hussein, well, a picture is worth 1000 words, isn’t it?
The chains that the wild man had been shackled by were literal, but they serve easily as a metaphor for the fact that our natural state is that of bondage. Paul writes (Romans 7:14-ff), “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I wold like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate…I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” He says that our old self, as believers has been crucified with Christ, “so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.”
Last week we talked about the hopelessness of the fact that Paul uses the metaphor of “dead” as regarding our sin. This week the metaphor changes, but it is almost equally as bleak a picture; we are in bondage because of our sin.
Interestingly, this man, controlled by demons, makes the first contact. What we have here, and from anecdotal evidence, what seems to be the pattern with others possessed by demons, is a mixed bag. At times, there seems evidence that the man has control of certain of his faculties; at others, the demons clearly control him. He recognizes Jesus, even identifying Jesus correctly (the demons believe, and tremble!). The demon recognizes Jesus, identifies Him correctly, and then prays to Him! “I implore you, don’t torment me!” Jesus had begun to call the demons to the fore, to speak directly to them. I am firmly convinced that demons are real and active today; there is plenty of Scripture and anecdotal evidence as well which points to this. At the same time, there isn’t a demon behind every bush, as some Bible teachers would almost seem to suggest. Nonetheless, this was a man controlled not by one, but by many, demons—a Legion of them!
And what did this man need? Not religious laws; he hadn’t kept them. He didn’t need society’s laws; ditto. His chains were of no help. No, his problem was his heart. Did Jesus know something about the man that doesn’t come through in the text here? When in his more sane mind, did he not hate the miserable existence he was living? He needed Jesus to change him from the inside out. And that is what happened; he who had been chained was now
2. Changed
Was this man a difficult challenge for Jesus? No moreso than are we. In fact, Jesus described people who were the real “tough cases”, if you will. He spoke of the difficulty of the rich entering heaven, in that the tendency of those who have money is to trust in it. How hard are you fighting that tendency, or when it comes down to it, when you are honest, do you find that to be true? It is difficult for those who consider themselves “good people” as well. There are many people who are, on a horizontal plane, what we would call “good people”. They fancy that they need no change, that they will be perfectly fine if they live moral lives and try to treat people well. But here is the rock-solid fact: you and I, by nature, are far closer to the wild man in the wilderness than we are to the righteous standard of God, than we are to Jesus!
In fact, here is a good test of the reality of your relationship to God: are you more likely, when you think of yourself, to think of yourself as a “pretty good person”, or as terribly sinful in the eyes of a holy God? It’s funny; often, when some high profile individual, be it a sports celebrity or a Hollywood star, or whomever, gets caught in some type of transgression, the person will protest that he/she has merely been misunderstood, because, basically, “I’m a good person”. On the flipside, those who really know themselves, throughout Scripture and church history, and who really know God, are people who know themselves, by comparison to God and His righteous standard, to be terribly sinful—and of course, who live as people the most thankful for His amazing grace!
As Jesus commanded the demons to leave, He asked them their name. Why? Commentators differ, but some suggest that the answer might be to tear loose from the man his close association with the demons, to demonstrate to the man the seriousness of his condition, and to strengthen the consciousness of his real self. After all, he hadn’t been in his right mind for a long time. “Legion” – a Roman legion consisted of thousands of soldiers; the terminology here is emblematic of a whole host of demonic influences which indwelt this man. One commentator said that this man was possessed by “an army of occupation, cruelty and destruction”, but Jesus changed all that with a word.
The demons make an unusual request. They knew as well that their eventual end was certain, and that it would be torment in hell with Satan. They begged Jesus not to expedite their punishment, but instead to send them into the pigs that grazed on the nearby hillside. Why did Jesus grant the request? Was it to give a graphic demonstration of the destructive nature of evil? Was it to determine the spiritual readiness of people in the region? We don’t know, but we do know that the same Jesus Who had successfully calmed a raging sea (recorded earlier) now calmed the spirit of a man possessed. This man had one opportunity for relief from the demons, and he took it.
And so the herd of ham hotfooted it. The pork pounded the pasture, but the swine couldn’t swim, so the Sea of Galilee quickly became the Bay of Pigs! Soon, there remained little but bacon on the beach.
But notice, there was another group of people with an opportunity; whereas “carpe diem” describes the actions of the wild man, “carpe nada” would be a better description of their response. These were the people of the nearby town, described in verses 14-17. Their reaction was one of amazement, to be sure, but not one of faith. A maniac, a total nutcase, a wild man, had been totally delivered—and all they could think about was dead pigs!
Think about it: here is a guy who had been nuts out of his mind, sitting clothed and carrying on normal conversation, talking about this Jesus guy who had been responsible for his change. Don’t you think that they might have thought about bringing out their impossible cases to see Jesus? Why not bring their sick and afflicted? Why didn’t they come and sit at His feet to listen and learn? Why didn’t they bow down? Here was a town with an opportunity to encounter Jesus, to receive great things from God…but when Jesus did something great, they worried about dead pigs. Were they afraid that Jesus would disturb their lifestyles? Were they afraid he’d tip the apple carts of their lives?
And is it possible that today there are people who think a lot of Jesus, who are just fine with Him in theory, until, that is, He comes in and wants to start changing things? As long as I can sit on the sidelines and just sort of cheer for Jesus, then that’s fine, but when His Word calls me to allow the Holy Spirit to actually make some changes in my life, changing some things I’ve gotten quite accustomed to and have grown comfortable with, well, that’s a different story. These folks were pretty used to the wild man just being wild and the pigs just being pigs, but when the wild man starts having intelligent conversations and the swine go snorkeling, well, that’s just a bridge too far. And so, in the face of opportunity, in a “carpe diem” moment, the townsfolk just say, “go away, please, Jesus!”
We’ve all seen the commercials which advertise products which promise the change that they will make in your situation, whether it is dandruff, ring-around-the-collar, male pattern baldness, or a sluggish engine. Often, these commercials are accompanied by the proverbial before-and-after photos, proving the difference. Here is the ultimate before-and-after, is it not? The wild man had been chained, but now he was changed. But notice, Jesus doesn’t leave the story there; he is
3. Charged
Jesus gave this man one job. “Go, tell your people what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He had mercy on you.” Those who previously have been chained, but who have been changed by the grace of God, have likewise been charged by God with a mission, and that mission involves the spreading of the witness of the change that Jesus brings, the mercy that Jesus shows, and the difference that Jesus makes.
When Jesus truly changes people, it is an amazing thing. This man was a vivid demonstration of this fact. And he couldn’t help doing what Jesus charged him to do. I’ve got a feeling that Jesus didn’t even need to charge him, but rather, praise and testimony would have come naturally. I mean, if you’ve got a story to tell, why wouldn’t you tell it? Is the fact that we don’t tell the story evidence of the lack of a story to tell in our own lives? He didn’t undergo high-level witness training; he attended no seminars or workshops. He read no books on how to share his faith. He had been insane just a few minutes before he began to be an evangelist. All that he knew was that Jesus could handle a problem that nothing or no one else could, that Jesus’ power trumped a legion of demons. And Jesus sent him back to the people who had rejected Jesus; instead of Jesus saying, “forget about them”, he instead sent the wild man as a missionary. And He still uses unworthy messengers, and He still sends them to unworthy people. That’s His plan. Are you cooperating with Him in the outworking of that plan?
Those who work with NASA speak of a “window of opportunity”, the relatively short period of time when the conditions are right for a launch. Once that window is lost, the rocket cannot go up. And there comes to each of us, I believe, windows of opportunity. Windows of salvation opportunity, windows of witness opportunity, windows of decision opportunity. You’re here this morning; you’ve heard of the change that Jesus can bring. Your window is open—carpe diem!
