Luke tells us a story about the two sisters, Martha and Mary. We think of the sisters of Lazarus from John’s Gospel, but a second look at Luke’s story shows us that there is no mention here of Lazarus, nor of Bethany, where John tells us they lived.
Martha and Mary by Caravaggio, c.1598
Still, they must be the same sisters: the same names, in the same relationship, in both gospels. As in John, we see the differences in their temperament. Martha busies herself with the necessary things, food and hospitality, while Mary sits listening, a true disciple.
Jesus tells them that Mary, sitting and listening to Jesus, has chosen the only needful thing, the only necessary thing.
We think so many things matter. We cling to the details of life—meals, clothes, money—and all of those things do matter, all of them are necessary, but all of them are so temporary. When we share a meal, is it the food we remember or the company? And clothes? Our designer labels will be forgotten as soon as the food we ate yesterday.
It goes deeper than food and clothes. We love to dwell on having our way, on being right. It seems so important at the time. In a week? In a month or a lifetime? Most of the points we thought so important dwindle to obscurity, like dust on the ledge of a window where we used to sit and look out at the world.
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Diego Velázquez, c.1618
A few verses earlier in this same passage, Luke tells the story of Jesus and of the lawyer who answered his own question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Love the Lord your God with your heart, strength, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus told him that he was right, but he did not tell him to go and keep being right. He didn’t even tell him to go and do things that were right. Jesus told him to go and love.
Love God. Love your neighbor.
Food, clothes, houses—we need these things, though seldom do we need them to be so rich as we think. They matter, but they are temporary, transient, as real and as lasting as raindrops.
What did Mary choose that was so needful? She sat and listened to Jesus speak a few words. We don’t even know what they were—Luke does not record them, because those words, whatever they were, mattered for Mary. Like her, we have to be quiet and listen for ourselves.
It may be that God has been speaking to us all this time, and we have been too busy to hear.
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha by Vermeer, c.1655
He already knew the answer, this lawyer, but he asked the question anyway. Scripture commands, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This much he knew, and the commandment is plain, but this lawyer, much like ourselves, lived for the wiggle room between the words.
We have to love him. That’s what Deuteronomy says, right?
A straightforward answer would have done the job, but Jesus, true to his nature, didn’t give one. Instead, we and this lawyer get a story. It’s pretty famous, as stories go. We’ve even named it—the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we call it, as though this Samaritan were an exception, different from other Samaritan cretins we might know.
The Good Samaritan. Rembrandt, c.1630. Wallace Collection, London.
Samaritans were nearly Jewish, which made them more loathsome to the Jews than had they been completely gentile. They were the product of centuries of exile, a people group who filled the void left when the Assyrians destroyed Israel and the Babylonians hauled off the best and brightest of Judah. The Samaritans worshiped the God of Abraham, but in the wrong places and in the wrong ways, at least in the eyes of the Jewish people.
We most hate those people who are most nearly like ourselves. Long tailed monkeys are amusing, but chimpanzees make us uneasy.
In the story, the priest and the Levite fail, but the Samaritan shows mercy and compassion, and he rises to God’s expectations. He spends his money, invests his time. He gets involved.
That is the trouble with neighbors—their nearness. If they were far away, an orphaned kid on a poster, we could write our checks and feel compassionate. Neighbors? They are right here. They know where we live. They might come back. Get involved in their messes, and we may not get free.
They’ll want handouts and money, time and favors. And Jesus is telling us not to say no?
Not exactly.
“Love your neighbor as yourself” is an odd way of shaping a commandment. In particular, there is much that it does not say. For one thing, it doesn’t say to give people anything they want. That’s not love, that’s indulgence, or stupidity. It doesn’t say to destroy our own lives, families, or peace.
The Samaritan took the injured man to an inn, but he did not devote the rest of his life to looking after the man. He engaged, he helped, and he also brought the social resources he had available to bear—in this case, some of his wealth, some of his time, and the future help of the innkeeper. His response was loving, it was reasonable, and it was directed at returning the injured man to health and to his own recognizance.
Sometimes we refrain from helping the needy neighbor because we recognize that the neighbor is in the business of seeking help. It is a reasonable response. Standing on a street corner passing out twenty dollar bills is not reasonable. It is the difference between helping our neighbors out of their problems and perpetuating them in their problems.
Fair warning, though—that is no reason not to help. It is a reason to think of constructive ways to help.
The Samaritan came up with the idea of carrying the injured man to an inn because there were no hospitals. Perhaps had there been hospitals, ambulances, and social services available, he would have gotten help for the man in a different fashion.
The point Jesus makes is that the Samaritan saw a need—no, saw a person who needed help—and helped. We have to wonder what the other characters in the story saw. What did the priest see? Maybe he saw a man who fell prey to robbers because God had judged him. Maybe he saw a man whose situation was the result of his own sins. There was plenty of that kind of theology 2000 years ago; there is plenty of that kind of theology now.
The Good Samaritan. Pen & ink. School of Rembrandt, 17th century. Harvard Art Museums.
What did the Levite see, this man whose role was somewhere between the priest and the laity? Perhaps he saw trouble, and obligation. He knew that to lay aside one’s obligation to the stranger was wrong, but was it wrong if he never took up the burden? Perhaps he pretended to be blind, because that helped him pretend to be decent.
And where were they all rushing? What awaited them that was so urgent as to justify leaving a man to bleed by the roadside? We might supply many answers. All of us have plenty of experience justifying ourselves. No doubt we would recognize their answers as our own.
We like to picture ourselves as Samaritans, at least in this parable. Some of us have found ourselves in ditches. The hard truth Jesus is telling is simple, and we don’t appreciate it. We are the priest and the Levite, of course. We turn a blind eye to the needs of our neighbors. Worse, we resent the clear implication that if we fail to help, we have failed in the eyes of God.
We want to point out that God does not understand how complicated it gets, but even in our most self absorbed moments, we suspect God manages.
It is simple.
We need to stop imagining that our destination is more important than the people we pass along the way. Theologically speaking, spiritually speaking, we might say that the people we pass are, in fact, our journey. And when we see them, we need to look long enough into the mirror of their eyes to see ourselves. Maybe then we can love them.
The Good Samaritan, Jan Wijnants. c.1670. Hermitage Museum.
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Two by Two
[Note—This post is the text of a sermon prepared for the July 3rd, 2016, service at First Baptist Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. My thanks to them for being kind enough to listen to it.]
I begin with a confession. Were I not working from the Lectionary, I would not have chosen these verses as the basis for a sermon.
The Lectionary gives us the story of the sending of the 70 as found in the Gospel of Luke. In fact, this event only appears in the Gospel of Luke. In the previous chapter we read of the sending out of the 12, also found in Matthew and Mark, but in this Gospel the story is told a second time, with a larger number of followers.
We have all, if we’ve been in churches for any length of time, heard sermons and reflections on the sending of the 70 and their return. We often hear a great deal about the instruction to shake the dust from our feet. Maybe it is because that is the one thing in all of this story that we feel we know how to do. It’s recounted with some warmth and fervor, far more often than the instructions of going out side by side into the communities around us. And nobody talks about going out to heal people.
Shake the dust from your feet, leave them to their fate, pronounce the judgment of God upon them and watch for their destruction.
There is something in us that likes the idea. We get to go out there and be right—who doesn’t like to be right? And we get to pronounce judgment on the hard headed heathens who don’t listen and disagree with us—who doesn’t enjoy that?
It just doesn’t feel very Christ-like, does it?
Let’s take another look.
There are some parallels to this passage, such as in Acts where we read of apostles going here and there in pairs. The idea seemed to stick with them. The most notable parallels are in Genesis and the ancient stories of Noah. In the great story of the flood, Noah brings the animals two by two to save them in the ark. We assume they are in pairs for the sake of making more of them. Here, Jesus sends followers out into the world, again two by two. Once again, there is an idea that in the future there will be more disciples. Although in a different way, the command to go forth and multiply still applies.
In chapter 10 of Genesis, we read of the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth, the sons of Noah. It’s a long list, a table of the nations, a story offering a symbolic explanation for the range and relationship of different people groups in the ancient near east. There are 70 nations listed, unless you are reading the Septuagint, the first century Greek translation of what we Christians call the Old Testament, in which case there are 72 people groups listed.
As it happens, there is a small textual variation in some manuscripts of Luke, where Jesus sends out 72 disciples instead of 70, another parallel.
A fact like that can cause problems. We see the small differences in ancient manuscripts, and we begin to wonder what the truth is. Or we notice big differences, like the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple. Matthew and Luke, based as these two gospels are on Mark, place the story near the end of Jesus’ ministry–it is one of the things that anger the powers that be, leading to the crucifixion. John, an altogether different gospel, places the story near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Did it happen twice? If not, which version is true?
Luke wants us to remember the story of the ark, and how the world was saved. In this Gospel, Jesus is himself the new ark, and all the nations are saved through him. We miss the meaning, and become fascinated by the facts.
That’s where we fall down. We tend to think that facts are true. The sun rises in the east, for example, and sets in the west. Most of us would accept that as a fact, something that is true, but it turns out not to be a fact at all. The sun does not rise each morning, except from our perspective. The fact is that the earth is whizzing through space like a ball on a string, a string called gravity, and while the earth whizzes along it spins, and the spinning of our planet is what makes it appear to us that the sun rises every morning. We’re like a kid on a merry go round, catching a glimpse of her parents each time the thing goes around.
The sun rises in the east. It’s not a fact. And yet, for us and for the way we live our lives, it is true.
In the field of science, facts are extremely important. In astrophysics and biology, facts and the theories based on them are what we use to find a different kind of truth, scientific truth.
When Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” he probably wasn’t talking about quantum physics or geology, and he wasn’t talking about scientific truth, though in many ways the same thing applies.
Like Jesus, we are talking about theology and matters of the spirit. We have to use a different set of definitions, and we have to be mindful that we are using our limited vocabulary in different ways. In our hearts, in our daily lives, the most important truths may not be based on a fact. When we are dealing with the things that are true and lasting in our lives, this kind of truth matters more than those sorts of facts.
It is a difference the church does not always get right. NASA’s Juno spacecraft is approaching the planet Jupiter right now. Over 400 years ago in 1610, Galileo looked through his telescope and discovered the 4 moons of Jupiter. The church, confusing spiritual truth with scientific fact, forced the brilliant scientist Galileo to recant his observations of the way the earth moves around the sun. The story is that Galileo did recant, being an intelligent man who valued his life, but that he quietly said, “And yet, it moves.”
And yet, it moves.
I mention that story because it is important. It is vital that we remember the times when we, the church, were wrong, when we did not get it right, when our understanding of God and of what God is doing and of our relationship with God and with each other—the only things that the Bible talks about—is wrong. Incomplete. Unfinished. We tend to think of scripture as something that is as unchanging as the rising and setting of the sun, but our understanding of it does change. There is an arc, a trajectory of understanding, that travels through scripture from beginning to an end we have not seen yet. We religious folk do not stone witches, not any more. That may be a good thing for a few of us. We do not stone adulterers, not any more, which is a good thing for many of us. Here in the south we eat barbecue, often and enthusiastically, despite what the book of Leviticus says about it.
We can get lost in the numbers, the details. We can get so close to the painting that we can see the brush strokes but miss the whole picture.
That happens a lot. It happened to these 70, or 72, followers. The truth is not in the fact of how many there were—12 or 70 or 72. The truth is in what they experienced.
They came back excited that powerful things happened when they preached the good news– the Kingdom of God is at hand–out in their communities. They barely had an inkling of what it meant, not at this point in Jesus’ ministry, before the crucifixion, before the resurrection. We might suppose that Jesus sent them out more to help them learn than to teach anyone else, but they went out anyway, and they came back excited. “Lord,” they said, “even the demons submit to us in your name.”
That must have been amazing, but it behooves us to see what they got wrong, and likely what we get wrong.
10.19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. 10.20 Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
They were happy about their power, and why not? Most of us like having power, even if it is usually an illusion.
Plenty of Christian groups, many more than 70 or 72, have taken passages like this one about authority to heart. Some of them take the verses quite literally—either thinking that these early disciples literally had the miraculous power to handle poisonous snakes and scorpions with impunity, or worse, thinking that we should do same thing.
There’s problems with such thinking.
First of all, it’s a metaphor, and as we all know, symbols and metaphors are much more powerful than snakes, and much more dangerous. Serpents and scorpions—we can think that Jesus was literally talking about snakes and scorpions, which might have some limited practical application, but it does little to advance the gospel. Or we can take a step back, always a good idea when encountering a snake or a scorpion or a metaphor, and see the big picture. These are symbols representing what is out there in the world. It’s not easy to be a messenger of peace. There are powerful forces that resist the Gospel, people and powerful groups of people, including everything from terrorist groups to governments to greedy corporations run amuck, who do not want to hear the Gospel.
You may have heard the old story of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog to take him across the river on his back. The frog says, “No, you’ll sting me.” The scorpion says, “No, I won’t. If I were to sting you, we’d both die—you from my sting, and me by drowning.” Thinking of how sensible the scorpion’s answer is, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across. Halfway over, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog says, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both die!” The scorpion answers, “You knew what I was before you agreed to give me a ride.”
Here we are, messengers of a gospel of peace, and we are supposed to take that message out among the scorpions and the snakes. A message that is no less than a God-spoken imperative to go out and help the poor, feed the hungry, take care of the sick, make life better for the less fortunate—are we kidding? Don’t we know that if Christians went out there in the world and actually did that stuff, actually fed the hungry, clothed the poor, brought medicine to the sick, that it would take the wind out of the sails of every single radicalized group in the world? Don’t we realize how much it would reduce the profits of giant pharmaceutical companies that have become more interested in paying dividends to stockholders than in producing new medicines at reasonable prices?
There are plenty of demons out there. Plenty of snakes, plenty of scorpions, plenty of fallen angels. Most of them have nice shoes. All of them have agendas. None of them sees any future in the Gospel.
There is another verse in this Gospel of Luke, “To whom much is given, much will be required.” We often act as though it says, “To whom much is given, much more will be given,” and that does seem to be the way of the world. Money begets more money, power begets more power, and all for itself.
That is not the way of the gospel.
Sometimes we get tired of it all. We know that we should speak up, or engage with the world around us, but we want to pull back.
Icon of Simeon Stylites. Historic museum, Sanok, Poland.
In the 5th century, in Aleppo, Syria, a monk named Simeon felt that way. He tried living in caves, but people found him. Eventually he came across a stone pillar, about 9 or 10 feet high, and he climbed up to the top, made himself a small platform about a yard across, and made up his mind to stay there, away from people. It didn’t work, of course. When people saw a man standing on top of a pillar, they went over to see what the deal was.
Eventually, his attempt to withdraw turned into a community effort of its own. People got into the idea. They built him a taller pillar, about 55 feet high, and Simeon climbed up and stayed there for 37 years. Some sources say 47. A mighty long time.
A few moments of reflection can supply you with a long list of problems with living on top of a 50 foot tall pillar. By yourself, you’d get thirsty and hungry, and things would get generally unpleasant. Fortunately for Simeon, people of his time and community recognized that crazy as he was, he was trying to live a life closer to God. And they helped him. They put a ladder up so they could bring him food and water and buckets. And people started coming to see him, to get his advice or to ask for his blessing and prayers. And he lasted at least 37 years before dying up on that pole, his body found folded in prayer.
My point, if I have one in telling you about Simeon, is that his weird expression of faith was only possible because of the community around him. Although it was his intent to withdraw, and in a way he managed it by 40 or 50 feet, it was only by engaging with the community that he survived, and they were all blessed by a lunatic Saint on a pillar of stone.
Jesus says that we are to go out there. We have the authority to speak the truth to power, to speak peace to the world around us. We have the power to give rather than take away, to build up rather than tear down. We have the power to help people who need it, to tend to the sick, to make a better path for the poor.
But there are so many obstacles, we say, so many details, and we know who lives in the details.
“Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you,” Jesus tells them. “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
What is heaven? How do we describe it? Streets of gold, one day, far away, on the other side? Perhaps that is so. No one here knows for sure, not yet. Whether we think of literal streets of gold or gold as a metaphor for the path that leads us back into community with the ones we love, we hope for it. But here Jesus isn’t talking about one day, someday, far away.
Rejoice, he tells them, right now, right here, in this life and this time. Rejoice, right here and now, that your names are written in heaven. Rejoice that you are right this moment part of a community of saints—saints here certainly not meaning a bunch of perfect people; the saints of the gospel are, of all things, people like us.
Imagine.
A whole community of saints run through this passage. Disciples. Followers. And of all the ideas contained in this passage, the idea of community is the one I urge us to carry out of this place today.
Jesus sent these people out in pairs. Why? Couldn’t they have covered more territory if they split up? But anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie knows you don’t split up. Bad things happen when people split up. The boogeyman gets at least one of them every time.
So if Hollywood knows that splitting up is dangerous, why don’t we get it? We want to go it alone, cowboy evangelism, but Jesus sent them in pairs.
He sent them two by two, and we might note that nothing in this gospel says he let them pick their partners. It sounds like he picked them, paired them up, as he sent them out. He sent them to communities, to share the road, to share roofs, to share food. He sent them out and told them, very particularly, to depend on one another and, oddest of all, to depend on the people they went out to find. Depend on the people out there—the people you’re going to tell the Gospel to, the people you are going to help. That sounds crazy, depending on the people you are going to find, depending on the ones who need your help, but God works in crazy ways, and depending on one another is how we build a Community. It is how we invite people in rather than keep them out.
And in the end, he says, rejoice that you are part of a community, that your names are listed among them.
And remember that there are different ways of going out, different ways of contributing to our community. Simeon managed it, despite himself, standing on a pole 50 feet in the air.
And our community, the Christian community of the Church, is different than other groups, different than civic groups and charities. Those are fine organizations to support and to participate in, but we make some very peculiar claims, we Christians. For one thing, we claim that life continues beyond the portal of death.
It is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
That means that Simeon is still part of our community. He still contributes. For all I know, he nudged me to include a mention of him in this sermon—I had thought of him, dismissed the idea, but then kept returning to the notion of him standing up there on that pillar, praying for all of us.
Sometimes we Protestants look sideways at our Catholic or Orthodox brothers and sisters, with their icons and statues, praying to Mary, Theotokos. At the same time, we think nothing of sharing prayer requests with those of us who are still sitting here, wondering when this sermon is going to end. What is really so odd about asking those who have gone before us to join us in our prayers? After all, they may have a better idea of what they are doing at this point. And who among them would have a better idea of how to pray for us than Mary?
A word about snakes and spirituality.
This may sound strange, but I’m afraid that we have made Christianity too spiritual. What do I mean by that? It’s reasonable question. The New Testament letter we attribute to James puts it this way:
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
Or, at the other end of the spectrum, we get side tracked by literal thinking, making snake handling a thing while the sick and the poor and the needy people of the world, the people Jesus sent his followers out to find, wait for the side show to be over. Many Christians would rather pick up a snake, real or symbolic—not all snakes slither in on their bellies—than go out there and help anyone.
Proclaim peace, Jesus said. Heal the sick, he said. Show them that the kingdom of God has come near.
The next time someone comes and wants to argue about whether we should take a passage of scripture literally, I suggest we steer them to this one first: Heal the sick.
That is what Jesus commanded. He wasn’t vague. He didn’t beat around the bush. And he didn’t say, “If you can…”
You may remember a sermon a couple of years ago, I think, when Glenn Phillips told the story of the man who came to church for the first time and was so excited. He asked, When do we do the stuff? You know, the stuff that’s in the Bible. Healing people, and turning water into wine, and stuff like that?
That man was in for a disappointment.
We preach to people. Sometimes we preach at them. We tell them all about the spiritual aspects of Christianity. We tell them why they are wrong, why their choices are wrong, sometimes why their very identity is wrong, and if they don’t listen, we shake the dust off our feet. And we do those things because those are the things we understand how to do.
That’s a big deal—realizing that people do the things they do at least in part because those are the things they know how to do. Why does anyone persist in ignorance? By definition, because nobody taught them a way out. Why do people keep making choices that lock them into poverty, or addiction, or mediocrity? Maybe they need a teacher, or better tools to think with, or just a safe place to sleep. Meanwhile, those bad choices are the ones they know to make, the choices giving them some payoff, a feeling of control, or pleasure, or even simply escape.
There’s us, and there’s them. We know about them. They are different. They look different, smell different, dress different, maybe speak a different language. Maybe they even think they are different. Maybe they act like they are better than we are. Maybe they are poorer, or richer, or better dressed, or more arrogant.
All those people who make up “them” are out there. Some of them even look like Jesus.
Remember what Jesus told those followers as he paired them up and sent them out. Go out there to them, he said. Heal them, Jesus said. Feed them. Clothe them.
I expect that everyone here knows about this church and the annual warm the world project, where people needing help get warm clothing for themselves, their children. I put it to you that giving away those coats and blankets may be the most spiritual thing this congregation does. It’s more spiritual than me standing up here preaching. It may even be more spiritual than praying—don’t you think God already knows what we’re going to say?
Heal the sick, Jesus said—if not by a miraculous touch, then work the miracles of medicine and practice the ministry of presence. Feed the hungry—if they aren’t at our door, let’s pair up our dollars and our bags of rice and send the aid to them like Jesus sent those disciples. Clothe the poor—if they aren’t in our community, we can send help to theirs. Buy more wells. Support more doctors. Build a school. Support a teacher. Share a kind word—never underestimate the power of a word—that is the tool Jesus used the most. Take the time to listen. Share one another’s burdens.
Go out there and do those things, and we will be treading on the scorpions and treading on snakes. Do those things, and we can rejoice that our names are written in the community of heaven. Do those things, and the kingdom of God is at hand.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus said to an unnamed would-be disciple. It must have been discouragement enough. We hear no more of whoever it was.
It’s an interesting saying, recorded also in Matthew’s Gospel, though not in the other two. Luke records two more strange sayings, one about letting the dead bury the dead and another about putting one’s hand to the plow but looking back, like Lot’s wife. None of the three sayings are quite as simple as they sound.
The words about foxes and birds together with the stories of Jesus walking up and down the countryside—the quintessential peripatetic teacher—form the basis for the notion that Jesus was homeless. Somehow we modern folk tend to view homeless people as having less to offer, while we buy into the idea that Jesus being homeless enhanced the gospel message. There is a double standard at play that we should drag out into the daylight and reject.
At the same time, there is another aspect to the image of a homeless Jesus: it does not jive with the rest of what we hear about him in the gospels. The earliest gospel written, Mark, plainly speaks of Jesus being at home in Capernaum—try reading the chapter two, and try to keep an open mind. Mark tells us that Jesus was at home when men famously came bringing an invalid on a stretcher and, by way of bypassing an insurmountable crowd, tore open the roof of the house and lowered the man on ropes to where Jesus sat. Nobody in the story complains about the roof or the mess, most likely because the house belonged to Jesus himself.
Why does it matter? It highlights whether we are reading scripture and paying attention to it or merely looking for confirmation of what we already think it says. God can knock loudly when God chooses, but the Spirit still requires an open heart and mind to be heard.
Elsewhere when Jesus makes extreme statements and hyperbolic exaggerations to make a point—pluck out your eye, cut off your hand—we get it. We understand that those sayings were meant to illustrate his meaning. Point out, as I have just done, that it is far more likely that a first century adult male Jew with education and training, family and standing, did have a home, as the plainest reading of Mark indicates, and you may find yourself facing hostile believers quoting Luke and Matthew.
We do not like anyone messing with our ideas. It makes us anxious, uncertain, and ornery.
While we’re messing with ideas, let’s look at another one that has to do with wandering, from Deuteronomy 26:5—My father was a wandering Aramean…
These words, built into Jewish religious observance and ritual, are a reminder of the humble origins of their people. Jacob, and his grandfather Abraham, came from generations of semi-nomadic people of the ancient Fertile Crescent region. In a real sense, these people, the ancestors of the Jews, had no place to lay their head but under their tents and the stars above them. These people, the spiritual ancestors of all of the peoples of the book, were not above sleeping on the ground, a stone for a pillow.
Many of us buy mattress toppers and shop for starter mansions, or at least we spend our free moments watching the people on television buying houses most of us cannot afford, splurging on makeovers of homes most of the world would think already palaces. What will our descendants say about us? My ancestors were idle consumers…
There is something nearly Buddhist about the three admonitions Jesus speaks. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head… Let the dead bury their own dead… No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.
He is talking about attachment. He is talking about being present. If Jesus were using the language of Zen, these would be koans. What use is a house in the palace of God?
We hold onto our belongings and our habits as though we will live forever, and in holding on, we loose our grip on everything that is eternal. Whether our pillow is as soft as goose down or as hard as a park bench, it is good to reflect on another Jesus saying that is found only in the Gospel of Luke: The kingdom of God is within you.
They got into a boat and rode across the great lake called Gennesaret or Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee. As soon as Jesus stepped on the shore, a crazy man ran out to meet him, threw himself on the ground and started screaming for mercy.
It’s not something you see every day.
Jesus casts out demons. Stained glass, Strasbourg Cathedral, 13th century.
Luke tells us that the man was possessed by so many demons that they identified themselves as “Legion” — thousands, a multitude, an army. Today we tend to view tales of demon possession as superstitious stories used to explain medical maladies, or as the inventions of an ignorant people, or simply as stories we tell to scare ourselves.
We love to be frightened, it seems. Stephen King, H P Lovecraft, and many others have proven it, much to the delight of their readers. We watch horror films, revel in halloween costumes, and say “boo” to one another for the same reasons. We like the stories, and we like the chilling thrill. It is just that we do not want the demons to be real, though we are secretly afraid that they are.
We hear things that go bump in the night. We see something behind the eyes of a neighbor, just for a moment, that frightens us. We learn of the horrific things people sometimes do to one another—the ovens of Auschwitz, piles of skulls in the killing fields of Cambodia, a man with a gun in Sandy Hook or Orlando—and we realize we have gone past the bleeding edge of psychology. Beyond here there be demons, something inhuman, waiting to engulf us in waking nightmares.
The Temptation of St Anthony. Engraving, Martin Schongauer, c.1480. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
It is interesting what we accept and what we dismiss. We will accept that there are probably more species of insect in the world than we will ever discover. We listen as scientists play for us an audio conversion of the vibrations of gravitational waves coming from the collision of black holes deep in space, and while the sound is brief and unimpressive, we are astonished by the discovery. (You can listen here on NPR.)
But demons, we ask? A life form capable of acting as a sentient, controlling parasite within a human being? Rubbish.
One might point out that every human culture on earth appears to have developed a belief in the existence of demons, but Carl Jung gave us a plausible explanation, didn’t he? Demons are merely archetypes of the collective unconscious, aren’t they? After all, the psychological explanation agrees with Jesus’ teaching that evil comes from within our own hearts.
Whatever we think about demons, the man in the story fell to the ground screaming for Jesus to have mercy on him. That is how the gospels (Mark and Matthew have versions of the same encounter) tell it. We may not accept the story at face value as the original first century audience likely did, but we still have the same narrative.
The demons begged to be sent into a heard of pigs rather than into the abyss—apparently just what it sounds like, either the cessation of being or incessant torture. Jesus agreed and sent these demons to possess the pigs, who promptly stampeded into the lake and drowned. That may be the element that disturbs us the most—all those pigs plunging to their death. We perceive the demons as evil, but not the pigs. Even though pigs are ritually unclean to observant Jews, the point is moot—nobody claims that this man or the pig herder were Jewish, and the pigs are still pigs, right? Allowing the pigs to be killed and the pig farmer to lose his herd, all for the sake of showing mercy to demons, bothers us.
Never mind whether we believe in the existence of these demons. For the moment, let’s just go with it.
The other thing that makes us uneasy is not our qualms about the pigs. It’s summed up in a Rolling Stones song—we have no sympathy for the devil.
Jesus does. While you may explain away this story, and the floating porcine carcasses, as leading to the psychological catharsis of an insane man, the dead pigs being a symbol of the end of his affliction, that is not the way the story is told. We are told that Jesus had mercy on a legion of demons.
By the way, arguments that Jesus cleverly tricked the demons to destroy them don’t hold up. For one thing, nothing here says a demon dies when the creature it possesses dies. For another thing, such a motivation is simply not part of the story. Elsewhere in the gospels (Luke 11:24, Matthew 12:43) we read that exorcised demons wander deserted places looking for another host, an interesting and frightening thought, though this also could be explained in purely psychological terms—who hasn’t heard of a relapse being worse than the original affliction?
Meanwhile, back to the story we have.
If Jesus had compassion for demons, even placing their well being above that of the lives of animals and above the economic well being of a pig farmer, what does it mean? Simple. As Jesus did, so must his followers do.
We were afraid that was coming, weren’t we? It is why we look askance at this story of demon possession. Whether we consider the possibility of possession literally or as a way of understanding the mind, we fear it may happen to us or to our loved ones. We fear it has already happened to us, for which of us has no demons? At the same time and despite our own personal demons, we do not want to show mercy and compassion toward the demons around us. It disturbs our cultivated sense of right and wrong, good vs evil.
We like a clear line dividing us from the bad guys. Evil is there, on the other side of a line we draw in our minds. Being on our side of the line reassures us that we are right.
We do a fine job job of drawing lines these days. We draw them everywhere—in society, in elections, in religious tolerance or intolerance. We push all of those people, the ones not like us, over to the other side. Not satisfied with disagreeing, and not wanting to join in dialogue, we demonize people. We demonize plenty of people, because demonizing them makes it easy to judge them (and to approve of ourselves.)
Jesus pitied the poor demons. He listened to them and had mercy on them, even though they were making a man’s life a living hell.
Jesus did that for a multitude of demons, and for the man they were tormenting. We can do it for the people around us, even when they are wrong, even when they are different, even when it costs us something, even when they are strangers.
One of the most pervasive moral and ethical imperatives of scripture is expressed in how we treat the stranger, the other, the foreigner.
And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.
That is from Deuteronomy 10:9. The idea is so foundational that it is repeated over and over, in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, echoed throughout the prophets. It is an idea held sacred by all three faiths of the People of the Book—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is central to the teaching of Jesus—love your neighbor as yourself.
There are plenty of demons within us, and plenty of demons tormenting our neighbors. We don’t need to make more.
Have mercy. Show compassion. That is how the kingdom of God comes to pass.
Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. c.1900. Anonymous. Library of Congress.
