Timothy 2:1-10; Luke
8:26-39
St.
Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life
of man consists in beholding God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7).” To be a human person is to bear the image of
God with the calling to become more like Him in holiness. The more we do so, the more we become our
true selves. The God-Man Jesus Christ
came to restore and fulfill us as living icons of God. He enables us to become truly human as we
grow in union with Him, the Second Adam.
As St. Paul wrote, “For all the promises of God in
Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.” (2 Cor. 1:20)
If
we need a clear example of how the Lord has extended the ancient promises to
Abraham to all people to restore the beauty of our darkened souls, we need look
no further than today’s gospel
reading about a man so miserable that he was barely recognizable as a human
person. He had no illusions about
himself, for he was so filled with demons that he called himself “Legion.” (A
legion was a large unit of the Roman army made up of 5,000 soldiers.) His
personality had disintegrated due to the overwhelming power of the forces of
evil in his life. That is shown by the
fact that he was naked, like Adam and Eve who had stripped themselves of the
divine glory and were cast out of Paradise into our world of corruption. He lived among the tombs, and death is “the wages
of sin” that came into the world as a consequence of our first parents’ refusal
to fulfill their calling to become like God in holiness. This naked man living in the cemetery was so
terrifying to others that they tried unsuccessfully to restrain him with
chains. People understandably feared
that he would do to them what Cain had done to Abel. But when this fellow broke free, he would run
off to the desert by himself, alone with his demons. The Gadarene demoniac provides a vivid icon
of the pathetic suffering of humanity enslaved to death, stripped naked of the
divine glory, and isolated in fear. His
wretched condition manifests the tragic disintegration of the human person that
the Savior came to heal.
Evil
was so firmly rooted in this man’s soul that his reaction to the Lord’s command
for the demons to depart is shocking: “What have you to do with me?...I ask
you, do not torment me.” He had abandoned
hope for healing and perceived Christ’s promise of deliverance simply as even
further torment. By telling the Lord that
his name was Legion, he acknowledged that the line between the many demons and
his own identity had been blurred. He had
lost his sense of self to the point that it was not clear where he ended and the
demons began. The Savior then cast the
demons into the herd of pigs, which ran into the lake and drowned. In the Old Testament context, pigs were
unclean, and here the forces of evil lead even them to destruction.
Perhaps
there is no clearer image of how evil debases our personhood than the plight of
this miserable man. He is an icon of our brokenness and represents
us all. He did not ask Christ to deliver
him, even as we did not take the initiative in the Savior’s coming to the
world. The corrupting forces of evil were so powerful
in this man’s life that he had lost all awareness of being a person in God’s
image and likeness. We can also become
so consumed by our inflamed passions that we simply ignore that we are living
icons of God. When that happens, we
would rather that Christ leave us alone to wallow in the mire of our sins than to
heal us. We can easily become overwhelmed
with fear that His salvation will simply torment us, for sometimes we cannot
even imagine living without the corruption that has become so familiar.
After
the spectacular drowning of the swine, the man in question was “sitting at the
feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”
The one who had not been recognizably human returned to being his true
self. That was a very upsetting scene to
the people of that region and they asked Christ to leave out of fear at what
had happened. We may find their reaction
hard to understand. What could be so
terrifying about this man returning to a normal life? Unfortunately, we all tend to get used to
whatever we get used to. What we have
experienced routinely in ourselves or from others, no matter how depraved,
becomes normal to us. The scary man in
the tombs was afraid when Christ came to set him free, but his neighbors seemed
even more disturbed when they saw that he had been liberated.
It should
not be surprising that the man formerly possessed by demons and still feared by
his neighbors did not want to stay in his hometown after the Lord restored him.
He begged to go with Christ, Who responded,
“Return to your home, and declare all
that God has done for you.” That must
have been a difficult commandment for him to obey. Who would not be embarrassed and afraid to live
in a town where everyone knew about the wretched and miserable existence he had
experienced? It would have been much
easier to have left all that behind and start over as a traveling disciple of
the One who had set him free.
But that was not what Christ wanted
the man to do. Perhaps that was because
the Lord knew that the best sign of His transforming power was a living person
who had been restored from the worst forms of depravity and corruption. There could not be a better witness to the
salvation that the God-Man has brought to the world than a person who so
obviously moved from
death to life. Such a radical change is
a brilliant sign of Christ’s resurrection, for He makes us participants in His
victory over death by breaking the destructive hold of the power of sin in our
lives.
Today
we commemorate the Great Martyr Demetrios the
Myrrh-Streaming, an accomplished military leader who refused to worship the false
gods of the Roman Empire and boldly proclaimed Christ. After his arrest for being a Christian, he
was slain at the command of Emperor Maximian when the young Christian Nestor, whom
Demetrios had blessed, slew the giant Lyaeus in the gladiatorial games with
the plea “God of Demetrios, help me!”
The emperor then had Nestor killed also. St. Demetrios’ relics continue
to exude myrrh as a sign of God’s blessing and healing through the
intercessions of this great martyr.
St.
Paul instructed St. Timothy to “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ
Jesus.” The discipline and
self-sacrifice of military members to this day requires accepting the
possibility of suffering even to the point of death. Many who survive combat physically endure
spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds for the rest of their lives. The
witness of model soldiers like St. Demetrios to the lordship of Christ required
a deep level of suffering, for he willingly accepted the humiliation of losing
his exalted status in Rome and being arrested and killed at the command of his
emperor. He is not a saint because of
his military prowess but because, despite the grave dangers to the soul of shedding
the blood of others, he gained the spiritual strength to make the ultimate
witness of shedding his own blood. The many military martyrs of the early
Church embodied the soldierly virtues of courage, discipline, obedience, and
self-sacrifice when they laid down their lives out of loyalty to a Kingdom that
stands in judgment over even the most laudable realms of this world. Empires, nations, and their rulers can never heal
our souls or raise the dead, but they can easily tempt us to the paganism of making
them our highest good.
If we are to
follow the blessed example of St. Demetrios, we must refuse to entangle
ourselves in anything, including the worship of earthly realms, that hinders us
from becoming like the man formerly possessed by demons who sat “at the feet of
Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” He
was also surely a good soldier of the Lord.
Doing so requires the discipline of enduring the suffering necessary to
turn away from gratifying passions that have become second nature to us. We may be terrified of doing so, fearing what
it means to live without sins that have become part of our character. We may
have become comfortable losing our true selves in the face of our temptations. Nonetheless, we must cultivate the courage of
the man who, though he wanted to follow Christ into places where no one knew
him, obeyed the command to “Return to your
home, and declare all that God has done for you.” Embracing Christ’s healing of our souls is
not a matter of satisfying our preferences but of steadfastly enduring the
tension and struggle that are necessary to become the evermore beautiful living
icons of God that He created us to be.
Doing so requires engaging the battle every day to become fully
alive and behold the glory of God. That
is simply what it means to be “a good soldier of Christ Jesus” as we fulfill
our vocation to become like Him in holiness, no matter the cost.
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