Galatians 2:16-20;
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 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.) The forces of evil had disintegrated his personality. 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 the calling to become like God in
holiness. This miserable man living in
the cemetery was so terrifying that guards 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 is a vivid icon of the
pathetic suffering of humanity enslaved to death, stripped naked of the divine
glory, and isolated in fear. He embodies
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 only as 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 where
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. The corrupting forces of darkness were so
powerful in his 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 become blind to our identity as
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 then become overwhelmed with
fear that His salvation will simply torment us, for often we cannot even
imagine living without the corruption that has become so deeply embedded in our
hearts and evident in our habits.
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. We may find their reaction hard to
understand. What could be so terrifying
about this man returning to a normal life?
Unfortunately, what we have experienced routinely, no matter how
depraved, easily becomes natural and normal to us. Changing our assumptions is difficult and
unsettling. 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.
The
liberation of the Gadarene demoniac also provides a clear demonstration that the
healing of our souls is not a reward for good behavior for those who follow the
rules. It is clear that this man did nothing
at all to earn or merit his deliverance. He lived in a largely Gentile area,
which is shown by the presence of pigs, which the Jews considered unclean. No one would have expected the Messiah to
come to his aid as a demon-possessed Gentile, naked and living in a cemetery. His restoration reminds us of St. Paul’s teaching
that we are not “justified by works of the Law but through faith in
Jesus Christ.” The formerly demon-possessed man’s faith was evident in “proclaiming throughout the whole city all
that Jesus had done for him,” especially since he knew how his neighbors had viewed
him.
St. Paul wrote
that “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ
Who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the
Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” The Apostle united himself
to the Lord’s victory over sin and death through His cross and resurrection after
the Risen Lord appeared to him in a blinding light on the road to Damascus,
where he was headed as a Pharisee to persecute Christians. Christ delivered the Gadarene demoniac from
demons and St. Paul from physical blindness that symbolized his spiritual
blindness. Neither had initially sought
out Christ and both knew that they had no one to thank other than the merciful
Savior. That is how they came to have
faith in Him, not as a passive feeling or an emotional experience, but as they learned
to entrust every dimension of their lives to Him. They lived in gratitude as they took up their
crosses daily to share more fully by grace in the life of the God-Man.
Our encounter
with Christ is surely less dramatic than theirs, but the spiritual truth is the
same. We must not thank ourselves for
becoming Orthodox Christians or for whatever level of spiritual growth and healing
we currently possess. We must cooperate with
the gracious divine energies as we embrace the struggle daily to become our
true selves as those who are like God in holiness. The more that we do so, the more we will know
our own brokenness and our need for restoration that we cannot give
ourselves. The more that we do so, the less
enslaved we will be to illusions of spiritual self-righteousness and moral
pride over against anyone else. Let us,
then, be “crucified with Christ” and “live by faith in the Son of God” as we embrace
the blessed life of the God-Man in Whom we
are becoming our true selves as beautiful living icons of God by grace.
