Legion Goes Home
(This three-part series was inspired by the sermon on Mark 5, "A Human Haunted House" by Dr. Charlie Dates)
The fellow formerly known as Legion wanted to go with Jesus. Who wouldn’t!? After all Jesus had done for him—setting Him free, washing Him clean—that makes good sense. We all want to walk with Jesus. Amen.
But—is this odd?—Jesus didn’t want him to get in the boat with Him. Jesus didn’t want him to go with Him.
Why? We don’t know why.
This is speculative, but here’s a negative and a positive way to construe what Jesus is doing.
First, there are some who come to Christ with Legion-like stories in their past. Dark and hard, painful and shameful: they want to put those things behind them. Amen. But that trajectory sends them away from their former places and people, and sends them toward “good clean Christian living.” This can lead them to mistake the religious subculture for authentic discipleship.
That is, they confuse looking like Christians with following Christ. They can’t wash enough to get the pig smell out of their nostrils, so they work harder and harder to look less and less like what they were. They separate themselves from old ways, old friends, old places. They try to remake themselves. But is this about living for Jesus or more about a “complete makeover” or “image restoration” for themselves? As pleasant as this might be to see, it is not the same thing as being remade by the Spirit of Christ into His image.
In fact, to be like Christ is to be like someone who would go to those who live among the tombs. That’s what Jesus did, after all.
So Jesus tells this eager fellow, “Go home," rather than go along with Him in the boat. So, first, perhaps Jesus is concerned that this fellow may be about to mistake following Jesus with hanging out with His people. Second, positively, Jesus wants this fellow to go witness to those at home.
I puzzle over Jesus sending him home. This makes me anxious. Does he have what he needs to preach the Gospel and make disciples? He only just got a bath twenty minutes ago! He only just stopped howling within the hour! Is this prudent? Does he really have what he needs?
Yes. This is (an expanded, interpreted version of) what Jesus says, “Go home and tell your family and friends, all those people whom your descent into life among the tombs has hurt most deeply, whose faith in Me you’ve all but ruined, whose lives are colored by the emptiness you created in them, go tell them the two things that you now know better than most because they are the people who most need to hear this, and need to hear it from you. First, tell them what God did for you and second, how He had mercy on you. Go tell them the power of God, what God can do for them. But make sure you tell them how He had mercy on you. How He can have mercy on them too.”
The man knew what he needed to know. He knew those two things really well: that God has the power and that God is merciful.
These two truths may be two of the most significant truths in the Bible. In fact, these are almost a perfect summary of the point of all the stories, psalms, prayers, and laws of the entire Old Testament. Is anything too hard for God?Nope. Is anywhere too far from God? Nope.
Do you know these truths? Has Christ come and haunted your tombs? Has He washed the pig off you? Have you who were crazy and gross been clothed and calmed? If you know this—if you know what Jesus can do and how He did it for you—you know what you need to know to go home. You know what the whole world, and we all of us, need to hear, hear, and hear again.
Is anything too hard for our God? No way. And this story demonstrates that. Is anyone too far gone from God? Not at all. And again, this story demonstrates that. But your story too is a version of this same story. You were lost, living among different graves, at the end of a long road strewn with grief, at the edge of a dark sea. And then Jesus rowed up (with his ragged band of bewildered congregants). Don’t start being shy now, friend. You have this same story to tell. “Here’s what God did for me in Christ. And understand: it was mercy.”
Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
