The Provocative Crossing--February 9, 2018
"They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes.
And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him.
He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain;
for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him.
Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.
When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him;
and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’
For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’
Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’
He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding;
and the unclean spirits begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’
So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake. The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened.
They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid.
Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it.
Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood." [Mark 5:1-17]
I don't think much about the borders I cross in a given day, maybe because they are all safe to the point of being mundane most of the time. I don't notice when crossing from one township to another in daily travels among congregational visits, or from one county to another if I am headed to more distant meeting or a hospital in a larger city. I didn't even stop to think about the state lines we would be crossing when we visited family at Thanksgiving, or the times when we go back to Ohio from Pennsylvania to see parents/grandparents. In a country like ours, despite the differences that exist between one state and another, we cross those borders almost without thinking about anything happening.
And yet, to make a trip across one state line, or even a county line sometimes, means that you are going somewhere intentionally--that there is someone you need to see at the other end of your trip, who is the reason for your journey. On a trip across even a line like a county border, you go with the person or people in mind whom you will be seeing at your destination, and they become the reason and the momentum that leads you to cross whatever other civic borders you cross along the way.
The stakes were higher, I believe, when Jesus made trips across borders. Even when there weren't the military checkpoints, barbed wire, or concrete barricades lined with armed soldiers like there are today across Israel and Palestine, when Jesus would make a trip like he does here in Mark's gospel, he is crossing a border intentionally, and even provocatively. Sometimes I think we forget that about Jesus, and we imagine that Jesus just pleasantly ping-ponged at random between towns and villages without a thought of where he was going next, until some sort of alarm clock rang inside him and told him it was time for the Last Supper. But that's not really how the Gospels actually play out--they are not random episodes, but flow one to the next, with Jesus setting things into motion.
This scene here, where Jesus and his disciples get out of a boat in "the country of the Gerasenes," is one of those moments. It began at the end of the last chapter with Jesus saying, "Let us go across to the other side," which is to say, the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Now, even though the Sea of Galilee is really just a medium-sized lake, it's not the sort of place you can cross "accidentally." And it's not ambiguous who lives on "the other side." The "other side" of the Sea of Galilee is Gentile (non-Jewish) territory, ruled either by a different Roman-installed puppet or independent cities called the Decapolis, which were loosely ruled by Rome with some degree of their own autonomy. But in any case, Jesus deliberately instructed his followers to cross out of their own land and to enter the realm of "the other." You know it's Gentile territory there when they arrive because there are pigs around and swineherds raising them, and every good Jew knew that pork was not kosher. So nobody was surprised, or unaware, or accidentally crossing into foreign territory here--this was Jesus deliberately going across this boundary, knowing full well that there were leaving the territory of their own people, language, religion, and ruler, and heading into another realm.
The way of Jesus is like that--he has a way of intentionally, even provocatively, crossing boundaries we set up, and then going (and leading his followers along with him) into the places where "the other" is waiting to meet him.
And that's just what happens. As Mark tells it, Jesus has barely gotten onto dry land when this man troubled by a whole army of evil spirits comes out to him and confronts him. It's almost like Jesus had an appointment to keep--or at least that Jesus knew there would be someone in need of his help across the waters on "the other side" of the sea. And when you have in mind the faces at your destination, it has a way of making the state lines in between fade in your awareness. Jesus isn't worried about what lines he is crossing, and yet he is well aware that he is crossing them.
He helps and heals the man who is plagued by these spirits, but it comes at a price. The pigs become the new hosts for the demons, and they rush into the waters to their death. One man gets his life back, but some pig farmers lose their prize hogs for the county fair. And this is the other thing to notice about this story: when the townspeople come out to see what has happened, they start asking Jesus to leave--he is making more trouble and costing them their profits. So what if he cured a man troubled by unclean spirits--they won't be able to bring home the bacon if Jesus stays around! They make a clear choice: they would rather have their businesses intact than their neighbor back, whole, safe, and sound. They would rather keep being able to make a buck than to have their friend, their cousin, their fellow human being restored back to wholeness. And so that means they choose against the way of Jesus.
In this life, you do have to choose sometimes, which is more important: the bottom line, or the blessed Lord... the securing of your profits, or the savior's presence... the life of a neighbor, or your own net worth. You have to decide whether people are more important than things, even when the "thing" is money. And for that matter, the way of Jesus compels us to decide whether the man waiting on the far side of the sea is more important than all the scandal Jesus creates by crossing the border to help him.
We have a way of assuming that Jesus would only ever leads us on the safe route, never force us to make a difficult choice like that, and never would cost anybody a bigger profit for the sake of some random stranger. We forget that Jesus unilaterally made the decision in this story to put a higher value on the man's life than on the market value of a couple thousand pigs, and all the sausage patties that were lost in the lake that day, and perhaps we are afraid to consider that Jesus reserves the right to tell us as well that the lives of other people around us are more important to him than our making an extra buck, or posting higher profits in the first quarter, or getting the stock market to close higher than it did today. We assume that Jesus has too much respect for boundaries and borders to go recklessly crossing into Gentile jurisdiction like he does in this story, and we sometimes forget that he made his hand-picked followers complicit in the crossing, too.
But this is Jesus, dear friends. There is no version of the rabbi from Nazareth who does not do such things, and there is no option of a Way of Jesus that does not dare to take risks to cross boundary lines for the sake of restoring someone else to their full humanity. There is no option of editing Jesus, or re-routing his path to avoid a crossing to "the other side of the sea," and there is no possibility of following him in such a way that we are not taken across the border with him along for the ride, even if it puts a damper on the bottom line somewhere.
If we are going to be people who follow the Way of Jesus, then here is the question: are we willing to go where he leads us, even when that takes us outside the boundaries of our own comfortable circles, even when that leads us to people we would call 'the other,' even when it means a cost to profits for the sake of restoring personhood, even when it means being rejected by folks who would rather make an extra buck than have their friend back in their lives? Will we dare to let Jesus take us on his way across the boundaries we have erected, and will we dare to picture the people waiting there at our destination, whose paths Jesus intends for us to cross?
And where will that take you and me... today?
Lord Jesus, take us where you will today, grant us the courage to go where you lead, even if that moves us into new and frightening territory for us.
I don't think much about the borders I cross in a given day, maybe because they are all safe to the point of being mundane most of the time. I don't notice when crossing from one township to another in daily travels among congregational visits, or from one county to another if I am headed to more distant meeting or a hospital in a larger city. I didn't even stop to think about the state lines we would be crossing when we visited family at Thanksgiving, or the times when we go back to Ohio from Pennsylvania to see parents/grandparents. In a country like ours, despite the differences that exist between one state and another, we cross those borders almost without thinking about anything happening.
And yet, to make a trip across one state line, or even a county line sometimes, means that you are going somewhere intentionally--that there is someone you need to see at the other end of your trip, who is the reason for your journey. On a trip across even a line like a county border, you go with the person or people in mind whom you will be seeing at your destination, and they become the reason and the momentum that leads you to cross whatever other civic borders you cross along the way.
The stakes were higher, I believe, when Jesus made trips across borders. Even when there weren't the military checkpoints, barbed wire, or concrete barricades lined with armed soldiers like there are today across Israel and Palestine, when Jesus would make a trip like he does here in Mark's gospel, he is crossing a border intentionally, and even provocatively. Sometimes I think we forget that about Jesus, and we imagine that Jesus just pleasantly ping-ponged at random between towns and villages without a thought of where he was going next, until some sort of alarm clock rang inside him and told him it was time for the Last Supper. But that's not really how the Gospels actually play out--they are not random episodes, but flow one to the next, with Jesus setting things into motion.
This scene here, where Jesus and his disciples get out of a boat in "the country of the Gerasenes," is one of those moments. It began at the end of the last chapter with Jesus saying, "Let us go across to the other side," which is to say, the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Now, even though the Sea of Galilee is really just a medium-sized lake, it's not the sort of place you can cross "accidentally." And it's not ambiguous who lives on "the other side." The "other side" of the Sea of Galilee is Gentile (non-Jewish) territory, ruled either by a different Roman-installed puppet or independent cities called the Decapolis, which were loosely ruled by Rome with some degree of their own autonomy. But in any case, Jesus deliberately instructed his followers to cross out of their own land and to enter the realm of "the other." You know it's Gentile territory there when they arrive because there are pigs around and swineherds raising them, and every good Jew knew that pork was not kosher. So nobody was surprised, or unaware, or accidentally crossing into foreign territory here--this was Jesus deliberately going across this boundary, knowing full well that there were leaving the territory of their own people, language, religion, and ruler, and heading into another realm.
The way of Jesus is like that--he has a way of intentionally, even provocatively, crossing boundaries we set up, and then going (and leading his followers along with him) into the places where "the other" is waiting to meet him.
And that's just what happens. As Mark tells it, Jesus has barely gotten onto dry land when this man troubled by a whole army of evil spirits comes out to him and confronts him. It's almost like Jesus had an appointment to keep--or at least that Jesus knew there would be someone in need of his help across the waters on "the other side" of the sea. And when you have in mind the faces at your destination, it has a way of making the state lines in between fade in your awareness. Jesus isn't worried about what lines he is crossing, and yet he is well aware that he is crossing them.
He helps and heals the man who is plagued by these spirits, but it comes at a price. The pigs become the new hosts for the demons, and they rush into the waters to their death. One man gets his life back, but some pig farmers lose their prize hogs for the county fair. And this is the other thing to notice about this story: when the townspeople come out to see what has happened, they start asking Jesus to leave--he is making more trouble and costing them their profits. So what if he cured a man troubled by unclean spirits--they won't be able to bring home the bacon if Jesus stays around! They make a clear choice: they would rather have their businesses intact than their neighbor back, whole, safe, and sound. They would rather keep being able to make a buck than to have their friend, their cousin, their fellow human being restored back to wholeness. And so that means they choose against the way of Jesus.
In this life, you do have to choose sometimes, which is more important: the bottom line, or the blessed Lord... the securing of your profits, or the savior's presence... the life of a neighbor, or your own net worth. You have to decide whether people are more important than things, even when the "thing" is money. And for that matter, the way of Jesus compels us to decide whether the man waiting on the far side of the sea is more important than all the scandal Jesus creates by crossing the border to help him.
We have a way of assuming that Jesus would only ever leads us on the safe route, never force us to make a difficult choice like that, and never would cost anybody a bigger profit for the sake of some random stranger. We forget that Jesus unilaterally made the decision in this story to put a higher value on the man's life than on the market value of a couple thousand pigs, and all the sausage patties that were lost in the lake that day, and perhaps we are afraid to consider that Jesus reserves the right to tell us as well that the lives of other people around us are more important to him than our making an extra buck, or posting higher profits in the first quarter, or getting the stock market to close higher than it did today. We assume that Jesus has too much respect for boundaries and borders to go recklessly crossing into Gentile jurisdiction like he does in this story, and we sometimes forget that he made his hand-picked followers complicit in the crossing, too.
But this is Jesus, dear friends. There is no version of the rabbi from Nazareth who does not do such things, and there is no option of a Way of Jesus that does not dare to take risks to cross boundary lines for the sake of restoring someone else to their full humanity. There is no option of editing Jesus, or re-routing his path to avoid a crossing to "the other side of the sea," and there is no possibility of following him in such a way that we are not taken across the border with him along for the ride, even if it puts a damper on the bottom line somewhere.
If we are going to be people who follow the Way of Jesus, then here is the question: are we willing to go where he leads us, even when that takes us outside the boundaries of our own comfortable circles, even when that leads us to people we would call 'the other,' even when it means a cost to profits for the sake of restoring personhood, even when it means being rejected by folks who would rather make an extra buck than have their friend back in their lives? Will we dare to let Jesus take us on his way across the boundaries we have erected, and will we dare to picture the people waiting there at our destination, whose paths Jesus intends for us to cross?
And where will that take you and me... today?
Lord Jesus, take us where you will today, grant us the courage to go where you lead, even if that moves us into new and frightening territory for us.
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