The Far Side of the Sea--June 24, 2025

The Far Side of the Sea--June 24, 2025

"As [Jesus and the disciples] stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me”—for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him.  They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned." [Luke 8:27-37]

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 across the river that divides Lucas County from Wood County. I don't even stop to think about the state lines I cross to venture into Michigan if my son has a soccer tournament just over the border or if we are taking a trip that leaves out of the Detroit airport. 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 that separate places called "Israel" and places called "Gaza," or between Israeli territory and the walled off West Bank that includes Bethlehem, the city of Jesus' birth, the borders were a big deal. When Jesus made a trip across the Sea of Galilee like he does here in this scene that many of us heard this past Sunday, he crossed 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" as we heard from yesterday's verse, is one of those moments. 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.  Being Jesus' disciple will inevitably mean crossing borders like that, rather than staying safely in the blissful ignorance of our own comfort zones.  Jesus will take us to the far side of the sea.

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, following 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 (wrongly) 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 form of discipleship 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 Jesus' disciples, 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.