Trinity 1. Gadarene Swine.
The story we have just heard is history. It is a story of a real man possessed by evil. He is torn apart by that evil and tears others apart. He is endlessly destructive and lives in a place of death apart from life, and love and compassion and all the qualities that make human life worth living. Does he not sound like many of the men, and I say men deliberately, who rule the nations of the world? We look at the long evil of the war in Ukraine and see behind it a man, or some men, consumed by evil and violence. We see this even more in Gaza where a handful of men attack and kill the innocent, weak, women and orphans, against the fundamental teachings of the Jewish Law which tells us to care for the orphan, the widow and the stranger.
We look across the Atlantic and see similar chaos not quite in the terms of the violence of Gaza and Ukraine, but attacks on the weak and vulnerable which wholly deny the Gospel of Christ which that great nation is supposed to cherish. Those stories can be multiplied endlessly through Yemen, Sudan, the Congo, Myanmar and so the sorry tale goes on. We are not sure today whether we Christians should believe in evil spirits; it is not very modern. But we have no choice but to believe in evil – call it sin if you like; the sins of greed, arrogance, pride, power and fear. That is what drives the evil in the world. When you try to deal with any one of those evils you find yourself like the man among the tombs, dealing with a whole multitude of different powers. They are indeed legion.
Those are the thoughts that came to me when I read this marvellous story. It is a true story with a happy ending. The man is healed and we see him ‘clothed and in his right mind.’ This happens through the power of Jesus. Yet the story is also a parable, or an example of the evil which continues to ravage our world. We need to face this evil and understand it if we are to have any real hope of bringing it, through Christ, to an end.
The evil we see is not only that of war and government oppression. We all know of the evil of climate change, of the destruction of the environment. We know that this is rapidly making the world into a place where humans will struggle to live. We know this is driven by greed, consumerism, the desire for more and more. The leaders of our countries are intelligent, well informed people, be they political, economic or industrial leaders. They know the facts of this destructive evil as well as any of us, yet they are in thrall to the powers that be. They cannot escape from the thinking that has brought this situation to pass. They tinker but they cannot act against the evil, because to do so would seem to destroy everything we are as a modern western or eastern civilization. This too is evil. Lucifer has always been good at appearing as an angel of light. He can seem to be concerned for the welfare, freedom and prosperity of all people while leading us down a path to poverty, enslavement and destruction. And we follow like sheep. Or at least our leaders do.
In the midst of this evil where do we find hope? It is easy to despair. It is easy to see the scale of the evil and feel there is nothing we can do. We may even question whether there is anything God can do. God doesn’t seem to intervene dramatically in evil situations and bring them to an end. He seems to let them run their course. Yet knowing God, knowing Christ as we do this cannot simply be the negative unfolding of blind destiny. In the Gospels, whenever Jesus encounters evil in the form of sickness, sin or death he confronts it and defeats it. Even the evil which killed him was not a failure on his part. He told us he would not summon legions of angels to help him. This was an evil he had to pass through.
So let us start by renewing our belief that Jesus is active in these horrible situations and will overcome the evil. We must not despair. Our prayer for Gaza, the Ukraine, or the environment must not be despairing; nor must it be mere words. It must be full of hope. That is the function today’s story: that we have good grounds for hope. Jesus will overcome evil.
The story of the possessed man with all its violence ends with the man sitting at Jesus’ feet, ‘clothed and in his right mind.’ That is so ordinary and so wonderful. For a man who was so possessed by evil to become normal, able to talk and listen was a miracle. It is a typical Christian miracle. It does not major on the amazing, the spectacular, the fantastic. It shows that God wants us simply to be ordinary. God can use ordinary people to show himself to others. When the man wanted to join Jesus in his ministry Jesus sent him back to his village to show that God can turn wild demon possessed people back to normal. That man became a figure of hope.
So for us today. Our prayer for Gaza or Ukraine, or any other troubled place must not be despairing. Wars do end; violence does subside. People can resume ordinary lives. That is what we hope for and our prayer must be full of that hope. It is not easy. We have to work at it, but prayer is not meant to be easy. We do have to work at making it something that God really can use.
So it is with the environment. The problems get bigger every year. Who can deal with them? Who can get rid of the vast swamps of plastic in the oceans? Who can persuade people to accept a lower standard of living in the west so that people in other countries may survive? Who can turn our society away from the demons of consumerism? Who can help nature to recover the biodiversity it needs to support us? Governments won’t do it unless we insist on it. We are ordinary people with no apparent power to effect these changes. But we do have Jesus. There is another story to be told here, another sermon to be preached, but I won’t preach it. I will only repeat, if we come back to Jesus as we see him in today’s Gospel, and we hold on to hope, then things will change. Perhaps we need to return to the lesson Elijah learned: God was not in the storm or in the earthquake. He was a still, small voice in the silence. That’s where we must find him. Amen.