Healing Legion
Mark 5:1-20
This incredible story, one that could well lend itself to a movie--maybe one of the hot, new zombie flicks--actually carries a simple message--healing is restoring another to life.
Legion is not living--not in any real sense. There he is--stored away in a cemetery. He is dead to his community, too crazy to be a part of it, even if restrained strongly. We may not immediately relate to Legion--crazy as we might be to those who love us--but we know the experience of not really living. Fear, fretting, and fulminations on most anything can rob us of fully participating in life as it should be and could be for us.
Jesus meets us.
The first grace of this story is that Jesus enters the cemetery. He goes straight for the man who is as good as dead.
Where does God meet us? In our abject lostness. God is most present when God seems most absent to us. God does not require that we be good enough or clean enough or right enough to meet with us. in fact, the opposite is true. God meets us in our most tragic states because that is what real and actual love does. God is love, so God loves in a way that meets the Least of These and makes them more than they imagined being.
The second grace comes in the end of the story. After banishing the tormenting demons to a herd of pigs who immediately drown themselves--I cannot but help feel some compassion for the poor swineherds--Jesus sends Legion home. He will not be fully alive until he finds his way home, with the very people who banished him. Both sides to need to make amends.
This fits with something Paul wrote to the Corinthians--Christ came in reconciliation, and those who follow Christ have that purpose and intent. To be with Christ means to make amends--something that goes far beyond simply righting wrongs, confessing mistakes, and forgiving hurts. It means welcoming folks into the circle--even those folks we once excluded--perhaps HAD to exclude. Love redeems through reconciliation.
So, find Legion. We know him. He is near. Welcome him home. Redeem him. Give him life again, remembering that life is being able to be a part of love, whatever circle that entails.
This incredible story, one that could well lend itself to a movie--maybe one of the hot, new zombie flicks--actually carries a simple message--healing is restoring another to life.
Legion is not living--not in any real sense. There he is--stored away in a cemetery. He is dead to his community, too crazy to be a part of it, even if restrained strongly. We may not immediately relate to Legion--crazy as we might be to those who love us--but we know the experience of not really living. Fear, fretting, and fulminations on most anything can rob us of fully participating in life as it should be and could be for us.
Jesus meets us.
The first grace of this story is that Jesus enters the cemetery. He goes straight for the man who is as good as dead.
Where does God meet us? In our abject lostness. God is most present when God seems most absent to us. God does not require that we be good enough or clean enough or right enough to meet with us. in fact, the opposite is true. God meets us in our most tragic states because that is what real and actual love does. God is love, so God loves in a way that meets the Least of These and makes them more than they imagined being.
The second grace comes in the end of the story. After banishing the tormenting demons to a herd of pigs who immediately drown themselves--I cannot but help feel some compassion for the poor swineherds--Jesus sends Legion home. He will not be fully alive until he finds his way home, with the very people who banished him. Both sides to need to make amends.
This fits with something Paul wrote to the Corinthians--Christ came in reconciliation, and those who follow Christ have that purpose and intent. To be with Christ means to make amends--something that goes far beyond simply righting wrongs, confessing mistakes, and forgiving hurts. It means welcoming folks into the circle--even those folks we once excluded--perhaps HAD to exclude. Love redeems through reconciliation.
So, find Legion. We know him. He is near. Welcome him home. Redeem him. Give him life again, remembering that life is being able to be a part of love, whatever circle that entails.
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