There’s deep and timely wisdom in today’s gospel account of Jesus healing the Geresene demoniac.* The key is in Jesus’ exchange with the demon itself: “What is your name?” asks Jesus. The demon answers, “Legion.” And while we may think of this word first as meaning “many”, in Jesus’ time it specifically referred to a unit of the Roman army: around 5,000 men, about the same as a Battalion today.
With this key, we can access aspects of this passage that address the reality of Roman military occupation of the land, and brutal economic exploitation of its people. Jesus healed the inner chaos and brokenness of a man crazed by the effects of violent Roman occupation on his physical, material, and also spiritual situation. This was more than a personal healing, but a claim for the capacity of the way of Jesus and the power of God to break and overcome oppressions.
No wonder the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them: his action was subversive of Roman domination, and the people were scared of Roman response.
In our time, we’ve become more aware of the catastrophic physical and mental health effects of violence, poverty, cultural prejudice and political oppression, here and globally. I don’t mean to under-value the toxic effects of these insults to human needs by now turning attention to how living in a culture of systemic gross inequalities, exploitation, and violence affects those of us with privilege.
We, too, become divided and disordered in our own minds and our own relationships when we live within a culture of structural exploitation and oppression. You may be like me—growing up naively in a racially and economically segregated community, and only becoming aware much later that my family’s way of life, though working class, was possible only at the expense of other humans and of the earth itself.
To continue to live with privilege requires a degree of split consciousness. I can’t return to innocence about the ways our economic system take advantage of many here and abroad for the benefit of us with more access to resources. I know, and we all know, of the global climate-related catastrophes that will continue to unfold around us. We have to suppress our awareness to walk through the world as it is, but underneath, we know what we know. We become of two minds–or more.
So we, in a different way, have become demon-infested, we too are Legion. If it were possible to free myself, by myself, I would have done so by now. But though I have a longing for things to be otherwise, I also have the desire for security, and to continue in the way I have lived. I’m torn, split: we’re torn and split. “It’s enough to make you crazy.” Only through God’s grace and love, and the community of believers, do we have a hope of healing.
-Jeanne Marcus, Alumna member of CoS communities
