Redeemer Lutheran Church

Dear Friends in Christ Jesus,

“I believe that Jesus Christ has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil.” So the catechism’s explanation of the Second Article of the Creed sums up the very heart and centre of the Christian faith. Today’s Gospel reading on Jesus’ healing of a demon-possessed man expounds on the third evil from which we are saved—the power of the devil—in a most dramatic way.

After Jesus had just said to a sinful woman while reclining at the table in the house of a Pharisee by the name of Simon, “Your sins are forgiven”; those who were present said among themselves, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” And then, in the verses just previous to our text, we read that after Jesus calms the raging sea by the power of His Word, the disciples are filled with great fear and say to one another, “Who is this, that He commands even winds and water, and they obey Him?” Well, they are about to find out who this Jesus is in, of all places, “the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee.”

“The country of the Gerasenes” was a region of settlements inhabited not by Jews but by Greek-speaking Gentiles. That this Jewish prophet would sail across the Sea of Galilee to this region where unclean, unbelieving Gentiles lived—“a rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices,” to use the words from today’s Old Testament Reading—is most significant. For the message that Jesus “has purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil” is not confined to the Jews or to one particular group, region, or country, but is meant for all people in all parts of the world. As St. Paul puts it in today’s Epistle Reading: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

And that is why, when Jesus steps out of the boat, He is immediately confronted by a man possessed by demons who “would break the chains and shackles” with which the people had tried to bind him and who “for a long time had worn no clothes and had not lived in a house but among the tombs.” After all, what was behind the false beliefs and worship practices of those first-century people from “the country of the Gerasenes”? Who is behind the immoral, idolatrous, evil, and wicked ways of twenty-first-century people here in this nation? Is it not the author of sin, the agent of death, “the father of lies, the murderer from the beginning,” as Jesus calls him—that is, the devil?

This is why St. Peter writes in his first epistle these words: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Or, as St. Paul says in Ephesians: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Although the people who heard Jesus forgive the sins of that sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house questioned among themselves who this Jesus is, and although the disciples wondered the same after He calmed the raging sea, there is someone who knows exactly who He is.

We read: “When the man from the city who had demons saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him and said with a loud voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You, do not torment me. For He had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man.”

The writer of Hebrews declares, “the children share in flesh and blood, Jesus Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery”. These unclean spirits that possessed this man—more than one, for our text says: “Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion,’ for many demons had entered him”—“believe and shudder” to use the words of St. James. They believe that this Jesus is “true God, begotten of the Father from all eternity,” and then shudder—shudder because He is about to destroy them and their wicked works, shudder because they are powerless before Him, shudder because they are about to be cast into the abyss of hell.

“Now a large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged Him to let them enter these. So He gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.” This dramatic account—of unclean spirits entering unclean pigs (“deviled ham,” as it were) and plunging over the cliff into the lake where the unclean pigs drown and the unclean spirits descend into the abyss—must have been especially meaningful to those early Christians who first heard and read of this event. After all, for those believers in Jesus who were being persecuted by the Roman government—oppressed and threatened by the famed and feared Roman legions—and considering that the favourite food ration of those legions was pork, swine’s flesh, and that the insignia on the shields of the Tenth Roman Legion stationed in Judea was a wild boar, what were they to make of Jesus commanding this demon—whose name is Legion—to come out of the man and enter some two thousand pigs, which then plunged into the watery abyss?

Why, just this—as Martin Luther puts it in his famous hymn:

“Though devils all the world should fill,
All eager to devour us,
We tremble not, we fear no ill;
They shall not overpow’r us.
This world’ s prince may still
Scowl fierce as he will,
He can harm us none.
He’ s judged; the deed is done;
One little Word can fell him.”

“And when the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled and told it in the city and in the country. The people went out to see what had happened and how the demon-possessed man had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear.”

Now, we might well understand why those herdsmen whose pigs were floating around dead in the lake would be rather upset, but why all the people? Well, because they, too—like this demon—“believe and shudder.” They believe that this Jesus is much more than just some Jewish prophet; after all, He did something their soothsayers and incantations, their chains and shackles, could not do—He healed this demon-possessed man.

Moreover, Jesus did all of this not in the land of the Jews, but right here in their own country. And so, they shudder, filled with great fear—fear that this Jesus will cast out of them their own demons, which they rather enjoy and embrace: their wine, women, and song; their love of and preoccupation with money and pleasure; their religious beliefs and practices, to use the words from the Old Testament Reading, “of sacrificing in gardens and making offerings on bricks; of sitting in tombs and spending the night in secret places; of eating pig’ s flesh and broth of tainted meat in their vessels.”

And filled with fear over what the one, holy, almighty God will do to them because of their spiritual uncleanness; shuddering over the possibility that this Jesus will cast them into the abyss along with the demons and pigs; they “ask Jesus to depart from them.”

But there is one individual who is not filled with fear, one person who sees and regards Jesus as a loving Saviour, as the Redeemer from sin, death, and the devil—“the man from whom the demons had gone out and who is sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” And
that is the change that Jesus also works in the hearts and minds of people like you and me who are oppressed by the devil—what He works in us through the power of His authoritative Word. So St. Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. But
God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And in a way very similar to this man, we, too, have been exorcised of our demons. In the Order of Holy Baptism, for instance, we hear these words: “The Word of God teaches that we are all conceived and born sinful and under the power of the devil until Christ claims us as His own.”

As a result, we are now clothed and in our right minds—clothed with the righteousness and holiness of Jesus Himself, which covers the nakedness of our sins and all our uncleanness; in our right minds, made right by sitting at Jesus’ feet and hearing His Word; minds that know the love, grace, and mercy that the one true God has shown us and bestows upon unclean sinners in His own Son; minds that now partake not of the ‘deviled ham sandwiches’ of this world but of the heavenly food of the holy Body and Blood of the Lamb of God, who has overcome sin, death, and the devil by His sacrificial death and resurrection from the dead.

Now, as Jesus gets back into the boat and is about to cross the lake and return to Galilee, this man begs that he might go along with Him—echoing, as it were, the desire of the apostle Paul who said, “I would rather depart and be with Christ Jesus.” But as with Paul who said, “God called me by His grace, and was pleased to reveal His Son to me, in order that I might preach Him among the Gentiles”, so also with this man. For Jesus is not going to leave these people in the country of the Gerasenes to their demons. Instead, He says to him, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And with the result that “he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.”

The Holy Spirit blessed this man’s proclamation of Jesus Christ—this man whom we might call ‘the first apostle to the Gentiles’—for the next time Jesus returns to this neck of the woods, about six months later, we are told that a large crowd came out to sit at His feet and hear His Word.
In fact, from early church history we learn that by the second century a large number of Christians inhabited this “country of the Gerasenes,” and that a representative from the church at Gerasa would participate in that church council in Nicaea where, on the basis of the Scriptures, was formalized the answer to that question concerning who this Jesus is—the Nicene Creed that we confess still today: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.”

In this dramatic event we have, in its simplest form, the commission Jesus has also given to each one of us at our baptism, the task He again gives to us this day: “Now that I have redeemed you from sin, death, and the devil with My holy precious blood and My innocent suffering and death, return to your home and tell others around you how much I have done for you. Go back to that station in life, that vocation into which I have placed you and there, in word and in deed, ‘proclaim the wonderful deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light’.” In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.