Go Home to Your Own People

It was evening when he said it. Let us cross to the other side.

He had been teaching all day from a boat, because the crowd on the shore was too big to stand in. Now they sent the crowd home and pushed off across the lake with him just as he was, and other little boats went along. He was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.

Then the wind came.

The text says the waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was being swamped. These were men who fished that lake for a living, and they thought they were going to drown. They woke him with a question that has been prayed in a thousand hospital hallways since. Teacher, don’t You care that we are perishing?

He got up and rebuked the wind and the sea. Silence! he commanded. Be still! And it was.

The disciples were more frightened after the calm than during the storm. Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?

Nobody in the boat seems to have asked the other question. Where were they going in such a hurry, at night, across the water?

The answer was waiting on the other side.

They landed in the region of the Gerasenes, across the lake from home, where people kept pigs, which suggests it wasn’t Jewish country. (The gospels give the region slightly different names, and Matthew says there were two men. Mark tells it about one, and this chapter follows Mark.)

The moment Jesus stepped out of the boat, a man came at him out of the tombs.

Mark takes his time describing this man. He lived among the graves. People had tried to hold him down with chains and shackles, many times, and he had broken the chains and shattered the shackles. Nobody could tame him. And then the saddest line in the description:

Night and day in the tombs and in the mountains he kept crying out and cutting himself with stones.

Night and day. Crying. Cutting himself.

The text says he had an unclean spirit. Readers now will bring their own words to what they see here, and some of those words may fit parts of it. This chapter won’t trade the text’s words for ours, and it won’t pretend the text didn’t say them. What’s plain either way is that a man was in torment, alone, among the dead, and everyone who knew about him had given up and gone home.

He saw Jesus from a long way off, and he ran.

That’s the strange thing. Whatever was tormenting him fought Jesus with everything it had, shouting, What do You want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You before God not to torture me! But the man’s feet took him toward Jesus, not away. He ran up and fell down at his feet.

Jesus asked him his name.

It’s a small thing to ask a man nobody had spoken to in years except to chain him. The answer came back in a voice that wasn’t really his. My name is Legion, he replied, for we are many. A legion was a Roman army unit of thousands of soldiers. That was the only name he had left.

What happened next is one of the strangest scenes in the gospels. The spirits begged not to be sent out of the country, and asked to go into a herd of pigs feeding on the hillside. Jesus let them. About two thousand pigs ran down a steep slope into the lake and drowned.

The men who kept the pigs ran to town and told everyone.

When the townspeople came out, here’s what they saw.

When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons sitting there, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.

Sitting. Clothed. In his right mind. Luke adds that he was sitting at Jesus’ feet. The man who couldn’t be held by chains was sitting still.

And the people were afraid. The text says so plainly, and it’s not hard to understand. A whole herd was gone, somebody’s living drowned in the lake, and the man they’d all learned to fear was sitting there calm, next to a stranger who could do that. They asked Jesus to leave. Not angrily, as far as the text tells it. They begged.

So he went back to the boat.

As he was getting in, the man who’d been in the tombs asked for the one thing that made sense. He asked to come along.

Of course he did. The only person who’d been kind to him in a long time, as far as the text tells it, was getting into that boat. The town he’d have to go back to had chained him, feared him, and just now asked the man who healed him to leave. Jesus had called other men to follow him. Surely this one too.

But Jesus would not allow him. “Go home to your own people,” He said, “and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy He has shown you.”

No. Go home.

It must have landed like a door closing. It wasn’t. He was being given back his life, his people, his street, his name, and a job he could do nowhere else, because nobody else in that country had been where he’d been.

The text says what he did. So the man went away and began to proclaim throughout the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And everyone was amazed.

Decapolis means ten cities. He didn’t stay on his own street. He told it through the whole region.

And the boat went back across the water. The next verse has Jesus on the other side again, with a crowd. As far as Mark tells it, he crossed a lake at night, through a storm, stepped out, met one man, and went home. The text doesn’t say that was the reason for the trip. It doesn’t give any other.

Some time later, Mark says, Jesus came back through the middle of the Decapolis, and this time people were waiting for him. They brought him a deaf man and begged him to help. The text never connects the two visits. It’s hard not to wonder who told them.

Being found doesn’t always mean coming along. Sometimes it means being sent home, to the people who knew you at your worst, with something to say about what happened.

Where this meets your week

The storm on the way. Some people’s hardest season hits right when something good seems to be coming. The marriage finally settles and then the diagnosis. The retirement starts and then the flood in the basement. The disciples thought the storm meant they were going under. It turned out to be the road to somebody. If you’re in the middle of one now, you don’t have to know where it’s taking you. Ask his question, plainly, the way the disciples did. Don’t You care? It’s a real prayer, and it got a real answer.

The name you’ve been using. He had forgotten his own name, and answered with the name of what was tormenting him. People do this. They start introducing themselves by the thing that has them: the addiction, the grief, the anxiety, the failure. Jesus asked his name, which means he didn’t assume it was Legion. Write your own name down, and under it, the thing that’s been answering for you. Just seeing them separated on the page is a start.

The door you want to walk through and can’t. You wanted to go with. Into the new thing, the new town, the new group, the fresh start where nobody knows. And somewhere the answer was no, and you’re still here. It may not be a punishment. The man among the tombs was sent back to the one place nobody else could reach. Look around the place you’re stuck in and ask who’s there that nobody else can talk to.

The people who knew you before. The hardest audience for any change is the people who knew you at your worst. They remember the chains. They may be a little afraid of the new version too, the way the town was. You don’t need to convince them of anything. Just be sitting, clothed and in your right mind, when they come out to look.

Tell one person at home.

Not a sermon and not a testimony with a structure. Pick one person who knew you before, a sibling, an old friend, a neighbor, and tell them one true thing that’s changed, in the two parts Jesus gave the man. How much was done for you. And the mercy somebody showed you. If you don’t know yet who did it, you can say that too. The man in the tombs didn’t have much theology either. He had a story, and his own street to tell it on.

He asked to come along and was told to go home. So he went home, and then kept going, city after city, telling it.

And everyone was amazed.