Monday in the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time, January 31, 2022

I was exhausted by the work on Sunday, but that I was able to perform it at all is a good sign, I think.  Thanks for your prayers!

Mark 5:1-20

Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the sea, to the territory of the Gerasenes. When he got out of the boat, at once a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met him. The man had been dwelling among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any longer, even with a chain. In fact, he had frequently been bound with shackles and chains, but the chains had been pulled apart by him and the shackles smashed, and no one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the hillsides he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones. Catching sight of Jesus from a distance, he ran up and prostrated himself before him, crying out in a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!” (He had been saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of the man!”) He asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” And he pleaded earnestly with him not to drive them away from that territory. Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside. And they pleaded with him, “Send us into the swine. Let us enter them.” And he let them, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine. The herd of about two thousand rushed down a steep bank into the sea, where they were drowned. The swineherds ran away and reported the incident in the town and throughout the countryside. And people came out to see what had happened. As they approached Jesus, they caught sight of the man who had been possessed by Legion, sitting there clothed and in his right mind. And they were seized with fear. Those who witnessed the incident explained to them what had happened to the possessed man and to the swine. Then they began to beg him to leave their district. As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed pleaded to remain with him. But Jesus would not permit him but told him instead, “Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.” Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis what Jesus had done for him; and all were amazed.

In previous readings from the Gospel of St. Mark we have seen how events fall hard upon one another.  In Saturday’s reading we saw how te Lord preached to the crowd throughout the day, and then he sent them away: the Apostles took him “even as he was” in their ship.  Mark emphasizes the Lord’s breakneck pace to overthrow evil and to save souls.  The Lord goes to the desert and overthrows the devil’s temptations; he goes to Capernaum and expels a devil from a man in the synagogue there, then spends hours healing and exorcising in the town; next, he takes on the Pharisees and overthrows them by declaring himself Lord of the Sabbath; he preaches to the crowd and tells them parables in order to overthrow the ignorance in which the Pharisees hope to keep them; he then sets his boat directly into the path of a ferocious storm, which he easily conquers with a couple of words.  And now he goes straight to a possessed man on the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee.  Mark presents the Lord’s Public Life practically in terms of a series of military campaigns.  It is also a bit reminiscent of the Book of Joshua, which shows the Israelites quickly ad decisively overcoming the Canaanites in several battles.

The Lord’s hurried assault on pagan territory, as it were, is aimed at a particular case of demonic possession.  He clearly knows where he is going, and no reason exists otherwise for his going there.  He arrives at the graveyard in the night, he exorcises the demons, and then he heads back to .Jewish lands.  He does not preach there or perform other miracles.  We might wonder why the Lord goes to all the trouble of going to this Gentile man when so much work still lay before him in the time he had left on earth.  The answer to this is seen in the extreme nature of the case.  The man is possessed by a “legion” of demons, implying thousands.  It was as if all the evil in the pagan world was concentrated within this single human.  And we see the absolutely corrupt behavior of the world without Christ or even the Jewish Law.  We see violent attacks on others as well as self-destruction.  We see utter despair and helplessness.  We see, in his dwelling in the cemetery, a culture of death.

When Jesus sends Legion into the swine, the swine prefer death to a life of such evil, causing us to wonder at a human being who would choose to wallow in wickedness of this degree.  We might even wonder if this sort of degradation is even possible on a large scale, but the Lord tells us that it is.

We can understand the Lord’s foray into the pagan world as preparing it for its conversion by the Apostles, and by us.