[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 19th of June 2022]
(Readings: Luke 8:26-39 and Isaiah 65:1-9)
(((CONTENT WARNING: The story of the Gerasene Demoniac makes reference to themes of mental illness, self harm, and physical abuse – this sermon addresses those themes)))
“Keep to yourself; do not come near me, for I am too holy for you” (Isaiah 65:5). This is the ‘holier than thou’ attitude that the prophet Isaiah spoke against in our second reading today. For the Hebrew prophets this attitude smacked of hypocrisy. Worshiping out of a belief that we are better than everyone else is not true worship but a selfish enterprise. Yet so much of our lives is geared towards giving us a sense of superiority over our neighbours. We see this in the consumerist sense “buy this car and be the envy of your friends,” “wear this dress and be the envy of your colleagues” etc. but also in how competitive our society has become, “look how hard working and productive I am,” “look how much money I have.”
Yet this only works to make us feel better about ourselves if there is someone who we perceive as not having a nice car, as not having a new dress, does not have the money that we have, or someone who we deem to be lazy or unproductive.
That last one, the demonisation of those who we consider unproductive can become truly evil. Those who are disabled and out of work are regularly demonised in the press as “scroungers”, those who have fled suffering to come to this country are seen as nothing more than a dead weight on public services. When we malign, scapegoat, and put-down the powerless and the marginalised, we work to deprive people of their humanity.
One of the most marginalised and maligned groups of people in our society is the mentally unwell, who are all too often labelled as unproductive, defective, and dangerous. Throughout much of modernity mental illness has been seen as something to be contained rather than treated. Asylums were a tool to lock people up and away from being able to interfere in normative running of society. Even though we no longer have the asylums today – the social stigma around mental health has reduced but certainly not gone away.
This negativity around mental health has not always been the case however, some who experienced what we would call today mental illness were seen, in prior times, as gifted visionaries or spiritual leaders and were sometimes even prised by their communities. I am certain that William Blake, or even many of the prophets, would have been diagnosed with something if they had been around today. Yet many unfortunate others were seen as having been corrupted by some dark force or possessed by demons.
The latter was the case of the Gerasene demoniac. Now obviously we now know that mental ill health is not caused by supernatural demons entering someone’s body or mind, today we look for answers to what causes such cases through the tools phycology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. But the people in Jesus’s time did not have these tools and so tradition and folk law were all they had to draw on. It seems bazar to us but demons were accepted part of reality for many people in the ancient world – the demons effecting this demoniac would have been all to real to the people of Gerasene. At some point the people of the city had obviously made the decision to lock up this poor fellow by capturing him, physically subduing him and tying him up, only for him to escape his bonds and for them to perform the cruel process over and over again.
The Roman Catholic Priest and theologian James Alison, casts this demoniac as being labelled by the people of the city as “Crazy Jo” and, after being forced to take this treatment for a while, Alison believes that Crazy Joe could possibly have begun self-harming as a way of cutting out the middleman – “no need for you to beat me up, let me do it myself”. This would account for him having no clothes as he would have likely teared them of himself while seeking to scratch, cut, and beat himself up. Mark’s Gospel talks about the demoniac as bruising himself with stones (Mark 5:5). Self-harm can be caused by acting out the negativity that others have towards you upon yourself, and this was likely the case here.
So why were the people of the city so upset with Jesus for healing Crazy Jo if he was such a problem for them? Why does our reading from Luke’s Gospel describe the people as being “frightened” and “sized with great fear” and why do the people tell Jesus to go away?
Because, in healing Crazy Jo – or rather in restoring his humanity and turning him back into Regular Jo, Jesus had deprived them of something very valuable – their collective and effective scapegoat that had probably foundation of unity among the people of the city. Bad harvest? “Well, if only Crazy Jo had put some effort in rather than yelling and beating himself up, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Something gone missing? “I bet Crazy Jo must have taken it!” General misfortune? “It must be those bad vibes from Crazy Jo!”
Crazy Jo had probably, unintentionally on his part, been the unifying factor for the rest of the people of the city as everyone was likely united in hatred and fear of him. Now that Crazy Jo is Regular Jo, the people have no easy scapegoat to turn to and beat up. When things go wrong for them, they have no one to blame but themselves. This means that, instead, from now on when things go wrong, they actually have to do work to figure out the real reason why and even… take responsibility for themselves?! How terrifying! The people no longer have access to the “bad” person that makes them feel that they are the “good” people.
Yet Jesus responds to this by being surprisingly mild mannered. Usually, when Jesus encounters such injustice, this is not the case, so why is he more lenient here? A clue can be found with the pigs. The fact that the people were farming pigs means that they were very unlikely to be Jewish. The people of the Gerasene were gentiles and thus had likely never received the wisdom of the law and the prophets from Judaism. So Jesus gives them the benefit of the doubt – of course they scapegoated this poor man, how would they have known any better?!
Yet ignorance of the dangers of scapegoating is not going to be a reasonable excuse in future because Jesus give the Gerasenean people a parting gift – Formally Crazy Jo – or Ordinary Jo.
Now I really feel sorry for Ordinary Jo here as he is given an unenviable task. In Mark’s Gospel the wording of this task is ““Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” One can imagine Jo thinking, “Go home!? To my own people!? Have you not just seen the people from my home and what they did to me!?” Honestly, if Jo was thinking this, he would have had a good point. Earlier in his own ministry Jesus himself had proclaimed that, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24).
This was certainly a hard ministry for Jo, but I think it would have been a vital one for the city. If Jo had left with Jesus on the boat that day, the town would simply have created another Crazy Jo, the would have found some new victim or group of victims to scapegoat. But, with Ordinary Jo, roaming around them, ministering to them, that becomes a little harder. When the physical reminder of your past scapegoating is living alongside you, you might think twice before pulling that trick again.
We do not have the excuse of ignorance anymore. Not just because we have these stories from scripture, but because we have been blessed by the ministry of Ordinary Jos – the Ordinary Jos who have stepped of a flimsy inflatable boat from Calais, the Ordinary Jos who have had to battle the bureaucracy of an underfunded and understaffed mental health services in order to access the treatments and resources that they are entitled to, the Ordinary Jos who are disabled yet treated like suspected criminals for accessing the support they need.
For the sake of us all, we have to listen to their words of wisdom and learn from their ministry.
Amen.
