The Gospel According to Luke 8:26-39
At that time, as Jesus arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, there met him a man from the city who had demons; for a long time he had worn no clothes and he lived not in a house but among the tombs. When he 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 beseech you, do not torment me.” For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many a time it had seized him; he was kept under guard, and bound with chains and fetters, but he broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the desert.) Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him.
And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
When the herdsmen saw what happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gadarenes asked him to depart from them; for they were seized with great fear; so he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but he sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.
In our parish, Fyodor Dostoyevsky needs little introduction. His writings, both essays and fiction, intertwine his Orthodox faith with the moral and social debates of his time in the Russian Empire. His Christian perspective and keen insight remain relevant to our spiritual struggles today.
In the preface to his novel Demons—originally translated into English as The Possessed—Dostoyevsky quotes from Pushkin’s poem Demons as well as from today’s Gospel according to Saint Luke: the healing of the man from the Gadarenes plagued by demons. Dostoyevsky often prefaced his novels with Gospel verses. While I won’t delve into the role of demons in his novel, I will use this as a catalyst to reflect on what possesses, controls, and dominates us, preventing us from being in our right mind and sitting at the feet of Jesus.
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When reflecting on Jesus’s healings recounted in the Gospels, we must remember these reports are not ends in themselves. For instance, in this case, Christ’s power to exorcise demons. These accounts prefigure the Kingdom of God, where Christ will reign over all creation, and those who have lived “in Christ” will be in their right mind—cleansed of all demons—and sitting at Jesus’s feet. These citizens of the Kingdom will embody the image of the perfect person—Jesus Christ—who was tested himself: Those in the Kingdom will have embodied Jesus’s teachings of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the leper who returned to give thanks, as well as the persons in Saint Luke’s Gospel: Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, Elizabeth, her son John the Baptist, Zacchaeus, Mary and Martha, and the wise thief. Their lives and lessons offer us right orientation away from distortion.
In today’s reading from Saint Luke, we learn that demons—whether destructive ideas or otherwise—are truly effective only when they take root in a person, distorting God’s image and potentially destroying it. In a sense they are powerless without our consent—hence the lesson of the swine who rushed down the chasm to their death. Demonic ideas mock and twist God’s gifts. Free will, a divine gift for life, becomes distorted and results in slavery to sin and ultimately death (Romans 6:15-23). Demons enter our minds and hearts, distorting them with false faiths and convictions like autonomy and confidence in our self-sufficiency, resulting in indifference to God, others, and creation.
Yet, we must not despair, for our Savior is always near, just as He was passing the man in the Gadarenes, He continually reaches out his hand to lift us out from demonic captivity, either directly or through the good shown by others. But we must reach out our hand as well, through humility, guided introspection, and prayer. Thus, the daily tests—temptations, struggles for control of our minds will become opportunities that will lead us to become in our right and clear mind. We must heed Jesus’s exhortation to his “sleeping” disciples in Gethsemane: “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Luke 22:46).
I am indebted to Richard Pevear’s comments about Saint Luke’s passage about the Gadarene demonia in his Introduction to Fyodor Dostoevskys’ Demons (R. Pevear, L. Vokokhonsky, Transl.) Vintage Classics, 1995.