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Questions Jesus Asked: “What’s Your Name?” (Mark 5:9)
By Victor Shepherd
I
"What's
your name?" Jesus asked a man on one occasion. Our Lord didn't mean what the bureaucrat means when she's filling
out forms and asks us, "Name, address, telephone number?" If we said, "My name is Bill
Smith," it would tell her no more about us than if we had said, "My
name is Sam Jones." Names today
tell us nothing at all about the person whom the name names. "Victor Shepherd":
"Victor" is Latin for conqueror.
I'm no conqueror; "Shepherd" is English for sheep-herder. I'm a city boy.
When
Jesus came upon a deranged man, however, and asked, "What's your
name?", he was asking the man to tell him something about himself, everything about himself, who he most
profoundly was. You see, in the ancient
world "name" meant four things: personal presence, character, power,
and deserved reputation.
"What's
your name?" Jesus asks me today.
He won't be satisfied with "My name is Victor." He already knows that. Instead he's asking 1) "Victor, are you
personally present? Are you really
available to the people you meet? Are
you really accessible? Or have you
learned to "fake it", smiling as if you were personally present when
all the while your head and your heart are anywhere but with the people in
front of you?" 2) He's asking even
more: "What's your character? Are
you honest or corrupt? patient or irascible? kind or vindictive? forgiving or
vengeful?" 3) He's also asking
about power: "Are you influential or ineffective? Do you foster reconciliation or
alienation? Do you spread joy or
misery? In your company do people find
faith easier to exercise or harder?"
4) And then in the fourth place he's asking me about the reputation I
deserve just because I have acted in public as everyone knows I've acted.
II
Centuries
ago Jesus came upon a fellow who lived in the cemetery and mutilated himself,
no one else being able to subdue him.
"What's your name?" our Lord asked him. "I don't know!" the fellow
replied, "How do you expect me to
tell you my name when my name is 'legion', there being so many of us? What's my name? Which
one would you like to hear? What's
my character? Which of my many 'selves' are you talking about?" The man plainly doesn't know who he
is. He can't tell you anything about an
identity underneath his frenzy. A
legion, we should note, was a Roman military unit consisting of 6000 men. The man feels he's all of them at once.
How
did he come to be many? He was
overcome, overwhelmed by chaotic forces without that now were forces within.
In
Mark's gospel the story of the Gerasene demoniac follows the incident of
Christ's stilling the stormy sea for the sake of frightened disciples. In Hebrew cosmogony large bodies of water,
turbulent, unpredictable, treacherous; these are everywhere a symbol of
chaos.
In
Genesis chapt.1 creation arises when God parts the primeval watery mass (the
watery mass being the first step of creation, the raw material of creation),
thus permitting land to appear, the fitting habitation for "Sixth
Day" creatures: humankind and our second cousins, the animals. As long as God's providential hand holds
back the primeval chaos, animate existence, human existence, can thrive. If God, however, relaxes his intervention
ever so slightly, chaos creeps back in.
If God withdraws the hands that part the waters, chaos inundates the
creation, rendering it de-creation -- as happened in the story of the Flood,
when God's judgement appointed the world precisely to what the world had been
telling God for generations that it wanted: his effectual absence.
"You'd
rather be without me?" God had said, "Then never say I'm a spoilsport
who won't give people what they want. I
always give people what they want. You
want me inoperative? I'll grant you that." The result, of course, was that chaos surged
over the creation until such time as God, in his wisdom and mercy, gave
humankind a fresh beginning.
In
the wake of our sin; in the wake of our pursuit of deities who aren't the sole
sovereign maker of heaven and earth; in our ardour for spirits who are less
than holy; in our zeal for twists and turns that are anything but the turn, return, of repentance; in our seeking comfort and consolation
everywhere but in the Comforter; in
all of this we are effectually summoning chaos upon ourselves. Why, then, are we surprised when it comes
upon us? Since chaos is that from which
creation emerged, chaos is that to which creation most readily reverts. Chaos always laps at creation.
Scripture
testifies to God's patience and providence in moving back chaos, fending it
off, just when it's on the verge of overwhelming creation and undoing it. We see this everywhere in Israel's
history. Think of its entry into the
promised land; its restoration from the exile; the provision of two figures who
loom largest in both testaments: Moses and Jesus. In both men God's hands hold off the chaos that threatens any
society which exalts infanticide, whether in their era or in ours.
And
now we have a man from the village of Gerasa who lives -- like all of us --
alongside a chaos that threatens individuals and communities and nations at all
times, a chaos that from time-to-time invades us and molests us. At this point God's intervention alone can
fend it off and thereby give us room to be what God has always intended us to
be: sons and daughters whose earthly, earthy life nature won't menace but
rather will support.
In
his derangement the Gerasene fellow is a micro instance of that chaos
exemplified in the stormy sea as macro instance. The man is simply overwhelmed at the evil he knows only too well
to haunt the world even as the townspeople remain naïve, shallow and
unperceptive.
Evil
is legion, isn't it? There are at least
6,000 manifestations of it, expressions of it, embodiments of it. Evil is multi-faceted: both blatant and
subtle, both frontal and tangential, both brutal and seductive. Evil appears in the blackest colours but in
the brightest too. Evil appears both as
hideous and as benign. There is no end
to the faces it wears and the disguises it assumes and the approaches wherewith
it stalks us and steals upon us.
As
often as I read the story of the deranged man who named himself after the image
and likeness of a military unit I think, soberly, of countless men whose name
has become legion through serving in military units. In times of war military personnel have always suffered, or died,
or gone insane. For most of history,
however, a soldier's chances of dying were much greater than his chances of
derangement. At the time of the US
Civil War, however, all this changed, thanks to two major military inventions:
the machine gun and the timed artillery fuse.
The machine gun meant soldiers couldn't flee; the timed artillery fuse,
causing the shell to explode 100 feet in the air instead of on contact with the
ground, meant that soldiers couldn't hide.
They died in vastly greater proportions than they had ever perished
before. Because they were much more
likely now to die, they also went mad in record numbers. For the first time in the history of warfare
a soldier's chances of total psychiatric breakdown were three times as great as
his chances of dying. In view of the fact that the US Civil War killed 650,000
very young men, there were two million 19- and 20-year olds who were total
psychiatric casualties for the rest of their earthly life.
The
same ratio of insanity to death has operated in every conflict since the US
Civil War; in the Russo-Japanese war, the Great War, World War II, the Korean
War, and more recently, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. (This is a dimension of evil we ignore when
we speak of war.)
No
doubt you are wondering what all of this has to do with us who are in Knox
Church tonight. We, after all, are not
deranged. The Gerasene fellow can't be like us because he manifestly
is.
The
truth is, Christ's question, "What's your name?", now addressed to
us, would find us having to give the same answer as he. "I don't know who I am, which one I am,
the reputation I am, just because there are so many of us." We are many indeed. Plainly chaos laps at us; and if we truly
are "many", then chaos has more than merely lapped at us.
Then
how did we come to be "many?"
Think
of the daily pressure to be something to one person and something else to another
person and something else again to a third person. Think of how it seems we have to ease our way through tight spots
in life by bending the truth here and telling just a little lie there and
misrepresenting ourselves somewhere else, all in the interests of getting us or
those dear to us past the landmines and quicksands that will otherwise take us
down. The truth is, of course, we are
daily putting on one false face after another, always telling ourselves that
underneath our exchangeable false faces there does remain our real face, our
true face, our genuine identity. If no
one else is aware of who we are at this point, at least we know who we are.
But
it's never this simple. As we shuffle
the false faces, falsity overtakes us little by little. We tell
ourselves we haven't reduced ourselves to phoniness; we tell ourselves that when this sticky situation is past we can
revert to our real face, our true self, our proper identity. But of course life is so very fraught with
sticky situations -- every day brings a host of them, doesn't it? -- that we
simply become more and more adept at interchanging false faces until we no
longer are aware that any one of them is false; no longer aware that we have
become false; no longer aware that we are phoniness incarnate.
While
I don't have a drinking problem or a drug problem, I have to tell you that I am
an addict. You see, I'm a sinner, and
all sin is addictive. (If sin weren't
addictive we'd have long given it up, wouldn't we?) Since I too am an addict, I'm sobered every time I read the
literature displayed by those among us who know
they're addicts. One such item is the
acrostic, "DENIAL", with the word spelled vertically. DENIAL:
"Don't Even (k)Now I Am Lying."
Our
name can also become "legion" through moral compromise. When we are tempted to make moral shortcuts
our conscience pricks us at first and we hesitate; pricked now, we have to
rationalize the compromise to pacify our conscience; conscience pacified now,
we have the inner tranquility, inner permission even, to go ahead with our
treachery -- just this once, of course, because of extraordinary circumstances
-- after which we shall revert to our integrity. It seems not to occur to us that integrity which can be set aside
opportunistically is no integrity at all.
Very quickly the compromise becomes second nature. A pastor now for 33 years, I have had people
tell me the first time they committed fraud or adultery or something else they
were in torment; the second time they had only a momentary twinge; the third
time was as easy as falling off a wet log.
When someone identifies them in terms of their sin and they protest,
"That isn't who or what I really
am," the obvious retort is, "Oh?
Why isn't it?"
Again,
our name becomes "legion" through mindless conformity to social
convention. Social convention seems to
have nothing to do with chaos and the evil that chaos engenders. Social conventions, after all, are necessary. Social conventions facilitate the movement
of people throughout the society the way traffic lights facilitate the movement
of traffic through intersections. Our
society agrees to stop at red lights.
But of course there is no intrinsic
connection between red light and stopping.
In the same way we "collide" less frequently socially if we
all agree to abide by social conventions even though there is no intrinsic
connection between arbitrary convention and the behaviour associated with
it. The peril in our doing so, of
course, is that the social convention comes to tell us who we are.
People
address me as "reverend."
It's a social convention.
"Reverend" means I'm revere-able, and I'm revere-able
(supposedly) inasmuch as I'm extraordinarily holy. People also call me "Doctor", Latin for
"teacher." I'm
extraordinarily learned. You know, I
like the sound of it: "Reverend
Dr." It sets me apart, doesn't
it? It sets me apart from the common
herd that is neither holy nor learned.
"Reverend Dr.": it tells me who I am; it makes me who I am.
It
makes me who I am, that is, until Jesus Christ looms before me and asks,
"What's your name?" And when
I start to say, "Reverend Dr." he butts in, "Do you think I'm
fooled by arbitrary social conventions?
Do you think the label that you relish disguises for a minute what oozes
out of your every pore?"
The
sad truth is most people take as their name whatever the silent majority
represents. As the silent majority
shifts from this to that, picks up this and drops that, believes this now when
it used to believe that then; this is what most people are. What's their name? Their name is the myriad, ill thought-out ideation that forms the
mental furniture and the clogged cardiac system of the silent majority. Their name is legion.
Of
course there are always those who think they're smarter than most and can
recognize all this. Therefore they are
going to react to it: they are going to be whatever the silent majority isn't.
Alas, they don't see that their "name" is still determined by
the silent majority: reacting to the silent majority, they have become that
noisy minority which the silent majority has made them in any case, unbeknownst
to them. Their name too is
"legion."
III
The
man in our gospel incident was violent.
No one could subdue him. After a
while no one tried. Anyone who doesn't
know who she is; anyone whose identity is fragile; anyone who is forever
scrambling to find an identity lest the one she doesn't really have is taken
away from her in any case; any such person will behave violently.
When
I was younger I used to think that people who lashed out were uncommonly
nasty. Having observed people for
decades, however, I see that I was wrong.
Those who lash out violently and cause havoc aren't uncommonly nasty;
they are commonly insecure. Their
fragile, arbitrary, undefendable identity is threatened with extinction. They have to shore it up lest anyone
"see through" them and discover that they are hollow inside.
When
I was younger I was perplexed as to why people exploded if someone merely
disagreed with them. And if they managed
to stay cool when someone disagreed with them, they didn't stay cool when
someone refuted them. I was perplexed
that what passed for a discussion on a topic became a battle in which someone,
being led to see that the point he had advanced wasn't actually sound, suddenly
clung to the point regardless, enlarged it, raised his voice, reddened his
face, and attempted to browbeat others into admitting he was right. The reason, of course, that it's so
difficult to admit we are wrong is that our identity is tied up with a position
we've adopted (regardless of the issue), and to admit we are wrong is to
forfeit an identity that is so fragile in any case that it is readily pushed
over and caused to fragment. Still, anyone
threatened with loss of face and looming fragmentation will likely become
violent. Anyone threatened with
extinction is going to turn ugly. We
shouldn't be surprised.
IV
In
our gospel story Jesus heals the man whose name is "legion." The townspeople find him "sitting
there, clothed, and in his right mind", the English text tells us. In the Greek text there are three pithy,
parallel past participles: "seated, clothed, right-minded." The three parallel past participles --
"seated, clothed, right-minded" -- underline the fact that something
definitive has occurred to the man, something conclusive, something that is as
undeniable as it is unmistakable.
Seated. In Hebrew
symbolism to be seated is to be in authority, to rule. Whenever a rabbi made an authoritative
pronouncement he sat to speak. When
Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount he sits to teach. Our Lord wants us to know that in the Sermon
on the Mount he isn't offering an opinion; he's speaking authoritatively,
sealing upon us the meaning of life
in the kingdom of God.
Following
his ascension the risen Jesus is said to be "seated at the right hand of
the Father." He is seated inasmuch
as his resurrection has rendered him victor; his ascension has rendered him
ruler; as victorious ruler he is sovereign over the cosmos.
The
man whose name had been "legion" is now found seated. He is no longer the helpless victim of
whatever forces howl down upon him. He
is no longer a function of everyone he's met and everything he's seen. For the first time in his life he is
sovereign of himself. He is now the
subject of his own existence. As
subject of his own existence he is a self; a
self; one, unitary self. Now he is
simply himself, his own self, the subject of his own life. Hereafter he speaks and acts with the
authority of someone who knows who he is and what he's about.
Clothed. In Hebrew
symbolism to be clothed is to belong.
When the prodigal son returns from the far country and comes home his
father clothes him in a robe. The robe
means that he belongs; he belongs to this household; he belongs in this home;
he belongs with this family. He belongs.
In
our Lord's parable of the wedding garment the guests are streaming into the
reception when one fellow tries to crash the party. He isn't wearing a wedding garment. (In Israel of old, we must note, not merely the wedding party but
the wedding guests too wore distinctive clothing.) The party-crasher is denied admission to the wedding
reception. Lacking the proper clothing,
he doesn't belong, and everyone knows it.
When
the apostle Paul speaks of the new life that Jesus Christ is for us, and speaks
as well of the features of this life (readiness to forgive enemies, patience,
kindness, humility, etc.), he makes his point by telling us that we are to
"put on" Christ with his gifts. "Put on" is a metaphor
taken from the realm of clothing. We
are to clothe ourselves in Christ and
his gifts. Our clothing ourselves in
this way tells everyone that we belong to him.
The
man whose name had been "legion" is now clothed. He belongs to Jesus Christ; he belongs to
Christ's people; he belongs to the wider community (whose ground and goal
Christ is); he belongs to himself.
Right-minded. In Hebrew
thought to be possessed of a right mind, a sound mind, is to be sane, to be
sure, but also, even more profoundly, to have one's thinking formed and
informed by the truth and reality of God.
Most
people are sane now. Most people,
however, aren't "right-minded" in that they don't think in conformity
with the kingdom of God. If they are
asked what is real, what is good, what they should trust, what they should
pursue, what is central in life and what is peripheral; if they are asked these
questions they can answer them all in a few words: "whatever promotes my
plans for myself; whatever advances my self-interest; whatever makes my life
easier and makes me self-satisfied."
Most
people are sane; most people, however, are not right-minded, not
righteous-minded in terms of right-relationship with Jesus Christ and right
pursuit in conformity with this relationship.
The thinking of most people isn't governed by any of this; it's governed
by rationalization, rationalization that aids and abets their selfism.
The
man whose name had been "legion" is restored both to sanity and to a
manner of thinking that is now governed by one grand preoccupation: the reality
of God, the truth of God, the kingdom of God; God's plan and purpose for him here; his pursuit of this.
What governs his thinking now isn't thinly-disguised scheming connected
with self-promotion; what governs his thinking now is a vision of the kingdom
of God and a vocation to render this kingdom visible.
V
What
happened, ultimately, in the Gerasene village on that never-to-be-forgotten
day? What happened isn't what we
expect. We expect a celebration. A man, after all, has been living in the
cemetery, amidst the dead. His
existence -- violent, self-destructive, fearful -- has been a living death. Now he is healed. Surely the event should be publicly hailed a triumph. Instead the townspeople recoil from the
man. (Plainly he's a greater threat
healed then he ever was deranged.) They
look askance at Jesus, the one at whose hands the man has been restored. They want him gone. They beg him to depart, the text tells
us. They implore him. They plead with him. "Just leave us alone. We like the way things were before you
showed up."
Whatever
else the townspeople might be they aren't stupid. They have seen that the great healer is the great disturber, seen
that healing is a disturbance. They
have seen that wholeness is disruptive; peace engenders conflict; sanity is
hard to live with. They had life
figured out when the man they had long known (and could therefore write off)
shrieked and howled, gashed himself and raved.
Let him rave! Raving is harmless;
sanity, however, isn't. Inarticulate
shouts and cries mean nothing; sober, lucid, penetrating speech now means
everything. Every community has its
misfits. And everyone knows where and
how the misfits fit.
Yes. Misfits fit, because we tell them where they
had better fit. Fit people, however,
won't be told. Therefore fit people,
paradoxically, are forever misfits. The
Gerasene village has been turned upside down.
Before, no one had to take the ranting man seriously; now, those who
don't take him seriously are fools.
Before, however economically unproductive he might have been (certainly
he couldn't have been gainfully employed), at least he was socially useful: he
was Class-A Entertainment. Now he isn't
entertainment. His wholeness -- self-perceived,
owned, enjoyed -- is a rebuke to those who pretend they aren't as warped
inwardly as he had been outwardly.
It's
plain that the man can't be "put in his place" as he was always
"put in his place" before Jesus appeared. It's plain that he now sees with kingdom vision amidst
townspeople who are kingdom blind. It's
obvious he can't be domesticated just as Jesus of Nazareth, the one who has
given him back his life, can't be domesticated. Those who are socially ascendant are always nervous around those
who can't be tamed and won't come to heel.
The
townspeople had made their peace with the world as it is and also with
themselves as they are. Once Jesus has
appeared, however, such peace is seen to be a pact with evil. Since Jesus has identified what distorted
the man manifestly, Jesus won't stop short of identifying what distorts the
villagers secretly -- or not so secretly.
Then the Master will have to leave.
And if he's rather slow to leave, they will beg him to step along lest
he linger and torment them as he seemed, only a short while ago, to torment the
villager they'd all dismissed as insignificant.
Nothing
has changed. Throughout history, when
the church has been most preoccupied with Jesus the world has been unable to
tolerate it. When, on the other hand,
the church has tried to out-world the world, forfeiting its birthright and
making itself look ridiculous, the world has welcomed it. Prior to the collapse of the Berlin wall and
the dismantling of the USSR, a Russian Orthodox Church that lent itself to the
treacherous purposes of the state was a church the state could tolerate. Those congregations, however, that met
Sunday by Sunday to exalt Jesus Christ; communist leaders from Lenin through
Stalin to the most recent could never leave these congregations
unmolested. They knew that whenever
Christians remain preoccupied with Jesus, such Christians will always be a
rebuke to the state, to the society, to the culture, as surely as the healed
man of Mark 5, together with the one who had healed him, was more than civic
authorities could endure. Isn't this
what we saw last August, on the occasion of the Pope's visit, when CBC TV
interviewers kept trying to have young people badmouth him or badmouth the
church or badmouth whatever when all that the young people wanted to do was
exalt Jesus?
The
Gerasene fellow wants to join up with Jesus and the twelve. Jesus, however, has a different expression
of discipleship for different individuals.
And so he says to the man, "You go home to your family and your
friends; you go back to the people who know you best, the people quickest to
detect inauthenticity and the fastest to spot a profession of faith unmatched
by performance; you go back to those who will most readily hold you to your
newfound integration and integrity; you tell them what the Lord has done for
you and how he has had mercy on you."
The
man does just this, with the result, we are told, that many others
"marvelled." The Greek text
is an iterative imperfect: kept on marvelling, continued to marvel, and
continued to marvel just because the healed man continued to be anything but a
flash in the pan.
VI
The
questions Jesus asked in the days of his earthly ministry are the questions he
continues to ask, the questions he always asks.
And
therefore when he says to any one of us today, "What's your name?",
the answer he's looking for isn't "Sam" or "Samantha." He asks the question only because he already
knows the answer. He already knows that
our name is, or has been, "legion", since there are so many of
us. And of course he asks the question
only in order that he might speak to us, touch us, and thereafter display us as
citizens of his kingdom, possessed of his truth, preoccupied with his plan and
purpose for us. In short, he asks us
the question only because he ultimately wants to render us seated, clothed,
right-minded; and thereafter to witness in word and deed to all and sundry that
he has done this for us, and done it
all for us just because he has had mercy on us.
This address was delivered at the Knox
Summer Fellowship, Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, July 2003.
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