Progressive reflections on the lectionary #69

Luke 8:26–39 This one's a postcolonial belter

Poor old piggy… photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

I’m not preaching this week, which is a shame because I love this passage - it’s Luke’s version of the Gerasene Demoniac story. Mark’s version of this story got an honourable mention in my first ever lectionary post on this substack.

Basically I read this as a story about Jesus’ revolution against the domination and exploitation of the colonising Roman powers - the ‘legion in the garrison’ gag is not the most subtle piece of word play you’ll find in the gospels. Its actually a story about failure too, Jesus is unable to get the local people to follow his decolonising ways - we are reminded that not everyone is ready to be freed from their oppression!

On to the text: where Mark’s account is inevitably short and sparse, Luke’s version packs on the symbolism, making it a postcolonial tour-de-force, a gift for anyone looking to talk about liberation.

A brief recap then: Prior to the start of our story Jesus sails across the sea of Galilee for his only visit to Gentile territory in Luke - as he does so he calms the sea. You may remember that my view (other views are widely available) is that miracle stories are not to be read literally, but as symbols. Here Jesus’ miracle symbolises his ability to bring peace of a different order to the peace that Rome brings.

Then (8: 26) he arrives at ‘the region of the Gerasenes’. Now, lest we forget, the sea of Galilee is highly disputed territory, Herod Antipas is dominating it to try and win favour from Rome, building a city, taxing the workers and claiming all the fish. This is ground zero for colonial exploitation and domination.

On arrival Jesus meets a man who “had demons” (8: 27), this is a man with no clothes and nowhere to live except ‘the tombs’.

Ok - press pause, what does this symbolise? The demons are, as they are in Mark, the occupying powers. Here the extra detail is the man’s utter poverty, he is made destitute by the economic exploitation of this colonial power.

In 8:28 the man is unable to speak for himself (as it the way when people are oppressed and deprived of their native language) but the demon calls Jesus ‘Son of the Most High God’ - there are two straightforward ways to read this:

1. As a direct, subversive, reference to the sort of divine title that was given to an emperor, (they were understood as divine rulers).

2. As a title of a liberator.

Either of these concepts makes sense, they even kind of make sense together.

Then we learn that the ‘possession’ of this man had previously led to him being “kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles” (8:29) - this symbolises the way that colonising forces enslave native peoples, using them as ‘bio power’ to borrow a term from Foucault.

“What is your name?” Jesus asks the man/demons. “Legion,” comes the response (8.30).

So to go over those again, here’s a man who is suffering because of an occupying power, a legion - a military force. Because of this force he has become poor, homeless, unable to communicate, and has been deprived of liberty.

Then we get the symbolic casting out story, where Jesus drives the demons into a ‘large herd of swine’ (v 32).

According to whether you want to push the envelope or not, you might stick with the simple explanation that the pigs represent the ‘unclean’. The story of the prodigal son backs this up, there Jesus compares himself with the one who has ‘eaten with pigs’ so the story uses pigs to symbolise people who have collaborated with Rome (tax collectors etc).

If you prefer to get a little more experimental you might like to take a little excursion into classical myth and think about the myth of Circe, the enchantress who turn’s Odysseus’ men into pigs. When our hero has children with the enchantress (plot twist!) one of them is Latinus - the progenitor of the Latins. Too much of a stretch? Stick with unclean then. Either way, the pigs die.

Actually there are a couple of other intriguing details here - firstly the demons try to negotiate - “please don’t send us into the ‘abyss’” they say in 8:31. Here they are asking not to be returned to the ‘tehom’ from which God created in Genesis. This is ‘the depths’ - it’s not ‘nothingness’. Then of course they do end up in the depths, at the bottom of the sea. This is a mass grave, unacknowledged, a humiliation.

So then the man is restored to health and sanity, but the other residents aren’t keen on this decolonising prophet and choose to reject his anti-militarist project, so Jesus backs off, his mission a failure. In 8:38 the ex-demoniac asks to come with him, but in the final verse of the passage Jesus instructs him to ‘return home’ to tell people what has happened - again emphasising the fact that the man had a home but had lost it because of the occupying powers.

There are more nuances and details that could be pulled out, but suffice to say that this is, in my view, one of the clearest stories in the gospels for talking about Jesus as a liberator, and a decoloniser. It also helps to take away from the supernaturalist approach to talk of miracles, spirits and etc. These things have very ‘real’ meanings in the gospels, and this is one of the clearest examples of what that looks like.

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Progressive Reflections On the Lectionary are intended to be useful to people who preach, or are interested in why on earth anyone still reads the Bible.