"Power" by the Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Posted on
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 7
June 23, 2013: Galatians 3: 23-29, Luke 8:26-39
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
On first reading, the Gospel this morning seems pretty straight-forward. A man is possessed by demons, Jesus’ exorcises them, they enter into swine and the man is restored to health. On the surface a simple, and with different variations, an often repeated healing story. But a closer look at the story reveals some unusual elements. Let’s look more closely at the details of the story. First, the demonically possessed man does not ask Jesus for help. In fact, the first words the man says to Jesus are "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me". The man correctly identifies Jesus as the Son of God but thinks he has come to torment him further. Second, Jesus spends more time talking to the demons than he does to the possessed man. They first beg him not to release them back into the abyss but to put them into swine instead, and Jesus eventually complies with their request. Third, and most intriguingly, the people of the village, seeing the expulsion of the demons from the afflicted man and his restoration to health, become afraid and beg Jesus to leave the village immediately. Why in the world would the villagers want a man who removes demons to be gone from their midst: what are they afraid of?
To unpack the layers of meaning hidden below the surface of this otherwise simple story of a healing we need to begin by recognizing, as Jesus did, that demonic possession is quite real. There is clearly a psychological dimension to demonic possession, but there is also something else at work here: demons, by whatever names we wish to refer to them (addictions or obsessions), are forces or powers within us working for the deconstruction of our essential selves. And they compete with and challenge the forces and powers of God working for the health and well-being of the self. The Gospel makes it clear that the power of demonic forces is so strong that they recognize only powers of equal or greater strength than their own: that is why they know Jesus and why they appeal to him. The persons over whom they have taken control are no longer able to resist them: only God can do so. Twisted power recognizes healing power and is afraid of it because they are competing for the same space: the soul of the human person. In Jesus the demons know that they are encountering the only force that can send them back to the place from which they arose, to the nothingness (what the text calls the abyss) from which they came. They know that they have arisen not from the power of good, but from the power of evil. And evil is ultimately the source of nothing good, it is the absence of good, the emptiness of life with no true meaning; of a life without intrinsic value; or a life whose meaning is self-destruction and in the process the destruction of others. Evil festers and grows when the light of goodness cannot penetrate its lair and when it arises from the abyss it lives on in the dark shadows of lies and deceptions. But evil can escape the abyss, the darkness, when we, out of anxiety and fearfulness, succumb to its allure and call it forth and give it the power to live in us, replacing the power of God. This was the original sin of Adam of Eve: to try to live by the literally God-forsaken power of their own pride as cunningly and deceptively portrayed to them by the lies of the demonic power of the serpent who promised them that they could live as gods.
But once we are in the possession of demonic forces, we cannot easily recognize any other way to live. We become addicted to our demons and our demonic way of living. In fact, our addictions and obsessions are our demons: they possess us and they define us: they give us our identity, perverted as it may be, and we are loath to give up this identity since it is ours, it makes us who we are. We become addicted to our addictions and to the self they have created us to be. The personalities our addictions have given us are now familiar and comfortable and we are loath to change them. These addictions and obsessions are varied and diverse, both in type and in force. I have an addiction to books: reading and marking and using them for my research has defined me as a scholar for over half a century. They give me an identity as someone who is (at least ostensibly) intelligent and wise. Right now I am in the process of getting rid of hundreds of my books as I move from my college office to an office at my house. And each book I sell or give away erodes some of the identity I have developed as a scholar who lives through his books. But I know that my addition to books is a form of demonic possession, albeit a somewhat benign form. But it is demonic because it represents a false kind of power which I’ve allowed to help define my identity: a power of mind through which I could intimidate and dominate others. This is a power which if not kept under control can lead to unhealthy and destructive relations between myself and others. It represents a lust for power that replicates the power promised by the demon in the Garden. And the lust for power takes multiple forms in us. The possession of power promises (again on the basis of lies and deception), that with enough of it we can eliminate any dependence we might have on other people, on the luck of the draw, or on changes of fortune. The accumulation of power, we come to believe, gives us all the resources we need to hold at bay the threat of financial failure, medical bills, the loss of status, and all the other forms of social power we use to dominate others. We have become a people obsessed with the desire for power. That’s why many Americans, under the false belief that we owe nothing to anyone but ourselves, have consistently treated the poor and the marginalized as not worthy of our collective support. Why people on food stamps and Head Start programs are the first to be abandoned when social programs are subjected to cost cutting. The people who receive the grudgingly bestowed benefits of our social safety net are the ones with the least amount of social power and therefore the first to be stricken from public support when charity is not enough.
This syndrome of power holding on to power is a form of demonic possession. And it perhaps explains why the villagers who witnessed Jesus’ exorcism of the demons were so afraid. Jesus’ action has implicitly threatened the way of life of the villagers whose demonic possession was not as obvious or visible as the demoniac man, but who nonetheless are as addicted to their demons as he was by his. If Jesus the healer were to remove their demons, what would they be left with? Who would they be? What kind of person is someone without worldly social power? No wonder they feared Jesus: he had the power to take away their demons but in the process he would destroy their present way of life, a life to which they had become addicted and to which they saw no alternative.
It is almost impossible to imagine a life lived without seeking to acquire more temporal power: the power of wealth, the power of force, the power of the gun, the power of sexual identity, the power of race and gender, the power of status, the power of religious identity, and, the power that symbolizes all these powers, the power of acquisition or of consumption. In our own demonic possession we have come to define ourselves by what we have acquired through the power of wealth. In fact we define the economic health of our nation by our levels of consumption, not by our levels of compassion.
And the problem is that unless there is an alternative this model of power will continue to control us. But here is where the good news of Gospel has something else to say. As the writer of Galatians reminds us, in Christ we are given a new identity: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. There is an alternative to a life lived under demonic possession. It is a life in which our identity is a gift from the only power in the universe working for good, for our health, well-being, fulfillment, and flourishing. It is a life in which there is no fear since our fears have been taken away by God’s redemptive power. It is a life freed from the deceptive and perverse seductions of the demons of humanly-created forms of power: the power of domination and control over others. It is a life lived out of and from the power of God. It is a life that might begin to look, no matter in how small a way, like the life of Jesus. Jesus’ life was completely without worldly power: he had no wealth and his only power was the power of persuasion and the power of love; a love so strong that he willingly died for all so that we all might live.
When faced with the temptation of power exercised through domination, control, and fear, we can and we must opt for a different kind of power: one that exorcises the power of evil and false identity and replaces it with the power of humility, love, compassion, and a willingness, even unto death itself, to live by the power of God and by the power of the demons who seek to control us with the false belief that we can live by demonic power alone. And when we choose to live by the divine power we can truly do as Jesus admonished the healed man to do: "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."
AMEN