The following account has been brought to my attention three times in the last forty-eight hours, so I guess I’d better pay attention.

The Gadarene region was Greek, not Jewish, in culture. There were a lot of pigs. There was a lot of paganism. People understood power. They knew there were things out there beyond their control or ken.

Jesus and his disciples landed on these shores in their fishing boat. I am not sure why they made this decision. It’s possible that they were blown there by the recent storm and needed to touch land and regroup.

Almost as soon as they disembarked (“immediately,” Peter says, telling the tale to John Mark), they encounter the scariest sight any of them have ever seen: the town demoniac.

Peter gives us some background, which apparently was well-known to the people in area. This man “had an unclean spirit.” The local people had tried to “tame him,” but they couldn’t do it. With paranormal strength, he would break through any chains put on him. (Demons are quite reckless with the bodies of their human hosts.) He had it so bad that he couldn’t live around people. But he didn’t go far. Night and day, they could hear him screaming in the hills that surrounded the town and in the graveyard, his home base. He was apparently naked (because later, he is “clothed”), and he would cut himself with stones.

It breaks the imagination, what this man must have suffered.

The demons for some reason were attracted to the sight of Jesus stepping on their shores. The man runs up to Jesus, falls on his knees, and screams, “Why can’t you leave me alone, son of the most high God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”

Jesus, the only sane person in this story, asks a simple, human question. “What’s your name?”

He was asking the man, but the demons answer: “Legion, for we are many.” (This would later prove to be really really true.)

Jesus, unfazed, tells the demons to come out of the man. And they begin to bargain. I’m not sure why they thought this was possible. Was it because they were gods in their own country? Was it because there were so many of them? At any rate, rather than be banished from that region, the demons get Jesus to agree that they can go into a nearby herd of two thousand pigs.

There were enough of them to possess the entire herd.

The pigs, unable to handle what this poor man had been going through, panicked and “ran violently down a steep place into the sea” and drowned.

The swineherds, understandably horrified, went for help. By the time the people of the region had been summoned from their homes and fields and made their way to the beach, the formerly demon-possessed man was “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Jesus, still bringing the sanity and relief, had apparently rustled up clothing for him from somewhere. (One of His or His disciplines’ spare cloaks, perhaps, from the boat?) This man’s body no doubt still bore the scars of the harrowing life he had been leading. He was probably still fragile. Did he even remember the months or years he had lost to demon possession? We don’t know. But he was near Jesus.

The Gadarene people were freaked out. There were a bunch of dead pigs washing up on the beach. They were confronted with the disorienting sight of the madman’s face now looking sane. And, though they might not have known exactly what Jesus was, He clearly represented a dangerous power. They pleaded with Him to leave their region.

The delivered man, for obvious reasons, wanted to go with Jesus. But Jesus told him to go back and “tell your friends the great things the Lord has done for you.” Perhaps, during the time it took the swineherds to bring the townspeople, Jesus had been interviewing the man, finding out about relationships he had before disaster befell him fully. And this man was not a Jew, and would find it difficult to live on the west side of the sea. Going back to his old life might be hard, but going anywhere else would be a lot harder. He followed Jesus’ instructions.

This story would have been a very different horror story had Jesus not been present.

This story was re-told from Mark chapter 5.