A herd of considerable swine

Matthew 8:28-9:1 (§28)

[At that time, when Jesus] was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.

And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?

And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.

So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils.

And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.

And he entered into a ship, and passed over, and came into his own city.

The Gospels were not written as a work of fiction to tickle our imagination or sense of adventure, nor were they written as a chronicle of events for the sake of preserving a record. Rather, the Gospels were written as a manual for life, proclaiming the kingdom of God which is at hand and what one must do to inherit this kingdom, or sometimes what one must not do. Today’s Gospel passage is one of those cautionary tales.

Across the Gennesaret and the river Jordan from the Jewish provinces of Galilee and Judea, there was a confederation of cities known as the Decapolis which included the cities of Gadara and Gerasa. It is likely that the events described in today’s Gospel took place near one of these cities.¹ The Gerasenes, as well as the Gadarenes and the Gergesenes, were primarily Hellenistic pagans who worshipped a variety of gods and goddesses. And it is into this country that Christ came with His disciples.

We often think of Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles, but before Saul ever threw the first stone at a Christian, Christ had begun to reach His “other sheep” which were not of the Israelite fold (Jn 10:16). But what happened on that lakeshore, what the people of that country did when Christ stood at the door to their city and knocked (Rev 3:20), is all too familiar; this story is not about them, it is about us.

The Gerasenes, like the Gergesenes and the Gadarenes, were not evil or bad people; they were regular people. The Decapolis was primarily a trade confederation; the inhabitants of those cities worked, traded, raised families, and propitiated their gods, asking them for help in their endeavors - in other words, they lived average lives that could be recognized as such even by the 21st-century measure. There were likely some bad men among them, who nonetheless did good things on occasion; there were also some good men, who from time to time did bad things - very much like us.

There also lived there a man or perhaps two men possessed by devils. They lived outside of the city walls, in the tombs, which were usually made in natural and man-made caves in cliffsides. Such places were considered by the ancients to be the domain of the gods or spirits of death. When Christ and His disciples crossed the lake and came ashore, these demoniacs came out of the caves and approached the Lord.

Somewhere nearby there was also a herd of considerable swine - grazing, rooting, or whatever it is that swine do. One thing that we in our modern world no longer relate to is that in the time of Christ, animals were not raised on factory farms and their neatly-butchered portions sold in shops in plastic packaging. The ancients believed that all life, including animal life, belonged to God or gods. Humans had no right to take the life of an animal; thus, all animals were either actually or nominally sacrificed to a deity, and humans received a portion of that sacrifice as if from God’s table.

For the Jews, animals were divided into clean and unclean. This had nothing at all to do with whether an animal was dirty. Pasture-raised swine, for example, are not any more dirty than pasture-raised bovines and considerably cleaner than factory-farmed ones. Cats are among the cleanest animals, but are unclean for ritual purposes (Lev 11:27) and so are lions, which fact did not seem to prevent the Lion of Judah from being the Jewish national symbol or Christ from being referred to as the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Rev 5:5). Clean and unclean are ritual categories: clean animals are those which can be offered as a sacrifice to God; unclean ones are not offered as a sacrifice.

For the Jews, one of the most common sacrificial animals was a lamb. This is why Christ is called the Lamb of God (Jn 1:29) - not a cute and fluffy pet, but a sacrifice to be slaughtered. This is why Paul says: “We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter” (Rom 8:36). This is why when Christ was born, angels came to shepherds - to announce that the true Lamb, the ultimate sacrifice, would soon make animal sacrifices obsolete.

Unlike the Jews, Pagans offered pigs as one of the sacrifices to their gods, and a herd of pigs feeding near the towns of Gerasa and Gadara carries the same meaning as a herd of sheep grazing near the town of Bethlehem. Christ’s sacrifice is offered for all people - those who lived in Judea and Galilee and those who lived in the country of the Gerasenes.

The appearance of the demoniacs in the story often leads homiletic thought to focus on how the Pagans worshipped idols, and devils, and how unrighteous they were. Certainly a common interpretation among the Fathers of the Church and in the lives of saints is that Pagan idols are demonic. The Pagans themselves agreed with this: they used the word daemon or daimon to refer to their deities and guiding spirits, yet without assigning an exclusively-negative meaning to them. The daemons represented forces which could be hostile to humans but also beneficial and had to be propitiated with offerings and sacrifices.

In the healing of the possessed by Christ, we may see the true nature of these daemons: while they dwelt in the two men, they tormented them and all who came near. And when they knew they could no longer have power to stay, they asked to go into the animals which were theirs by right - the sacrificial pigs. The true nature of these spirits was immediately revealed as that of death and destruction. But let us not forget that the Gospel is not about them, it is about us.

Let us not think that we are not the same as those Pagans, that we have Abraham as our spiritual father (Matt 3:9), or that we are Moses’ disciples (Jn 9:28), for it were those who thought they worshipped the true God that “picked up stones to stone” Christ (Jn 10:31) and had Him crucified (Matt 27:20), and it were those who thought themselves the most observant of all rules and commandments of God that killed Christ’s disciples (Acts 7:8) and thought that they did God service (Jn 16:2). Truly, they have not known the Father, nor the Christ (3).

But what of the Pagans? - “Behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.” (Matt 8:34) They learned about what had happened; they saw the healed men and the dead swine. Their domestic world was turned upside-down. They lived in the delicate balance with their daemons - they offered the daemons sacrifices and the daemons left them to their trade and hearth. The possessed only served as a reminder of what might happen should the daemons get upset. And now they were very upset. Christ showed His power over a legion of daemons, and perhaps the Gerasenes would have forsaken their idols to become His disciples, but unlike the idols, Christ does not delight “in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats” (Isa 1:11); He asks for our heart (Prov 23:26); a true sacrifice to Him are “a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart” (Ps 51:17). This is not a comfortable and peaceful life; this is a loss of life for the sake of the One who gave up His life for us (Matt 16:25).

But the Gerasenes did not pick up stones or nails and hammers. They “besought him that he would depart.” Albeit, in a context more fitting for a council of chief priests and Pharisees (Jn 11:47-50), Dostoevsky explores the theme of the expulsion of God very powerfully in The Grand Inquisitor:

Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work? For Thou hast come but for that only, and Thou knowest it well.

'Go,' he says, 'go, and return no more... do not come again... never, never!'

Christ’s presence demands that we forsake the spirits of the world which often guide our lives and follow only the Holy Spirit of God. This is dangerous, this is a matter of life and death - eternal life and eternal death. It feels much safer to ask Him to leave us alone, to let us continue our familiar relationships with the daemons who help us in our temporal pursuits, who guide us in the affairs of this world, who do not demand that we repent of our ways, but only that we bring a small sacrifice - perhaps, a chicken, or a pig, or whatever else has taken the place of domestic animals in the modern world. Truly blessed is he who does not recognize himself in this image of the Gerasenes.

Today, Christ crosses the “great gulf” (Lk 16:26) to come to our country, to reveal the true nature of the spirits to which we sacrifice, and to offer us something far greater than trade confederations or anxieties about what to eat, what to drink, or what to put on (Matt 6:25-34). Will we pick up stones to stone Him? Will we ask Him to depart and not to trouble our cozy shire? Or will we beseech Him “that He would tarry with [us]” and invite Him to abide with us (Jn 4:40)? This is the choice that today’s Gospel reading invites us to make.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

- Revelation 3:20

1. The mention of “the country of the Gergesenes” is likely an early-third-century mistake in copying manuscripts and should probably be rendered as "the Gerasenes” - see Mk 5:1 and Lk 8:26.