Devotion - Monday, October 25

On the one hand, the story in Luke 8:26ff is easy to understand. Jesus encounters a man possessed by demons; Jesus drives the demons out of the man; the demons enter a herd of pigs; and the pigs drown themselves in the lake. Simple, right?

But there is so much to the story which I don’t understand.

First, how did Jesus’ contemporaries understand “demons”? The demons in this man have a conversation with Jesus. They have a name (Legion) and they participate in the decision as to their final fate. (They ask Jesus to send them into the herd of swine.) Modern-day Christians will occasionally speak of demon possession, but I am yet to hear of an encounter with rational, speaking demons.

Second, why do the demons ask to be given a new residence in the swine, only to drown themselves? I understand that the Jewish Christians of the first century maintained many of the Jewish food restrictions. They continued to avoid pork. The region where all this happens is on the border of the Jewish community so the destruction of the swine could been seen as instruction on what is and what is not considered acceptable among the followers of Jesus.

There is so much in this story which evades our understanding.

Some will respond to this reflection by asking, “What is there not to understand? The story tells us plainly what happened.” But the “Plain Sense” of scripture is a way of asking how the original hearers would have understood the story – not what do the words (or events) plainly reveal.

What this story said to its original hears might differ from what it says to us. The living Word of Scripture breaks forth with new life in each generation. But we should hear that new word with an understanding to what the old (first) understanding would have been. Thus, we prevent reading into the story so much of our current situation that we completely abandon what it is that Jesus intended to tell his listeners.