We learn early in school that the family is the basic unit of society. The familia, with the father as its head, goes back to the Ancient Romans. The father had absolute power over everyone in his family. Absolute meant exactly that: the father can disown, sell, even kill his children. For many fathers in Antiquity, children were property. Possessions.
For the Ancient Romans, the emperor was the father of all fathers. For the emperor, occupied peoples and nations were property. Possessions.
Jesus's exorcism reminds us, especially those among us who are fathers, that people are not property nor possessions. Especially not our children. And if we think they are, then we need an exorcism. Among fathers who badly need an exorcism are those who disown or turn their backs on their children.
We know how it starts: a child displays different, deviant, disruptive behavior: a boy who loves playing with Barbie dolls; a girl who plays with toy cars; embarrassing tantrums in public places, especially in church; unwelcomed, anti-social behavior; attempts at correcting all these based on church and society’s normative, purity, and morality laws. And then we start naming these, putting labels like “Alanganin,” “Retarded,” “Abnormal,” and, worse, “Demon-Possessed.” The labels stick. The labels are gossiped about. And they hurt.
The man from Gerasa in our text was a man from the city. Yet, when he encountered Jesus, he was homeless, living among the tombs outside of the city, bruised from self-inflicted wounds, and naked. He had been bound with chains, kept under guard, but he would break free, and flee into the desert. People were afraid of him at the beginning of the narrative. They were still afraid of him at the end of the story. I dare say the first person to fear him was his father.
When Jesus heals lepers, he tells them to show themselves to the priests because in Antiquity priests, not doctors, diagnosed leprosy. In today’s text, Jesus tells the man from Gerasa to “go home and tell them what the Lord has done for you.” In other words: “Go back home to your father who turned his back on you and tell him what the Lord has done!”
My friends, professionals who study D.I.D. or dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder as it was wrongly called in the earlier days) have studied this text as well as the Levite’s Concubine in the book of Judges to bring light on D.I.D. in conversation with anthropologists who study altered states of consciousness. There are people who love to escape by basking in the moonlight, stargazing, or, for a handful, actually going to the moon or outer space. There are people who escape to the oceans, to the unexplored mysteries beneath our feet. Then there are those who, in order to protect themselves, in order to survive, escape into the vast recesses of the mind. Let us never forget: the brain is a three-pound universe. Estimates put the number of people with D.I.D. at 1-3% of the population.
Jesus asked the man, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion. For we are many.”
There are also many daughters and sons who are grateful to God for their fathers, their grandfathers, living and those who have gone ahead. There are also many sons and daughters estranged from their fathers. And then there are sons and daughters who have D.I.D. most probably because of their fathers. They are survivors. And they are legion.
Jesus’s exorcism reminds us, especially those among us who are fathers, that people are not property nor possessions. Especially not our children. Each one is created in God’s image. Each one is a gift. Each one, our pride and joy. And each one has a name uniquely their own.
*Art, "Jesus, the Gerasene, and the Unclean Spirits" by James Tissot (1836-1902), from the Art in Christian Tradition (a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library).
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