Lectionary Commentaries for June 23, 2019
Second Sunday after Pentecost

At first glance, Luke’s version of Jesus’ encounter with the Gerasene demoniac simply portrays Jesus as a healer sent by God.

After casting out demons, he will go on to heal a hemorrhaging woman and a twelve-year-old girl. More subtly, however, the story reveals Jesus as one with cosmic authority, able both to calm the chaotic waters and to free people from occupying powers.

Immediately after Jesus calms the storm, prompting his awe-stricken disciples to ask, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?” they sail to the region of Gerasene, where they are confronted by a demon-possessed man. Naked, so overcome by violent impulses that he cannot be restrained even with chains and leg-shackles, excluded from the city, living among the tombs, he shows all the signs that the ancients used to diagnose possession by an unclean spirit. When he sees Jesus, he recognizes him and demands to know what there is between them. What does Jesus, the son of the most-high God, have to do with him? Then he begs Jesus not to torture him.

Is it the man talking, or is it the demons? The man himself may not know where his identity ends, and the possession begins. What is clear, however, is that Jesus will not allow the unclean spirits to keep on tormenting the man. Already, even before the man addresses him, he has commanded them to leave. Now Jesus asks the man’s name, but it is the demons who reply: “Legion,” they say, “for we are many.”

Until this point, the story sounds like a simple healing miracle. For people in the ancient Roman world, however, “Legion” had only one literal meaning: a unit of approximately six thousand Roman soldiers, the occupying army.¹ Suddenly an exorcism takes on social and political significance, and Luke’s word choices throughout the story invite a closer look. When the man confronts Jesus, Luke uses a verb that he employs elsewhere of armies meeting in battle (Luke 14:31). When the demon “seizes” the man? That’s a verb used elsewhere when Christians are arrested and brought to trial (Acts 6:12; 19:29).  The words for the hand and foot chains, for binding and guarding, are the same ones that Luke uses in Acts when the disciples are imprisoned. In short, the language of the whole episode evokes the experience of living under a brutal occupying power.

Furthermore, the region of Gerasene is the setting of a horrifying historical event. According to Josephus, during the late 60s CE, toward the end of the Jewish revolt, the Roman general Vespasian sent soldiers to retake Gerasa (Jewish War, IV,ix,1). The Romans killed a thousand young men, imprisoned their families, burned the city, and then attacked villages throughout the region. Many of those buried in Gerasene tombs had been slaughtered by Roman legions.

When the Legion occupying the demoniac encounters Jesus, it begs not to be consigned to the abyss. Rather surprisingly, Jesus permits Legion to enter into a herd of pigs instead. Jews regarded pigs as unclean, so this detail is a reminder that Jesus is in Gentile territory. It may well carry a more political meaning also. One of the emblems of Legio 10^th Fretensis — used not only on banners but on everyday objects such as coins and bricks — was a pig. The 10^th Fretensis participated in the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, took the lead in reconquering Palestine, and was stationed in Jerusalem after the war. For the people of the area, pigs would have seemed a fitting destination for Legion. Here the story takes a darkly humorous turn, for Legion, thinking that it has avoided the abyss, promptly charges into the deep and drowns.

The pigkeepers witness the whole scene and run to spread the news. When they return with people from both the city and the countryside, the liberated man is sitting calmly at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind. After hearing how he has been freed, the people do not celebrate his good news. Instead, overwhelming fear hems them in and holds them captive (the verb here is syneicho, used in Luke 19:43 of armies and in Luke 22:63 of the men guarding Jesus). Freedom is too dangerous, too costly. Though Legion has been expelled from the demoniac, the memory of Legion still controls his community. The Gerasenes beg Jesus to leave them. Jesus goes away as they have asked, but not before commanding the man to return to the city and explain what God has done for him. The man obeys, spreading far and wide the good news about the mighty work that God is doing in Jesus.

From the moment that the demoniac first confronts Jesus, the whole episode invites us to consider what Jesus has to do with the forces that occupy and control us. This way of reading neither denies the possibility of demon possession nor diminishes the miraculous healing. Instead, it challenges us to think more broadly about Jesus’ sovereignty over the powers that destroy human life. 

How many people in our world are haunted by a traumatic past and tortured by memories? How many live unsheltered and inadequately clothed because of social and economic forces that they cannot overcome, no matter how hard they struggle? How many are imprisoned, regarded as barely human, excluded, cast out? How many are enslaved by addictions no longer knowing where the addiction ends, and their own selves begin? Where do the governing authorities separate people from their families, denying them the opportunity to seek better lives? Where do occupying armies still brutalize entire communities and hold them captive to fear?

Jesus comes to challenge and cast out every power that prevents us from living fully and freely as human beings created in God’s image. Jesus claims sovereignty not just over our souls, but over our lives here on earth. Many among us resist that news, finding deliverance from Legion too frightening, too demanding, too costly. But those whom Jesus has healed and freed know that his liberating love is indeed good news, the gospel that he commands us to proclaim throughout our cities and towns. Still today God is at work in Jesus, bringing God’s kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.

Notes:

¹ See the masterful discussion of Mark’s account of the Gerasene demoniac in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man. A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2008), pp. 190–194. In my opinion, Luke’s word choices make his telling of the story even more politically resonant than Mark’s.

Isaiah 65:1-9 is the beginning of a response to the communal lament in the preceding chapter (Isaiah 64:1-12).

That lament, a combination of a call for divine speech and action with a confession of sin, offers a window into the sociological and theological worldview of Jerusalem in the time when those who had been forcibly removed by the Babylonians were returning from their exile. Questions remained about how their powerful God had let the holy city Jerusalem fall in the first place and how that same powerful deity would continue to let Jerusalem languish. “After all this, will you restrain yourself, O LORD? Will you keep silent, and punish us so severely?” (Isaiah 64:12).

In reply, Isaiah 65:1-9 presents themes of divine presence, divine speech and silence, and future promise.

Hide and seek

In response to the question in Isaiah 64:12 about whether or not God will continue in silence, we find in Isaiah 65:1-5 a description of what seems to be a game of divine hide and seek. God here is depicted as the youngster who hides almost out in the open and can hardly make it through the game, instead crying out before being properly found. God gives away the hiding spot every time, wanting only to be reunited with the seeker. Yet, in this case, no one is seeking (verses 1-2). Rather, the hoped-for seekers are off doing something else entirely (verses 2-5).

While the brief descriptions of offering incense (or particularly smoky offerings; verse 3), sitting inside tombs (verse 4), and spending the night in secret places (perhaps between rocks; verse 4) are not fully understandable, they appear to refer to cultic practices that run counter to more orthodox worship practices. Certainly, the eating of pork in verse 4 runs counter to cultic law and practice (Leviticus 11:7).

Yet, these practices evidently supply those who take part in them with enough self-assurance to claim a certain amount of holiness (verse 5). We need not know the precise historical antecedents to these actions to understand their implication: Those who now seek the LORD’s action and presence have in the past sought such action elsewhere. One might replace these ancient cultic actions with any number of more modern idols: media, hobbies, food, possessions, and anything else that seeks fulfillment or self-assurance outside of relationship with God and neighbor.

The theological theme of divine hiddenness is rich and broad. While the language here does not mirror exactly what the 16^th-century reformers meant by the hiddenness of God, it is similar in that God will be found in places where the people do not expect. In Isaiah 65, God is found not in esoteric rituals or in the inner circle of knowledge but rather in that place where God desires to be found — in this case right out in the open with arms outstretched.

Silence and speech

Although the lament in chapter 64 takes divine silence as judgment, it is God’s speech, when it comes in chapter 65 that actually judges. God will not be silent, but the word spoken will be one that revisits the people’s own iniquities upon them (Isaiah 65:6-7). Once again, the reason given has to do with unauthorized cultic practices that have been passed down to them from their ancestors. The bodily idiom of repayment “into their laps” (see Psalm 79:12; 89:51; Jeremiah 32:18) emphasizes that this the consequences for their actions will not be academic or abstract. One can almost imagine someone doubling over as their extra-curricular worship practices come back to them like a whizzing boomerang and hits them in the stomach. It is as if God, in silence, has been holding these consequences at bay but, having been begged to speak and act, now allows them to return to their source.

Promise

God’s speech takes a more merciful tone in verses 8-9, as it addresses God’s chosen servants rather than those engaging in alternate worship practices. The agricultural metaphor of clustered grapes on the vine, ready to be harvested and fermented into the blessing of wine, proclaims that the servants of the LORD are also ready for the harvest. While the metaphor of harvest and reaping can be a violent image (see also Isaiah 17:4-11), here the harvest image promises that as harvested grapes will become the blessing of wine, so shall the chosen servants live to see the blessing of descendants.

This week’s passage ends with this word of promise and blessing, though the passage itself continues to vacillate between blessing for the servants of God and reaping consequences sown by the unfaithful (verses 10-15) before ending in a full-blown promise of a new creation (verses 16-25).

This vacillation, hinted at in verses 1-9 and expanded in the rest of the chapter, infers a divided community with divided loyalties. Such a community is not difficult to imagine, mirroring as it does the reality in which many live. A preacher might choose to describe the rest of the chapter, not to so much exhort hearers to choose the right side or feel smug in their faithful actions but rather to build on the complicated nature of faithfulness in a world of many choices and the ultimate hope that in the end, through all the twists and turns of harvests and consequences, what lies at the end is a sure and certain promise of a new creation in which faithfulness is the air we breathe.

This chapter is well represented in the lectionary, and provides a stark contrast with the immediately previous one, when Elijah had his dramatic, public showdown with the prophets of Baal.

Here, we see Elijah’s internal struggle, his fears and doubts, and his private withdrawal into the wilderness. But this chapter is not only about the prophet. It is also about the God who meets Elijah and responds to him in the particulars of his situation: providing for his needs, and ultimately redirecting him.

The first verse reviews the excitement of 1 Kings 18, with Ahab’s report to Jezebel that Elijah killed all her prophets with the sword. Jezebel’s response is to send a messenger to Elijah with a death threat that she vows will be fulfilled in one day. Elijah is afraid,¹ and fleeing for his life, he goes to Beersheba. 1 Kings 19:3 reminds us that Beersheba is under Judah’s control, which means that legally, it is beyond Jezebel’s reach. Elijah does not stop there, instead going beyond, another day, into the wilderness. He is safe, geographically, in the land where Jezebel does not rule. He is also safe temporally, because Jezebel’s death threat was supposed to be fulfilled by this time. Elijah’s words and actions, however, belie any sense of relief or safety. He sits under a large desert bush (NRSV and NIV: “broom tree”) and asks to die, telling God, “It is too much; now, Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” (1 Kings 19:4).

The “ancestors” have been explained in at least two ways: one, as his dead ancestors, whom he wishes to join in death. Second, the “ancestors” are those in the prophetic vocation, specifically Moses,² who also complained in the wilderness and asked the Lord if he could die (Numbers 11:14-15).

While we can surmise from verse 8 that Elijah’s request to die is not answered, verses 5-7 contain an important divine response to Elijah: sending an angel and provisions of food, specifically a “cake baked on coals, and a jar of water” (verse 6). The Hebrew word used for coals (resapim) only appears here and in Isaiah 6:6, referring to the coal that touched Isaiah’s lips to purify him. The word used for jar (sapphat) is another uncommon one, but occurred in 1 Kings 17:12-16 to refer to the jar of oil belonging to the widow of Zarephath. Because of God’s provision, that jar miraculously remained full of food for Elijah and the widow during the drought. Thus, the provisions point to another prophet who felt unworthy, and God’s sustenance through times of lack.

The angel explains the reason why Elijah must eat, “because the way is too much for you” (1 Kings 19:7). The Hebrew points us back to Elijah’s complaint in verse 4 that it was “too much” (rab). Elijah is not released from what lies ahead, but after being provided for, he is sent on a way that is also rab for him (verse 7).

Elijah goes “in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights” (verse 8) to Mt. Horeb, where he then enters “the” cave to spend the night (verse 9). The definite article in Hebrew suggests that this was the same cave in which Moses was sheltered when the glory of the Lord passed by (Exodus 33:22). That connection is strengthened by God’s words to Elijah in verse 11, “the LORD is about to pass by.”

Before that happens, God asks Elijah what he is doing there (verse 9). Elijah eventually gets to the direct answer, that others are seeking his life (verse 10). Strangely, Elijah does not identify Jezebel, only saying that the death threats are from the Israelites. Elijah’s complaint contains other inconsistencies, such as his statement that the Israelites had slain the prophets; that, too, was done by Jezebel (1 Kings 18:4). Technically, Elijah was not the only one left; Obadiah had rescued a hundred other prophets (1 Kings 18:4, 13). And though Elijah had asked to die just verses earlier, he now seems upset at the thought of losing his life. 

Instead of systematically refuting Elijah, God announces God’s presence which ultimately comes not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the “sound of fine silence” (1 Kings 19:12), variously translated as “gentle whisper” (NIV), “sound of sheer silence” (NRSV), and “still small voice” (KJV).

When Elijah hears this sound, he wraps his face in his mantle, ostensibly to protect himself before going out of the cave to encounter God. Again, his previous desire to die seems now forgotten. God then repeats the previous question, “what are you doing here?” Elijah answers by repeating verbatim his previous complaint, suggesting that Elijah did not understand God’s theophany, God’s self-revelation. A direct encounter with God does not automatically result in a change of mind or a change of perspective.

So God redirects Elijah, commanding him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus” (1 Kings 19:15). Damascus is in the north, the opposite direction from the southerly journey Elijah has been travelling throughout this pericope. There, Elijah will anoint new leaders — Hazael and Jehu — to replace those mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. He will also anoint his own successor, Elisha, choosing him at the end of the chapter beyond this lectionary text. God will continue to work in Israel after Elijah is gone; God does not depend on Elijah. But Elijah matters to God, as is evident in all the ways throughout the chapter that God provides for and communicates with him.

Notes:

¹ Or, he “sees.” The Hebrew words are similar; “fear” is yr?, while “see” is r?h, and various manuscripts attest to each. Iain Provan explains that it can be understood as Elijah “sees how things are.” 1 and 2 Kings. New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), 144.

² Choon-Leong Seow, “1 Kings.” New Interpreters Bible Volume III (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 140.

This psalm was used to guide worship, rather than as a record of the particular faith journey of an individual in time.

Its words offered the community of faith a structure in which to express their deepest suffering to God even as they remembered God’s promises and salvation, to lament and praise in harmony.

Lament is like the blues, a tenacious articulation of reality insisting, even demanding, resolution. Laments, like the blues, can make intimate friends of strangers, awakening us to our shared experiences of humanity: vulnerability, love, loss, ecstasy, anguish, and everything in between. Like the blues, lament is a language of faith, an assertion of reality rooted in hope. Though we are lonely, we are not alone. Though we cry out to God from the depths of our true feelings, God hears us and is present with us.

In Psalm 22, the psalmist expresses bewilderment, surrounded by enemies, depicted as animals intent on pulling the psalmist limb from limb. God is nowhere to be seen, and the psalmist is sure that death is the only possible outcome.

The psalmist holds God accountable, invoking God to intervene on their behalf. As the lament turns to praise, it seems that the psalmist is naming God’s past work of deliverance not as praise but as petition, begging God to reprise God’s acts of salvation: “My God, you have always provided, so please show up now for me!”

Verses 19-21 signal a shift from petition to affirmation. Remembering God’s help ushers in a new tone, reversing the narrative from earlier in the psalm. Whereas the psalmist was mocked by those around them, now the community celebrates with the psalmist in praise of God. Now the psalmist is surrounded by a community of love, feasting together in praise of God. Now the community is fed to satisfaction physically, emotionally, and spiritually, all within a covenant of faith.

Not only has God responded to the psalmist’s suffering, but God has answered from the depths of the suffering (verse 21b). While the afflictions are still real, God is present with the afflicted in their suffering. God does not hide nor ignore those who cry out to God, but hears them and dwells among them.

The psalmist names things that God has promised and done for Israel. The psalmist praises God in suffering, which breathes new life into the psalmist’s certain death. Commentator J. Clinton McCann phrased it like this: “To praise God is to live.”¹ Nothing can separate us from God’s love for us, not even death. So rather than describing death as that which surrounds the living, the psalmist’s praise rooted in suffering offers the opposite: life constantly surrounds death. God’s power transcends boundaries (scientific, political, economic, racial, gender), restores what is broken, and breathes life into death.

In the practicing faith community, this praise turns into a celebratory meal, drawing all to a common table where God provides abundantly for everyone. The psalmist’s suffering has revealed a source of life for all who suffer. The psalmist becomes a witness of God’s salvation in ways that have strengthened the community and ushered in a new reality of love. You could say that the psalmist’s kenotic lamentation-turned-to-praise signals a reorientation of the world toward God.

Because Jesus evoked this psalm from the cross — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — this psalm is typically associated with the climax of Jesus’ ministry. Since the psalm was written for liturgical use, designed to help a community pray through suffering, we can see why Jesus turned to it in the midst of his suffering. For those who believe, this prayer deepens our intimacy with God, pointing not to an empirical change in the world but to an experiential change, where prayers of affliction and prayers of praise, as well as suffering and celebration, are part of a continual arc of faith, and cannot be understood without the other.

Faith is not an escape or a cure, but rather a witness to a new world where love and life, rather than suffering and death, have ultimate power.

How are you suffering? How is your community suffering? What snares entrap your feet? To what promises do you cling when you are suffering? How does your preaching encourage your congregation to understand suffering and celebration as twin strivings of faith? How does lament deepen intimacy with God, and within a congregation?

Notes:

¹ J. Clinton McCann, “Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible Commentary, Vol. 4, ed. by Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996), 764.

References:

Brueggemann, Walter, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).

Cotter, Jim, Psalms for a Pilgrim People (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1998).

deClaissé-Walford, Nancy, Introduction to the Psalms: A Song from Ancient Israel (St. Louis, Chalice Press, 2004).

Mays, James L., Preaching and Teaching the Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

Mays, James L., Psalms: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994).

McCann, J. Clinton, “Psalms,” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol 4, ed by Leander E. Keck, et al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

Reid, Stephen Breck, Listening In: A Multicultural Reading of the Psalms (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997).

When I was beginning graduate biblical studies in the early nineties, this passage from Galatians was a lynchpin in my growing respect for the theology of Paul.

If this baptismal formula were at the core of his values, then he and I could agree about the most important things, and I could be patient in trying to unravel his more difficult counsels. Since that time, there has come to be a more nuanced understanding of “no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female.” Feminists, African American scholars, and scholars focused on Paul’s Jewishness, and have all contributed to a richer grasp of this familiar and much-quoted passage.

Paul’s apostolic project

Paul did not have a grand plan for social justice. He was not interested in trying to reform Roman laws, institutions, or culture with respect to slave-holding, gender roles, or religious observance. Rather, Paul was focused on creating communities that were outposts of life “in Christ,” assemblies of people relating to one another in a way that was in accord with Christ’s anticipated full entry: the Parousia (1 Corinthians 15:23, 1 Thessalonians 2:19, 3:13, 4:15, 5:23), the Day of the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:8, 5:5; 2 Corinthians 1:14; 1 Thessalonians 5:2), or the Day of Christ (Philippians 1:10, 2:16).

Paul’s apostolic mission was thus to prepare the people in his assemblies (ekklesiai) to relate to one another as though they were in the very presence of God, as indeed he understood them to be when they gathered in Christ’s name. The reconciliation brought about by the cross of Christ invalidated conventional social distinctions within the churches: the distinction of God’s regard for Jews as opposed to Gentiles; the distinction in agency and social standing among slaves, freed, or free people; the distinctions in agency and roles of men and women.

One of the pertinent issues for preachers today is how to express the moral urgency of this reordering of human relationships without the intensity of Paul’s expectations of the imminent Day of the Lord.

Before faith came

Paul uses a variety to metaphors to explain the “new thing” God is doing with Jews and Gentiles. In the present passage, he uses the metaphor of the household moral tutor to describe the role of the Torah in guarding and guiding people in the ways of God’s justice until the time of the Messiah’s coming, when God made a way for all the peoples of the earth (signified here by “Jews” and “Greeks”) to be in right relationship with God.

No longer Jew or Greek

Looking beyond the passage at hand, it becomes clear that Paul did not teach the complete elimination of distinctions between Jews and Greeks. For example, Romans is punctuated with repetition of the phrase, “to the Jew first and also the Greek.” Torah and Temple remained a path of life and salvation for Jews. But God had chosen to make of the cross a means of reconciliation and life together (including meals) for Jews and Greeks on an equal footing before God. We might say that Paul’s insight is concisely contained in the phrase “no longer Jew or Greek.” Instead, his assemblies were made up of Jew and Greek, a distinctive sign of the new and reconciled life poured out through the cross.

No longer slave or free

Even when reading Philemon in the most positive way, as a plea for Philemon to receive Onesimus back “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philemon 16); and reading 1 Corinthians 7:21 as encouragement for slaves to use their possible freed status to the utmost advantage; one must nonetheless acknowledge Paul’s lack of critique of the institution of slavery itself as contrary to God’s will.

The extent of his vision of the effect of the power of the cross was in abolishing the distinctions between slaves, freed people, and free people before God — and thus the abolishing of these distinctions in Christian community with regard to charisms, leadership, and mutual respect.

The question before the preacher, then, is how the Spirit is continuing to push the life-giving and reconciling effects of the cross into the world that God is saving. What are the consequences of the equality of all people before God, not only in churches but in the world that is the proper object of the good news of salvation?

No longer male and female

Here Paul changes the connection between the pairs of terms. From Jew or Greek, slave or free, he moves to “no longer male and female.” Curiously, in Pauline epistles women seem to disappear almost entirely as women, as they are addressed consistently among the “brothers.”

When women do surface for particular comment in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, Paul makes a remarkably weak argument attempting to curtail their spiritual practice, relying on the dictates of “nature” regarding hairstyles.

On the other hand, the epistles witness to the many women who had roles of the highest importance as, among other things:

• house church leaders (Chloe)
• bearers and interpreters of letters (Phoebe)
• prophets and leaders of prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5).

Here in Galatians, Paul appears to be critiquing the socially constructed binary of male/female within the churches. As a woman, I wonder whether it felt freeing to be considered as a “brother,” a co-heir of Christ, in early Christian communities. Given the status of adult women as essentially minors under the law, would I have welcomed the agency and full respect that came with being counted among the adult brothers?

Clothed with Christ

Galatians 3:27 is the dynamic heart of the passage, and perhaps the surest foundation for a strong moral interpretation.

As we have seen, from the point of view of a twenty-first century democracy, Paul’s radical reordering of human relationships before God does not now seem nearly radical enough. To understand ourselves as clothed with Christ, who risked himself entirely for God’s purposes, is to apprehend our full responsibility as adult heirs of God, people with both the grace and the responsibility to discern the implications of Paul’s vision in ever-widening circles, preparing the world for the fullness of God’s presence. Since the day of the cross, the power of God has been on the move:

• to call people into dynamic relationship with God;
• to invite us into communities of well-being beyond constricting gender norms;
• and to effect freedom, full agency, and respect for all people.

Resources:

Blount, Brian K., General Editor. True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary. Minneapolis, Fortress, 2007.

Nanos, Mark D. Reading Paul Within Judaism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017.

Polaski, Susan Hack. A Feminist Introduction to Paul. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2005.