Sung Eucharist and Matins, The Priory Church, 23rd June 2019
Isaiah 65.1-9
Galatians 3.23-29
Luke 8.26-39
The sun is shining and as you walk by the school playground, you hear the sound of laughter and the shrieks of excitement as the children enjoy the last few minutes of break time.
What you may not notice is the one child set apart from the rest. He’s in the corner, crouched down, distractedly drawing in the dirt with his fingers.
A group of children walk over to him. The boy gets to his feet, shoulders hunched over, head bowed down because he knows what’s about to happen. Three or four of the children from the group move closer, forcing him to back into the corner. When he can go no further, one of the group moves to hit him. A couple of the others do likewise. The boy flinches. But rather than hit him, the group of children start to taunt him. They know what names to call him. The ones that cut deep.
As much as he doesn’t want to, he starts to cry silently. They stare at him with satisfied disgust. And then, as quickly as it started, it’s over. The school bell rings and the children turn and run back to the centre of the playground, squealing with laughter as they go. And the boy? He crouches back down, and once again in the dirt draws his wild patterns of confusion and pain.
PAUSE.
This ritual is one that we see played out at all levels of society. The group selects, albeit unconsciously, one person whom they then make an outcast. And by doing so, according to the French anthropologist and theologian, Réné Girard, they create and sustain the unity within their group. ‘What unites us is that we’re not like him… We’re not like her.’ Rather than fight amongst themselves, they keep a lid on that destructive energy, which is so powerful that it would otherwise tear the group apart, and channel it instead onto that other person, the outsider, the scapegoat.
Once you notice it, you see this pattern happening everywhere. Sometimes in sophisticated subtle ways, be it in the family, at work, or in church. Sometimes in brutal ways, in the school playground, for example. And in our day, we see it especially happening online with social media. But also it can occur at the level of nations, the same dynamic, with the most horrific of consequences. Think of Nazi Germany and the Jews.
PAUSE.
In the gospel reading this morning, did you notice the reaction of the people from the city and country of the Gerasenes, which remember is gentile country, when they saw that Jesus had healed the man who had been possessed? ‘Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the right hand of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.’
Why? Why were they afraid. After all, if someone we all knew, who’d been exhibiting acute pyschopathological symptoms, was suddenly cured, would you not rejoice? However shocked you were by what had suddenly happened, you’d probably nonetheless say, this is fantastic news! At least, I guess that’s how we’d like to think we’d react.
But no. Their reaction is one of fear. Not only that. Such is their fear, they ask Jesus to leave. Rather than bring their sick and infirm to be healed by him, they ask him to go away.
This reaction is very striking and worth exploring. I reckon they’re fearful for two reasons, which are both to do with scapegoating, that patten of behaviour I was talking about a moment ago. For them, the possessed man was functioning as the scapegoat. He’s crazy—by contrast, we’re not. We’ll tie him up with chains, he’ll break free. We’ll do it again, he’ll break free again. We’re doing it for his own good, we say, as we force him to the ground and bind him as tightly as we can—or pay others to do it for us. But sure enough, the ritual continues and the next day he breaks free. In Mark’s account, the possessed man even takes to stoning himself—remember that stoning was the way the community would kill the person they’d chosen as the scapegoat to thereby purge itself of whatever evil they thought was besetting the community and in the process give vent to this communal violence that lives just under the surface, focussing it on the one outsider rather than let it tear the society apart.
But now that Jesus has healed this man, we don’t have a scapegoat. And you know that one is always going to be found. It could be you next! Now, that’s something to be fearful of.
But the other reason for being fearful is that if we let Jesus stick around, he’s just going to keep healing all these people who we’d pick on and use as our scapegoats. All those weirdos and outsiders, the oddballs, the misfits, those people who are just different from us in some way, all those people we’ve decided just don’t fit in, he’s going to make them part of the society again, healing them, reincorporating them back into the community. But then, if that happens, the way our society functions is going to be turned completely upside down. It’s hard to put into words, because this isn’t something that we think about consciously, but at some deep level we know we need these outsiders. Without them, we aren’t a we anymore. Without them, we’ll tear ourselves apart. We’ll destroy ourselves just like that squealing herd of pigs that rushed down the slope into the sea and drowned. No, we can’t let that happen. Go. Leave us.
And so Jesus gets back into his boat and departs.
But not before we have this final, quite extraordinary moment. The man who has been healed wants to follow Jesus. Wouldn’t you? Your life has been one of utter pain and confusion and now, this man has healed you. You don’t want to stay where you’ve suffered, you want to go and follow the one who brought you peace in your heart, soul and mind. And it’s what you’d expect to happen. On numerous occasions, Jesus says, ‘Follow me.’ But on this occasion, he doesn’t. Instead, he says, ‘Return to your home, and declare what God has done for you.’ Think about it. How hard that is. To go back and live with the people who excluded you, who marginalised you, who bound you up and left you for dead among the tombs. You’re now to live with them, see them everyday, look them in the eye and tell them what God has done for you, implicitly reminding them at the same time of all that they did to you. And so he does, the one who has been healed returns home, proclaiming throughout the city from which he was once banished how much Jesus has done for him.
PAUSE
The twist in the tale, of course, is that the one that came to announce and embody the kingdom of God, where everything gets turned upside down, who healed the Gerasenes demoniac, and countless others, both in Galilee and beyond, Our Lord Jesus, in his execution on the cross, he was the ultimate scapegoat. In Jesus God chose to become our scapegoat onto whom all the evil and violence of the powers and principalities of this world was poured out. In so doing, he both exposed this system of scapegoating and brought it to its fulfilment. And in his resurrection, Jesus rendered it void. Having sent him away, definitively, or so we thought, after his death, Jesus returns to us, risen, with his nail-punctured hands outstretched in love.
Our challenge as Christians is to live in the light of this and not to revert to using scapegoats in order to unify us. Church is meant to be the place where we learn how to do this. For at the heart of our community is the one who was the cosmic scapegoat, who has brought the whole system of scapegoating to an end.
And if hearing that, you have a sense of how deep-rooted in us this tendency to scapegoat is, for it starts at the earliest of ages—from the playground onwards, then you can maybe understand the fearful reaction of those who told Jesus to go away. But we’re not called to be like them. Our calling is to be like the man who has been healed. We are to return and tell those with whom we live, how much God has done for us. For in Jesus is our identity and our unity.
Amen.