Do you have any vested interests that would be disturbed if Jesus was working powerfully in and around your life?
It is no doubt bad enough to be a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type of person, alternating between two different states of personality. It is much worse to be the victim of a whole series of simultaneous conflicting impulses and demonic powers, as was the case with this man who knew himself to be inhabited by a whole legion of demons. He suffered from what today would be called a particularly severe manic-depressive psychosis which rendered him incapable of living a normal life in human society; we get a grim glimpse of the only cure that the ancient world knew for such poor sufferers—restraint and confinement. Once again, however, the illness was not purely physical, for the man possessed the uncanny knowledge of the demon-possessed as to who Jesus was.
Three points of difficulty arise in the story:
Where did it happen? The manuscripts give different possibilities. Gerasa was some thirty miles south-east of the lake; its “country” must have stretched to the lake side. Gadara (Matthew 8:28) was six miles from the lake. Gergesa (RSV mg.) is modern Khersa on the lakeside, and the cure took place near here.
The aftermath of the cure. Many people have found it difficult to credit the story of the demons passing from the man into the swine. So far as the moral difficulty of the destruction of the swine is concerned, it is sufficient to say that one man is of much greatcr value than many swine. Attempts to give a rational explanation of what happened are all conjectural. The vital point is the effects of the cure on the local people. They showed themselves to be much more interested in their swine than in the cure. When every allowance is made for their loss of livelihood, can their attitude be justified? Note that the old argument that, as Jews, they shouldn’t have been keeping swine, is dubious; the people concerned were possibly Gentiles.
Why was the man not told to keep silent about his cure? Was it because it was Gentile territory? Or because Jesus himself did not intend to work in that area himself?
