This past year we've just been in gospel passages on Sunday morning, and we've done a lot of stuff. We've talked about a lot of things. We've read a lot of things. We've seen a lot of things.
And we decided we wanted to do this, not just to see the truth of who Jesus is, but to see the truth of who Jesus is asking us to be. And last week I talked about how if we're really curious to watch how Jesus behaves sometimes in conflict, especially the people he might be in conflict with, and we can learn even more about him, and we've talked about conflict some these last several months. And typically it's between Jesus and the religious leaders of the Pharisees, and we talk about them, and most of the time they're kind of the bad guys in our story. We can be honest with you, but this watching this tension point that Jesus gets into them.
But most of the time their tension is over these people saying that Jesus is not being religious enough, that Jesus is not being holy enough, that his righteousness is false. And I realized a couple of weeks ago as much as we kind of dog on these guys, I mean they are the antagonists of the gospel most of the time. But we also have to be able to talk about the fact that Jesus is not just dogging though on righteousness, as he's in this conversation with them, as he's having this issues. But Jesus deeply cares about our holiness.
Jesus deeply cares about our righteousness. Last week we pulled out a couple of passages from the sermon on the Mount. And I described this as Jesus' ethical tone that he gave us. That Jesus cares about us and how we act and how we interact.
He says this in Matthew 5, 17 through 20, do not think that I've come to abolish the law of the prophets. I've not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.
But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, these people, Jesus is always in conflict. Like this, that you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. So you see, Jesus, he doesn't not care about these things.
But what's going on is there's an application that is broken there. Just to practice, it's the values of these religious leaders and the values of the kingdom that are out of sync with one another. So where do we start? How do we actually talk about righteousness in a way that Jesus wants us to think about righteousness?
I love the crazy stories in Scripture. I love the wild stories. So the thing I've missed the most this year is that the gospels tend to not be the crazy stories. I really enjoy a lot.
But there's one really crazy story. It might be the craziest story that we read in the gospels. And this morning we're going to talk about it. And so Jesus interacts with a man who's possessed by a demon.
This is not a new story for us at Foundry. Alan Johnson, I told him, I'm going to talk about you this morning. Now he's sitting on the front right there. Alan Johnson is the pastor of the Wesley Foundation on campus, the campus ministry, and I met this church.
A few years ago, Alan actually preached this passage. And it was one of the best sermons I've ever heard in my entire life. I listened to it again yesterday. And if you go to our sermon preview at the website or if you go to the message notes on my Foundry.life, I've actually linked back to Alan's message on this story.
We're going to dig back into it again. But before we get into it, I want to let you know that to think about this while I'm reading these words, that can we handle holiness? Can we handle it? This will be Gospel of Mark 5 verse 1 through 20.
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country, to the jarassanese. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately they met him a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit. He lived among the tombs and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he'd often been bound with shackles and chains, but he rinsed the chains apart and he broke the shackles in pieces.
No one had to strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was crying out and cutting himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him and crying with a loud voice. He said, What have you done with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?
I adjure you by God, do not torment me. For you saying to him, come out of the man, you unclean spirit. And Jesus asked him, What is your name? He replied, My name is Legion, for we are many.
And he begged him earnestly not to send to them out of the country. And now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside and they begged him saying, Send us to the pigs, let us enter them. So he gave them permission. The unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs and I heard numbering around 2000 to rush down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea.
And the herdsmen fled and told it in the city and the country and the people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus and saw the demon possessed man, the one who had had the Legion sitting there, clothed and in his right mind and they were afraid. And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon possessed man to the pigs. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region.
As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. And he did not permit him but said to him, Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you. How he has had mercy on you. And he went away and began to proclaim to the Capitalists that is a region of cities.
How much Jesus had done for him and every one marveled. So can we handle holiness? Now when you read the story and I was reading a few weeks ago getting ready and I was surprised at first because I'm used to the story. I've heard the story.
This is another, like one of the stories we hear is kids. I read it in the first translation, my normal practice when I get ready for messages. The very first thing I do is I read the passage several times in three or four different translations and I realized the one that I normally used was the only one that said evil. All the rest of them said unclean and whenever it's a difference, I start getting curious and started looking at this and not always assumed in the gospels.
You're pretty sure to assume something. That Jesus talked about these demonic presences as evil, as malevolent, as bad. I mean all the things that you would typically think about if someone was possessed by a spirit. But no, all throughout the gospels what it describes it as is unclean.
And this isn't a word that we would typically think about as far as the whole, it's not in the realm of evil. It doesn't talk about evil. It's a word about worship. It's a word about being in the presence of God.
And then unclean things, we know from the Old Testament that unclean things cannot be in the proximity of the presence of God, like the items in the temple and all the kiddies, candlesticks and these altars and these sorts of things. I guess using the exact same idea talking about this man that's possessed by the spirit, an unclean spirit. In fact, the whole story is wrapped up in the idea of being unclean. Jesus is on the sea right before this.
Him and the disciples have a scenario where they're scared of the ocean, the sink of the ship and Jesus calms the storm. And they show up on this shore of this region called the girass and he's just part of the capitalist. A series of cities that are not Roman but they're not Jewish or Gentile, they somehow managed to keep an amount of independence, but they're populated by Gentiles and good Jewish people don't mess with Gentiles because Gentiles are unclean. In fact, we don't even have the disciples ever even get out of the boat in this story.
It doesn't talk about them. They might have been like, I'm not, that's bad stuff happens here. I'm not getting out. The next thing we find out is there's this man, this possessed man possessed by an unclean spirit.
In the gospel of Mark, there's 13 healing stories and four of them are Jesus interacting with unclean spirits. Almost 20% of the healings of Jesus in the gospel of Mark are dealing with unclean spirits. The next thing we find out is that this means a living in tombs and a good Jewish person doesn't mess with dead things. Like living tombs is a no-no.
Like you don't do that. That's bad. That keeps you from the presence of God. That makes you unclean.
And last, there's this proximity. There's this story, the whole pig thing. Is that kind of weird to anybody else? Okay.
Well, in an Old Testament, there's a series of animals that are considered to be unclean and pigs are one of them. And for a long time, no, it's kind of like, yeah, we don't eat like vultures. I don't eat vultures. I don't eat anything.
We don't eat a vulture. We don't eat turtles. I'll eat a turtle. I mean, all these things we don't eat in pigs are just kind of part of that classification of things you don't eat.
But a couple of hundred years before this, a Greek conqueror had come and it seems any ochius of the fourth and that he conquered Jerusalem. And when he conquered Jerusalem, he did a couple of things that changed the pig game for Jewish people. The first thing he did was he sacrificed a pig on the altar. So he sacrificed an unclean animal on the altar of God to desecrate it.
And then he made all the priests and the Levites who were serving in the temple, he made them eat said pig. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have pulled forth at some point in time this week. That's not a big thing to us. But for a Jewish person, you don't eat pigs.
And then especially you don't eat an unclean animal that would sacrifice to another God to desecrate our all. I mean, because of little ears and this is church on Sunday, I can't really come up with an analogy of what this would be like in our culture. It's so despicable. There's just not a safe Sunday morning way to talk about this.
But ever since that point in time, pigs had been like the picture of evil to a Jewish person. Like this is we stay away from this. This whole story is covered with unclean things. But unclean things cannot be in the proximity of God.
And it explains the demons reaction. I mean, the man ran up to Jesus and the demon, they're back and forth they had. We'll talk about that in a moment. But it explains a little bit of this man's reaction because this demon is dealing with Jesus in a very interesting way.
So don't send us out of here. Don't make us go away. So many times when we think about what's unclean, when we think about sin, we think about it with the idea that Jesus wants to get rid of us. Let's be honest ourselves, right?
Like we think that our bad behavior means that God wants to get rid of us. But what we find in this story is the things that are unclean can't handle being close to the presence of God. This painful to these unclean spirits. This whole casting out is not Jesus getting rid of.
But then saying, if you're going to be here, we can't be here, but you're more powerful than us. And so we need you to give us permission to leave and for us to go away from your presence. It's a very different way than we think about sin normally, isn't it? The distance that we sometimes find from God.
What if that's not the way we behave and think that God wants to get rid of us? What if it's instead these things that we're not willing to cut loose since we're still tying them to ourselves? That means that we then have to leave the presence of God. And what's unclean is directly related to what's outside the realm of God.
It's our willingness to hold on to sin that might send us away from the holiness of God, from us being holy. And you've got this man and it's like a triangle conversation. I tried to diagram it, but I couldn't. I didn't have the time to of the man talking, the evil spirits talking, and Jesus talking.
But all throughout it, what we see is power being given to Jesus. That power is absolutely there. It makes us think back to when James said, you believe in God, well, good. So did the demons, but they shudder.
Like we see this power struggle across scripture being worked out in this short conversation between Jesus and the demons in this man. But what we also find is that the function of this unclean spirit is to destroy the image of God in this man. He's tormenting him. That he is breaking down every single thing that makes him to be human.
And what's so interesting is if we think about this in like first century eyes between the tombs, between the nakedness, and between the cutting on stones and the chains, like this man is essentially presented to us as an animal. That he has lost the distinction that God gave humanity above all other creation. That's what Jesus restores to him. We see holiness is ultimately about Jesus making us adequate, where we have previously been inadequate.
He does those things by restoring us and by setting us free from the things that were keeping us captive. So can we handle holiness? Our own can. We need Jesus to come through that with us.
So what do we do when we've been confronted with our own lack of ability to be in the presence of God? How do we handle that? Well, in the story we see two different ways. We see these townspeople and we see this healed man himself.
These townspeople, we see his begging Jesus to leave because they can't handle him. Or an example, we can't handle the stuff that happens when you're around. Verse 17 to ask Jesus to leave. They beg Jesus to leave.
Think about that. What does it mean to ask Jesus to leave? Why would you want to ask Jesus to leave? What scenario could present itself where you would want him to not be there?
We've done a couple. The other one, this verse is economic. The capitalist was managed to keep their free state where they were surrounded by the Roman Empire on all sides. They managed to somehow keep their freedom by agreeing to supply the Roman army with the things that it needs.
And so most likely, all these pigs that Jesus just killed and got rid of were part of that economic industry. Hey, we're going to sell and provide this meat to the Roman army as they are here. And so all of our resources just tumble down a cliff because of you. You're messing with what I got, Jesus, and you need to go.
I'm kind of scared of you. I don't want to get an argument or fight with you, but you're messing with my stuff, you need to go. But the second thing is more is that they lost their scapegoat. And what's interesting is this Bible story is talked about more by secular Roman philosophers than any other Bible story.
It's kind of weird, huh? But I mean, even now to this day, like sociologists who study what's called scapegoat theory will point back to this Bible story as an ancient form of scapegoat theory, meaning that as long as there's somebody that's worse than me, I feel safe because I can blame them. So we've got this crazy naked guy running around in caves, and he cuts himself. I'm not nearly as bad as he is.
As long as that guy's out there, we're safe in here. As long as he's doing his weird thing, I'm all right. As long as he's out there doing crazy stuff, my crazy stuff might not seem so crazy. And now he's gone.
So I can't blame him anymore. They actually probably believed because of the malevolent entity, the unclean spirit, the evil spirit, however you want to call it, they probably actually believed that he could collect those as well. That as long as he was out there, that the demons would not bother them. They would just go straight.
That might have been why they felt that it was all right for him to have multiple ones of them. That he somehow does their own non-Jesus way of believing how the world worked. So he's gone to the out crazy stuff can happen to us. Bad things can happen.
That's evil stuff can come into us, but I don't have him to blame anymore. I'm going to have to look at myself and the things that I'm doing. He's been chained up outside the walls, but he's not there anymore. And I've got things I've been secretly trying to chain up in my own life.
And the problem is they keep breaking for those chains anyway. And now maybe because this guy's gone, the people are going to start looking at me now. I don't want to be the next weird crazy naked guy running around the caves. So Jesus mess with their stuff.
He was messing with their stuff a little bit too much. And this is the perfect example of our inability to control and to contain what can only be healed supernaturally in our lives. These things that we have that we will not be able to fix on our own. They can only be fixed by Jesus.
We need Jesus to come and to break us loose. And holiness doesn't happen without humility. And healing doesn't happen without humility. The only problem with healing is if it doesn't frighten us a little bit while it's going on, it's probably not going to heal us.
Healing is good. Healing is necessary, but healing is also a little bit messy sometimes. Can we handle holiness? But we also see is that Jesus interaction with this man who's been healed, has been made holy, has been made clean again.
And he's sent to testify. He's sent to tell the story of God's redemption in his own life. When I was in college, a friend of mine, I'm now related to him by marriage. His wife and married at their first cousins.
But I was about six months after a pretty rocky time. And I thought I'd gotten everything under control, everything handled. And I was kind of starting to stick my toe back in a little bit. And he called me one day.
He's like, man, are you okay? I said, you know what happened last time? I was like, no, no, no, I got this under control. I got this figure out of it.
And he said, okay, so you might be all right. I was trying to justify my actions. And you know, typically whenever we try to justify our actions, we know we shouldn't be doing it anyway. But he said something to me.
I've talked about him multiple. I actually texted him yesterday. I said, I'm talking about it again tomorrow. And he's like, I really can't even remember saying that.
It kind of, it was a cast off remark from him that stuck to me for the last 20 years. But it was this. He said, okay, he said, does it make you any more holy? And I was, you're right.
And that phrase has stuck with me for decades now. And what's so funny is every few years, it comes back again. And it comes back again, just to remind me, hey, let's go the next step now. Let's go the next step now.
Let's go the next step now. And what's so funny is when we begin opening ourselves up to the holiness of God, typically those first couple rounds are going to be the typical things that we know God wants to fix. Like they're going to be bad behaviors. But if we stick with it, it continues to grow deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
Because we need to get used to a constant state of Jesus cleansing us and restoring us. Not because we've backslidden, there's a whole country church phrase right there. Not because we've backslidden, but because we want more Jesus. For in so many times in our Christian lives, I think that we get frustrated because we get stuck in the first step and we stay in that first step for our entire lives.
We stay stuck in that first step. I'm not really loved. I'm not really that good enough. I'm going to be a horrible person.
Because we've never opened ourselves up to the holiness and the healing of God. And what God wants for us is to quickly move past that and instead grow in Christian maturity and allow him to go to these depths of who we are. Tells us, man, you can't come with me. You've got stuff to do.
Go and tell your friends and your family how God has been merciful to you. And to be merciful to someone is to be concerned with their needs. God was concerned with his needs. Think about that.
God's concerned with your needs, with our needs, with my needs. The God of the universe cares about me as an individual. Sometimes that's that step we take. We understand Jesus died to save us all, but it's a struggle to understand that Jesus died to save me and to let him come into our own personal junk.
To be in taking care of that. This man was sitting there clothed in his right mind, sitting down, being normal. And everybody got freaked out because whole people terrify unwhole people. Because whole people live under a different set of circumstances.
They care about different things and they don't care about other things. Whole people disarm because they show us what life can be like when we refuse to let life rule us and contain us. When we refuse to have anxiety bound by the circumstances of life. When we say these things just don't apply, they really don't matter that much.
It's about being being made whole, being able, being vulnerable. Allowing Jesus to teach you of what really matters. It's also about what Paul said that we find our strengths and how he cares for our weaknesses. That he makes our weaknesses strong.
I know what I'm bad at. Is anybody ever got exasperated because they fall into a season of life where they realize that they're going to have to focus on what they're not good at? How stressful that can be. Jesus says in your weaknesses, I'm made strong.
Let me come in and make you whole. Then we can handle holiness when we tell Jesus, hey, I need you to keep messing with my stuff. I don't need to mess with it once. I need you to keep messing with my stuff because my messing with my stuff doesn't fix my stuff.
This man, it might have been the only moment of lucidity that he had for ages saw Jesus. And for a brief moment was able to contain those things that were warring within him and to rush to Jesus. All we need to worry about is having enough clarity in our life to say, I need you to take care of these things and I'm willing to give them to you. And then just take along for the ride.
We can handle his holiness because he wants to make us holy. Let's pray. Father, God, each of us have different reasons and different ways that we are rushing to you. God, we all have a different junk going on.
And if we're looking for our life that's never full of junk again, we're going to be sadly disappointed. But we live a life that's promised by you, of one with you being involved, of one with you healing us and restoring us. God, to every one of us, we have our own version of running around naked in caves. But God, for every one of us, you have a vision of us sitting in our right mind and clothed at your feet with the call of then being sent to those who know us best to speak of your mercy, to speak of your personal involvement and your care and your concern in our life.
So God, let us just simply offer ourselves to you this morning in the way that we need to. It's your enemy pray. Amen.