Mark 5:11-13
What if you could do it? What if you could take all the splotches out of your life and have them thrown into a herd of pigs. Would you allow it.
We're all a mix, aren't we? Purity and putridness. Saintly and sinister. Best intentions and manipulations? Fealty and phlegm. Complimenting and cussing? Hospitality and hostility? Endearing and demeaning. Forgiving and fuming. Pretty and petty.
The problem is, we can be both at the same time. Our purity can be putrid when it comes out as self-righteousness. Your best intentions can be the basest of manipulations if those intentions are fed from the soil of a false ego.
Oil and water can be mixed together. But if you wait long enough, the oil floats to the top and you can separate them easily. But if you put chocolate syrup in milk, you can't unchocolate the milk. Once the syrup is in, it's always going to be chocolate.
We may think the same about our character and our spirit. Once you've let the smut in, you can't unsmut your character. Once you've let all the obscenity in, you can't make your spirit obscene-less. To take the smut and the obscene out of your life would kill you because it's all mixed together. You have to pour the milk out with the chocolate syrup, if you want to start over.
Maybe you've seen the TV show, Intervention, with episode after episode, each one as frightening and heartbreaking as the last. The show's subjects came from every possible social demographic, from supportive and stable families to dysfunctional, abusive ones. What Intervention does best, though, is show the person behind the addiction — a person with a sense of humor, a set of values, an identity that was getting absorbed into their addiction crisis.
Some episodes of the show were overwhelmingly tragic, some incredibly frustrating, and some make the viewer want to leap through the television, grab people by the shoulders, and shout "stop blaming your child for being the victim of your abuse."
In one episode, Allison was addicted to inhalants, sometimes using ten cans of spray duster a day to get high. The episode stands out for a few reasons: One, until this point, many of the viewers were not even aware that people abused spray dusters as an inhalant drug. And secondly, even while obviously in the throes of a very serious crisis, Allison's personality was really vibrant, even while she was sucking down spray cans and passing out in Walgreens.
But certainly, like these people on the show, Intervention, the mad man who confronted Jesus needed an intervention of some kind. The mad man was a human being, after all, was, at some time, some mother's baby, some father's child. And as a human being--an awful mixture of the vibrancy of being human and the tragic of succumbing to the smut and obscene that drives a person to madness. Can the two ever be separated?
Thinking it impossible to separate the two, people learn to live with it. You hear them say things like, “This is just the way I am.” Many addicts on the show Intervention, were heard to say: "This is just the way I am! If you don't like it, tough. That's your problem, then, for not being able to accept me the way I am." That's the problem, isn't it. We get used to it--the way we are. Nothing's going to change until the kingdom comes.
But what if it could? What if you could? What if all that falseness and madness could be separated out from you and you could be free of it? Would you do it? Would you take the chance?
I wonder about the wild man. If people just got used to him. And he just got used to himself. If you lived in the nearby town and went to the waterfront for some reason, you just expected to hear or see the wild man, running around screaming. Or if you went to the cemetery to decorate the grave of a loved one, you expected to see the wild man, either from a distance or up close. It was just a reality. The situation wasn’t going to change. The mad man wasn’t going to change. People and the man were resigned to the way it was.
But the situation did change. The man did change. By Jesus, everything changed. The man's madness--his deeply imbedded false self--was separated from the good that lay hidden, and removed. After his encounter with Jesus, the man was "...clothed and in his right mind...".
2000 pigs died that day. The story thus makes us assume there were 2000 aspects of the mad man's false self that went out into the pigs causing them to stampede and die. Imagine 2000 aspects of one man's false self. Makes you wonder, doesn't it. About yourself. How many aspects of your false self there really are. Evidently, not enough to drive you mad and live in the cemetery.
But enough for me to ask the question again, Would you allow it? Would you allow all the aspects of your false self to be cast into pigs, and watch those crazed pigs, imbedded with your false selves destroy themselves--and your false self with them? Not scapegoats, but scape pigs. Would you allow Jesus to do that for you?
The thing is, because the false selves were so many and so rooted in the crazy man's life, he probably didn't even know that he needed such an extraction, such an intervention. Notice, Jesus didn't ask the mad man's permission.
Thus, Jesus, in effecting our salvation--of performing an amazing intervention--doesn't ask our permission. Jesus has already made the evaluation that we are a sick, addicted, perverse, violent, and nearly mad people. In Jesus Christ, God doesn't wait for us to ask that there be some sort of thorough spiritual intervention. As Paul writes in Romans, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly."
In the intervention that would free us from our false self once and for all, Christ didn't round up all our loved ones and give us a choice. Christ went through with it, extracting the false self cleanly and neatly from the ways it was intermixed and tangled with the spark that had to do with God. It's already been done.
As this chapter says, "Putting on the new nature, as with putting off the old, is not something we can do" (page113). That's the amazing gift we've been given. The Lord has cast all of our falseness into the pigs and sent the whole mess over the edge. It has, once and for all, been put to death. Not because we wanted it or could do it ourselves. All we need to do is acknowledge what Christ has done for us.
But I like what the author of our book further states: "Such acknowledgment is far more than our intellectual assent to a theological fact or our cognitive affirmation of dogma. It is a radical commitment to a whole new mode of being." We aren't just saying to ourselves, "Oh boy, Jesus has taken care of my false self, and killed it. What a nice guy." Instead, our acknowledgement of that fact needs to be the first step in that "radical commitment" to Christ for what he's done. That commitment is the only thing that will keep the demons from coming back, digging in to create another false self, or false selves.
That's why I love this picture on the front of the bulletin. It's the picture of a person who has had her false self, with all it's aspects, thrown into the pigs. The pigs have all thrown themselves into the lake and drowned. And all that's left is a person, a human being, clothed and in their right mind, clinging to the cross that made it all happen. Clinging to the Christ on the Cross. Clinging with radical commitment, free of the false self, and transformed and filled with the Christ self. All you need to do is put yourself in that picture.
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