Jesus

by James Martin

  Then “early in the morning” (or in the Greek at the “fourth watch of the night,” between three and six in the morning), according to Mark, “he came towards them . . . walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by.” The disciples are terrified and cry out in fear; they think they are seeing a ghost.

  The one standing upon the waves greets them. “Take heart (Tharseite, Courage!), it is I,” Jesus says simply, which may be a gently human way of reassuring them. Or it may be an echo of God’s divine declaration to Moses in the Book of Exodus, “I am who I am.”15

  “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus, who boards the boat. The wind ceases. To describe the overwhelming emotions of the disciples Mark writes, lian ek perissou en heautois existanto, literally, “very much exceedingly in themselves standing outside.” That is, utterly beside themselves. Although they have just witnessed the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, they still do not understand who he is. Their hearts, says Mark, are “hardened.”

  Matthew’s addition to the story is well known even to those who aren’t familiar with the New Testament. Peter answers Jesus with a challenge: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

  Why does Peter, who often serves in Matthew as a mouthpiece for the disciples, request this? Is he looking for proof that the one speaking in the teeth of the gale is truly Jesus? Does Peter want to arrogate to himself God’s prerogative, power over nature? Or is he simply curious to see if he can do what Jesus is doing? What fisherman wouldn’t want command over the waters?

  In response Jesus says, “Come.”

  Peter begins to walk on the water, but then notices the strong wind. Distracted by danger, Peter fears, begins to sink, and cries out, “Lord, save me!” much as the disciples did during the storm. Taking his eye off Jesus means that he can do nothing on his own. Jesus stretches out his hand, takes hold of Peter, and says, perhaps bemused, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Jesus brings Peter back into the boat, where all prostrate themselves and pronounce him the Son of God. In Matthew the disciples are more able to apprehend Jesus’s identity. Once again, the disciples may have recalled the psalms that speak of God’s saving those in danger of drowning.

  In both Matthew and Mark, Jesus manifests his awesome power over the sea. In both instances the disciples are terrified. In both Jesus warns them against fear. But besides counseling against fear, Jesus offers another blessing desperately needed today: calm.

  Let’s consider this in light of the frenzied state of our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual lives today. The more I listen to people, the more I hear them speak about their lives using the same words: overworked, overbooked, overwhelmed, stressed-out, crazy-busy, nuts, insane. “I have no time for my family.” “I have no time to pray.” “I barely have time to think.” Now this does not describe everyone’s life: the unemployed, the underemployed, the sick, those in the last stages of life. But our culture has impressed upon us the equation that the busier you are, the more important you are.

  Some of this pressure may be the result of an economy in which more hours are demanded from employees. Some of it can be traced to increasing pressures from advances in technology. Newer forms of communication mean that it is easy for us to be always connected. You’re never far from work or from anyone intent on contacting you. But some of our busyness is the inevitable outcome of a world where overactivity is praised. And if everyone else is busy, who are we to opt out?

  Yet it may also mask a subtle form of pride. Being busy is often an indication of generosity; some people pour themselves out for others in a selfless way. But sometimes busyness is the way we prove (consciously or not) to ourselves that we are important. This tendency on an individual level is then multiplied out in the community, leading to a society in which extreme busyness is a badge of importance. It may also mask an inability to be still. What would it mean if we weren’t running around like demoniacs? What would happen if we weren’t overbooked? What would we do with ourselves if there wasn’t some task at hand?

  Not long ago I found myself in a kind of storm. Trying to be generous, I had agreed to do many talks around the country. This had been my pattern for the last several years. I enjoy speaking to groups and visiting colleges, parishes, and retreat houses, but it was becoming unmanageable.

  One weekend I flew to a city several hours away and, while my hosts were delightfully welcoming, the logistics of the trip were unavoidably bollixed up. There was confusion over where I was staying, a more grueling itinerary than anticipated, no heat in my bedroom, delayed flights, stormy weather, and an ear infection that made flying agonizing. After returning home, exhausted, what Thomas Merton would call a “filthy” cold hung on for two months. The doctor said that overwork and stress had played a part.

  One day, looking over my schedule for the coming year, which was packed with travel, I began to worry. Fear set in. How could I continue at this pace? But gradually, I noticed something else within me: a deep-down desire to live a calmer, quieter, more contemplative life. A great many people were counting on me for lectures and retreats. Yet the more I thought about it, the more my longing for a quieter life increased. Still, in the midst of the storm I was bewildered. Should I cancel engagements and disappoint others or continue on and disappoint myself? I promised myself that I would pray about it the next day.

  Early in the morning, when I closed my eyes, the first thing I saw in my mind’s eye was Jesus, clad in a light blue robe, standing silently on the sea, a glassy calm. He stretched out his hands as if to say, “Come.” But unlike Peter I didn’t feel the invitation to walk on the water, as if to prove something. Instead, he seemed to be saying, “Why not come into the calm?” The wind whipped around his blue garments, with the sound of a flag in the wind, but both he and the sea remained calm.

  Why not come into the calm? Why not indeed? It seemed a real invitation: Come. That morning I crafted a letter of cancellation to many of the events I had already accepted. I am loathe to cancel anything, as I consider it as a breaking of my word, but the choice was either a life of storms or a life with at least a little more calm. So I was honest: I needed more quiet in my life in order to be a good Jesuit. I wrote my e-mail, took a deep breath, and hit “Send.”

  The responses were more understanding than I could have imagined. “Good for you!” most of them said. “I should do the same thing,” wrote another. The president of a Jesuit university where I was scheduled to deliver a lecture wrote a compassionate note, averring that it’s important to take care of oneself and live a contemplative life, in order that one may be of greater use to God. I felt a great calm.

  Not everyone can jettison tasks in this way. A new mother or father cannot simply stop rising in the “fourth watch of the night” to change a squalling infant. A person caring for an elderly parent cannot simply walk out of that boat. But most of us know that there are some unnecessary things that prevent us from living more contemplatively, extraneous tasks and events and dates and appointments and things that can be thrown overboard. Do you have to make everyone happy by agreeing to every request? Must you say yes to something else you cannot possibly do—on the job, at your children’s school, or in your family? Aren’t there a few things that you can drop overboard?

  Can you hear Jesus inviting you to more calm in your stormy life? Even Jesus needed to take time alone to pray.

  Reading this you might fear. What would it mean for the storms to cease and for you to live more contemplatively? The disciples knew this fear. Even when things grew calm on the Sea of Galilee, when one would think that their fear would lessen, it only grew.

  Jesus gently guides us away from fear, and he calls to us, as he did to the disciples, inviting us onto the calm waters of life.

  Listen to him. He says to you, “Come.”

  * * *

  THE STILLING OF THE STORM

  Mark 4:35–41

  (See also Matthew 8:18; 23–27; Luke 8:22–25; John 6:16–21)

  * *
*

  On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 14

  Gerasa

  “Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.”

  EARLY IN OUR STAY at the Franciscan hostel, I asked Sister Télesfora about the surrounding geography. I pointed vaguely to the opposite bank of the Sea of Galilee, where the rolling hills looked like folded cloth, and said, “What’s over there?”

  “Oh,” she said airily, “the land of the Gerasenes.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Is that really where the story of the Gerasene demoniac happened?”

  Raised eyebrows indicated that she was not kidding. “That’s the other side,” she said.

  Immediately I remembered the story of Jesus and the disciples crossing in a boat to what the Gospels called the “other side,” which had always seemed vague. It’s hard to imagine the other side when you don’t know any side at all. Once again, the force of being here, where Jesus was, almost floored me.

  George seemed startled. “Oh, I really want to go there,” he said. “That story is really important for me.”

  FOR ME TOO. IT is a stunning story, both touching and disturbing, found in all three Synoptic Gospels. It recounts the healing of a strange man who hurts others and himself. Its power to shock has been undimmed by two thousand years: the tale is called by modern Scripture scholars both “eerie” (Barclay) and “bizarre” (Meier).

  Matthew, Mark, and Luke place the tale immediately after the Stilling of the Storm. Jesus and the disciples have sailed to the “other side” of the Sea of Galilee, to the “country of the Gerasenes,” according to Mark. Before Jesus even steps off the boat, we must navigate our way through some textual difficulties.

  Here’s why: Other ancient copies of the Gospels speak of the land of the “Gadarenes” and still others, the “Gergasines.”1 This is a hotly disputed phrase, because the name does not correlate with the most likely site. Gerasa (modern Jerash, located in what is now Jordan), a large city in the region, is located roughly thirty-seven miles southeast of the sea. As we will soon see, this makes it an impossible candidate for the place. Or perhaps Mark simply intended to describe the general area between Gerasa and the Sea of Galilee.2 But although Mark may have gotten the name of the town wrong, he is clear about the importance of the general location: Jesus is setting foot for the first time in “pagan” territory.

  “Immediately,” says Mark, as Jesus is still disembarking, a possessed man confronts him. The man, who has been living in the tombs that were cut into the limestone rock of the nearby mountainside, is possessed by an “unclean spirit.” (Later, Mark refers to him as a daimonizomenon, or demon-possessed man.) Living in burial sites was, according to rabbinic literature, a sign of madness.3 Interestingly, the word “tomb” is mentioned three times in only a few sentences, setting up Jesus’s conflict not only with a demoniac, but, in a sense, with death.

  The madman possesses terrifying physical strength: “No one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him.” Donahue and Harrington point out that the Greek’s proliferation of negatives—literally, “No one” (oudeis), “not even” (oude) with a chain, “was ever” (ouketi) able to bind him—heightens the coming conflict with Jesus. That is, Jesus is about to do something that no one else can do. No one. Ever.

  Then comes an achingly poignant description: “Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.” It is easy to hear in this story echoes of people we know who seem intent on harming themselves, and indeed anyone who engages in self-destructive behavior through addictions, compulsions, or habits. Probably the man desperately wanted to be free of these demons, but had no idea how to free himself. His cries (krazōn, to shriek) are those not just of a frightening man, but of a frightened man.

  The man rushes up to Jesus in what must have been a terrifying scene, clambering down from the dusty mountainside, probably falling headlong, terrifying the disciples and onlookers. If this occurred shortly after the storm at sea, it would have happened as night was falling—or even in the dead of night. As Barclay notes, “The story becomes all the more weird and frightening when it is seen as happening in the shadows of the night.”4 The disciples, still recovering from Jesus’s rebuke of the storm, have stepped onto unfamiliar ground, in the dark, and are now confronted by a dangerous, violent, probably lethal figure.

  Then, touchingly, the crazed man prostrates himself before Jesus in a gesture of worship or respect. It seems to be the man who does this, not the demons. The poor man knows he is powerless to heal himself and hurls himself before Jesus.

  But then the demon spits out his threat to Jesus, crying out again in a loud voice: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” It is the same furious cry, nearly word for word, that Jesus first heard from the possessed man in the synagogue at Capernaum: “Ti hēmin kai soi Iēsou?” “What have you to do with us?”5 And here: “Ti emoi kai soi Iēsou?”

  Jesus’s first exorcism on Gentile soil will mirror that in the Jewish synagogue: his power is equal in both settings. And as in the synagogue, the demon already knows the Messianic Secret. The demon identifies Jesus, even though the disciples failed to grasp this in the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes and at the Stilling of the Storm.

  The possessed man’s conflicted behavior points to a deeply divided self. He prostrates himself before Jesus, but then screams at him. He asks Jesus to swear “by God” that he won’t be tortured, even as he is possessed by demons. The most succinct description comes from Donahue and Harrington: “The words of the demoniac show the inner division and turmoil he suffers.”6

  Why has the demon said these things to Jesus? Mark tells us that Jesus had already said to the demon, “Come out of the man,” prompting the demon’s response. Then Jesus addresses the demon again, directly, asking, “What is your name?”

  In the ancient Near East, names held great significance and power. In the Book of Genesis, God renames Abram as Abraham, signifying a divinely ordained change in identity. Jesus will rename Simon as Peter, a sign of his new life and mission. Moreover, knowing a person’s name was believed to give someone power over that person.

  This is one reason that, when Moses asks to know God’s name, the answer is, “I am who am.” In other words, “That is my business.”7 Moses has no right to access the “power” of knowing God’s name. Thus, when Jesus asks the demon’s name, he poses a direct threat. “What is your name?” means “Let me have power over you.”

  The scene always brings chills to my spine and reminds me of the scene in the film The Exorcist when the psychiatrist addresses the demon within the possessed girl, Regan, whom he has hypnotized. “I’m speaking to the person inside of Regan now,” he says. “If you are there, you too are hypnotized and must answer all my questions. Come forward and answer me now.” After a growling Regan writhes on the bed, he asks, “Are you the person inside of Regan? Who are you?” This is Jesus’s question.

  Jesus receives an answer: “My name is Legion; for we are many.” What a chil
ling statement—there are many demons within the man.

  There are a number of interpretations of this famous name. First, Mark may simply be reporting what transpired, with the “legion” as a colloquial expression for “many.” Second, the demon may use the word to avoid giving Jesus his precise name.8 Third, it may relate to the Roman legions. “Legion” is a Latin word for a military unit of around six thousand men. It was also used by Greek and Aramaic speakers of the day, what scholars call a “loan word,” borrowed directly from another language. The Greek word in Mark is simply a direct transliteration of the Latin legion.9 The word could also be a not-so-subtle reference to the presence of Roman forces in Palestine. On the other hand, as Donahue and Harrington point out, Jesus is not expelling Romans from Jewish lands here, since he was in Gerasa, a largely Greek city. However, if he is on the “other side” of the Sea of Galilee and still near Jewish territories, the word may still evoke the image of Roman legions and their own “possession” of Palestine.10

  The demons beg Jesus not to send them out of the country, but rather to send them into the herd of pigs nearby. The Greek word for “beg,” parakalein, is used not only for someone in need who begs, but also for an “inferior” speaking to a “superior.” The begging shows us who is already in charge.

  At that time, the notion that the demons would want to have some place to reside (rather than being sent to an everlasting place of damnation) was common.11 The introduction of pigs also reminds us of the pagan setting of the story and, also, the sense of uncleanness, because Jews were forbidden to keep pigs or use them for food.12

  Jesus gives the demons permission to enter the pigs. Immediately the unclean spirits enter the swine, and the entire herd (two thousand, says Mark) rushes down the precipice into the sea and drowns. This is one reason for the confusion over the location. If the original story took place in the town of Gerasa, the pigs would have had to run a marathon thirty-seven miles to the sea.13 Once again, though, Mark may simply have been referring to a general region.