Session 3: Class Notes (Mark 5)

Day Trip
The story of Jesus healing the possessed man in chapter 5 is the longest healing story in Mark.  This story marks the first time that Jesus leaves the area of Galilee and moves beyond the Jordan river.  Refresh your memory and check out the story by clicking here.

Let's look at this story through two lenses.  First, we'll look at the major players (Jesus and the Possessed Man) as individuals and the significance of their individual situation and actions.  Second, we'll look at the story and it's characters as by what they symbolize, a broader communal view.

Individually

It's important to understand the Jewish concept of cleanliness.  Cleanliness and dirtiness had less to do with mud or grime and more to do with social order, boundaries, and expectations.  One helpful way to think about it is to think of your yard and your home.  You may not think of your front yard or your back yard as dirty.  However, if some of the dirt from outside got onto your kitchen floor it would make the floor dirty.  Dirtiness was more about something not being where it was supposed to be, something not fitting into an established category.

For an individual to be deemed unclean had dire consequences in Jewish society.  Ritual impurity isolated one from relationships (others did not want to be made unclean by association), from commerce, from religious life, etc.  One needed to pass through a religious protocol to once again be made clean and restored to community.  This often involved an offering and time spent in a quarantine of sorts.  Being unclean disconnected the individual from the community and made them vulnerable.

With this in mind it becomes clear that the man possessed by the demon was in desperate situation.

• He lived in a cemetery - Unclean! (Leviticus 21:11; Numbers 19:11)
• He lived among pigs - Unclean! (Leviticus 11:7; Deuteronomy 14:8)
• He lived in a city of Gentiles - Unclean! (Acts 10:28)
• In him lived an unclean spirit - Unclean! (Mark 5:2)

This man was completely isolated.  He is so separated from his community and from himself that he has lost his identity and is not even named in the story.

Jesus, as a rabbi, would have been expected to uphold the social mores of ritual purity.  His entering into an unclean situation (eg gentile land, cemetery, etc.) would have been scandalous.  He is willfully disregarding societal norms that guided how people interacted how people with others and with God.  Without offering justification or rationale Jesus breaks through the barriers that isolated this man and reunites him to community by healing him of the unclean spirits.  An amazing reversal in this story (and in the next story in chapter 5) is that rather than the man making Christ unclean through their interaction it is Christ who heals the man and restores him to community (again, note that this is circumventing the temple and its process for ritual purification).

The story speaks powerfully of the love of God which overcomes every created barrier.  It is reminiscent of Romans 8:38-39.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Through the individual interplay between Jesus and the Possessed man we hear a beautiful testimony that none are beyond healing; none are so far isolated that they are forgotten.  To all Christ comes, and to all Christ beckons.

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Now let's look at the story through the lens of what Jesus and the Possessed Man represent.  How might this story have been heard by Mark's original audience.

Communally or Symbolically

When we take a moment to pick at the details of the story we uncover clues that may have triggered another theme.  It begins by taking note of the names.

• The story begins across the Sea of Galilee in an area called the Gerasenes.  The area that the story is very likely referring to is known as Gerasa (modern day Jerash in Jordan).  A couple of things to note about Gerasa: (1) while Gerasa is located on the other side of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum (Jesus' homebase) it is not located on the seashore.  It is actually nearly 30 miles to the south east.  And (2), sometime in the mid 60s AD (this is about the time that Mark was written), a rebellion flared up in Gerasa.  Rome violently squelched it intent on sending a message to other would be revolts.  Much of the town was burnt down and over 1,000 people were murdered (this would have been a large percentage of the population).
• The demon says its name is Legion.  A Legion was a regiment of 1,000+ Roman soldiers.
• Legion asks not to be sent out of the country but instead to be sent into the pigs.  It says that Jesus gives them permission.  Yet the actually Greek term translated as giving "permission" is more akin to dismissing a group of soldiers.
• The term "herd" in the text is a term that was not usually applied to pigs but rather applied to a disorganized group of soldiers.
• The text says the pigs rushed into the sea.  Yet the word for "rushed" was more often used to describe a military charge.

Perhaps the possessed man is more of a symbol (thus no name) for the people of that area who were tormented by the unclean Roman army.  His wounds caused by the Legion that possessed him spoke of the physical and psychological wounds caused by the Roman military.  To the survivors of Rome's attack Jesus brings a word of healing.

The idea is that Jesus (the embodiment of the reign of God) overcomes and banishes Rome (the reign of "might makes right").  To those early followers of Jesus, that original audience of Mark, those who were haunted by the wounds of the past or who feared the possible (and likely) Roman persecution to come, the story offers a powerful, healing and hopeful word about the Prince of Peace who overcomes every power and principality.

It is this story that  healed man is charged to go tell.