Go Away, Jesus!
Via The Captivation of the Will, pp. 102-104. (@eerdmans)
What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? (Matt. 8:28-34)
What shall we do with Jesus? A Jesus who carries on in such outrageous fashion? Or what shall I do, faced with the prospect of having to preach on such a preposterous text? Shall I seek, somehow, to make sense of it for you, to apologize for this Jesus so you can sit back and assume that all is well after all? In this regard it is almost comical to watch the various commentators stumbling over themselves to defend Jesus. What lies nearest to hand, perhaps, is to moralize somehow, like “they hand’t ought to have been raising pigs anyway.” The pit, the Jerome Bible Commentary sets forth for our edification, is the most unclean animal. A pig was good for nothing at all and no one could incur a loss when a herd of pigs perished. I wonder how that would go down in Iowa? One commentator even suggested that the owner could, after all, have cut his losses by making hams out of all the drowned pigs (the original deviled ham, perhaps?). Was he serious? Or one might perhaps psychologize: we hav to do here only with primitive perceptions of mental illness, of course, even though the text doesn’t have all that much to do with us. Another commentator suggests that what happened, perhaps, was that the shrieking and carrying on of the alleged demoniacs frightened this herd of swine grazing nearby so that they stampeded into the sea and this was taken as a sign of comfort–an indication that they really had been cured! A yes! So we can all relax! But yet one can still hear, nevertheless, the protest of those poor herdsmen: “But I don’t care about all that religious claptrap. I lost my hawgs, don’t you see?” Better a few crazies hanging around now an then than that! The verdict of the townspeople when they came out to see the wild goings-on is not strange either, I think: “When they saw him, then begged him to leave their neighborhood.” You see, it didn’t really matter, after all, whether they were supposedly crazy or sane, whether apology was possible or not, whether the reaction was rage, fright, or even awe. The outcome was the same: “Go away, Jesus! What have you to do with us? Have you come to torment us before the time?”
What shall we do with Jesus? Could it be, perhaps, could it just be, that the matter is quite other than we think? Could it be that this Jesus is waging a lonely and desperate battle for us all by himself of dimensions so deep and mysterious we can only dimly perceive them with elemental spirits and principalities and powers? Could it be that with infinite patience he waits for us to see? Could it be that when one looks into the depths of a text like this the greatest miracle is that he doesn’t just let us go, leave us among the tombs with the demons, send us cascading into the sea, or even just blow it all away? What was it he said once? Only the one who loses his very life for my sake shall find it? Could it be, after all, that the only real comfort we might offer those herdsmen–for the time being, at least–is, “Count your blessings. You may be lucky that you lost only your hogs?”
That, however, may be too much for us to contemplate. Safer it is, no doubt, to stay with the plea, “Go away, Jesus. What have you to do with us? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” But then, we are left, of course, with the disturbing question of those demons. Where have they gone? Were they drowned in the sea? Did they fall into some psychotherapeutic slough? Legend has it that they like the sea, that it is one of their favorite haunts. Where could they have gone–if it is not yet time? Well, where better to look than in a world which in a myriad of ways–subtle and not so subtle–still mouths the same plea: “Go away, Jesus”? Where better to look, perhaps, than in a church which still finds it so necessary, apparently, to apologize for the strange goings-on in the country of the Gadarenes? Where better to look than in that zoo which calls itself “Evangelical Christianity”? Where better to look, even, than in the mirror–perhaps the mirror of a text like this?
For isn’t it strange–and marvelous–that somehow the more we plead with him to go away, the more surely he moves in upon us? The more we try to get rid of him, the more tightly he closes in with majestic constancy? We tried to get rid of him once and for all by nailing him to a cross. But that only means we can never git ride of him or be finished with him. We sealed him in a tomb, but the stone was rolled away and he came back to say, “Shalom.” Peace be unto you.” He even said, “It is expedient for you that I go away, for I will send you another comforter. I will never leave you” (cf. John 16:7, 14:16-18).
So the last question: “Is it still before the time?” Or might it be that the time is up now? What shall we do with Jesus? What is left to do but repent? For he comes to save us from our sins and to cast out the demons. What is left but to begin to stammer, somehow, Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.
