Real Power (Part 2)

Imagine with me an adolescent kid, maybe late teens or early twenties, whose mind is so obsessed with death that he literally spends all his time wandering around the local cemetery. 

Imagine this man who, while in the care of professionals, was so volatile that he needed to be restrained with handcuffs or straight-jackets.

Imagine him so inwardly disturbed that his only method of expressing raw emotion is to emit high-pitched wails, like a groupie at a screamo rock concert.

Imagine him so devoid of self-worth, so unable to affirm his self-image, that he regularly cuts himself.

In this second part of my series on Real Power, this describes the subject of the Gospel narrative in Mark 5:1-20.  This young man, resident of a Syrian city east of the Sea of Galilee, was utterly rejected by his community and written off as hopeless.

However, this is also a description of far too many young people in our world today.  I have known and worked with teenagers like this, first in my seminary days as a shift-supervisor at a juvenile detention center, and later in professional youth ministry. 

The man in Mark 5 was labeled "demon-possessed."  So are many young people today.  They are deeply tormented, and they often express their torment in ways that offend the sensibilities of "normal" people.

This man comes into the presence of Jesus and, ironically, begs Jesus not to torment him.  A life of torment has become so normal for this man that the presence of the true Healer feels like torment.

But Jesus engages with this young man and, once again, reveals His real power.  He literally spared no expense to drive the source of the torment out of the young man: He used a whole herd of pigs (the villagers' main source of wealth) in order to destroy the demons.  When the villagers later found him, he was completely "in his right mind."  (With another twist of irony, the villagers were so often used to seeing him in his demonic state that when they found him healed, they were afraid!)

In our last post, Jesus displayed power to bring order out of chaos.  In today's lesson, we see Jesus with power to bring sanity to torment.

In the past one hundred years, our understanding of mental illness has grown exponentially.  Many human phenomena once attributed to demons are now known to have natural causes.  Without ruling out the existence of the demonic, I concur that there are so many factors that combine to create unhealthy and destructive patterns of thought and behavior in a person: body chemistry, family history, personal upbringing, childhood trauma, etc. 

Diagnosis is multifaceted, and healing is a long process.  Truly no human being can bring about the kind of instantaneous and miraculous healing Jesus did.  But we can follow Jesus' model in another way. 

Too many individuals--and especially in the Church--tend to mimic the example of the villagers.  We seek to control or exclude the mental illness, to keep it at the margins where it will not upset our carefully staged happiness, where it will not exert its disruptive effects on our much-loved status quo. 

But Jesus does not use His power to control and exclude.  He engages mental illness, even to the extent that it is allowed to disrupt other aspects of life.  He expresses unreserved value for the person, regardless of the mental torment experienced, regardless of what other secondary values might need to be sacrificed.

I, for one, am grateful that Jesus models for us a better, healthier way to explore the very rough terrain of mental illness, and that He indeed has the power to bring sanity to torment.