Continuing as Sophia: We raise pigs for Rome. Nice, juicy sucklings; crunchy dried pork … all sent off regularly to provide meat for the Great City. My name is Sophia, and I live in Gerasa, a small village on the Sea of Galilee. On the other side of the lake from Palestine. I’m no Jew, mind you. My ancestors were Greeks, the greatest of all peoples, and I’m proud of my heritage. But these days, we’re just pig farmers. We’re trying to hold our own under the yoke of Roman rule, just like the Jews, just like everyone else, I guess.
Life is hard. We raise pigs, but we rarely get to eat them. Pork is the food of the gods. Pig blood is the highest sacrifice you can offer in our Temple. Now, though, pork is for the wealthy Romans. I hear that our pork a favorite for their extravagant banquets. They roast it, boil it, stuff it, carve it into fantastical shapes. My sons, who have to take the pigs up in the hills to scrounge for food, ask me why the Romans don’t raise their own pigs. Ha, I know why! Pigs are good to eat, but raising them stinks. They eat garbage, rotting corpses, refuse, all kinds of nastiness. The Romans don’t want pigs eating all the grass off of their hillsides and wallowing in the remaining dust. They don’t want them rooting around their latrines and garbage dumps. “Not in my backyard,” they say. “That’s what the provinces are for.”
And yet they name their powerful armed legions after our pigs. Yes indeed. The Tenth Legion, the one that subdued the land of the Judeans across the lake, that legion has a big picture of a boar on its shield. That’s right—a pig—right in the place of honor. Pigs and powerful Roman soldiers, one and the same.[1]
Speaking of the land of the Judeans …. Don’t get me started. They lorded it over us here in the Decapolis far too long, trying to get us to follow their religion and their laws.[2] The elders say that we didn’t get a moment’s peace from their critical, fanatical ways until the Romans took over. At least under the Romans we have a little autonomy. Everyone knows that Jews won’t go near pigs, let alone eat them. The Romans make jokes about it. I heard that the Emperor Augustus once said that he would rather be King Herod’s pig than one of his sons. Good one! That crazy Judean king was so paranoid and power-hungry that he murdered his own sons![3] The Judeans don’t have any right to look down their noses at us, but they do…
I almost forgot: I’m here to tell you what happened here last week. You won’t believe it. My sons told me the story, though, so I know that it’s true. My boys were up in the hills overlooking the lake, watching the village pigs with all the other young boys. I don’t like them going up there, though, because of Erastus. Have you heard of him? He calls himself Legion now (shudder), but he used to be just little Erastus. His poor, wayward mother named him that—It means "Beloved.” She died when he was only six. Erastus never did fit in with the rest of us. Everyone whispers that his father was a Roman soldier who forced himself on his mother. (I think that’s why he started calling himself Legion.) When his mother died, Erastus made his own way in the world—a loner. Always rejected, always alone, stealing what he could to survive. I think he used to slop the pigs for a while. At fifteen, he was attacked and beaten by some other men for sport, and it was all too much for him. He lost his mind, and the demons came in. What a frightening thing he was. Dangerous! Biting and clawing like an animal, tearing off his clothes, living among the dead. We tried to keep him chained, thinking that containment would work, but the Evil inside him was too strong.
As I was saying, last week, my boys said that a boatload of Judeans pulled onto the shore. Fishermen, probably. Legion saw them and charged at their leader in a fury, ready for battle. My boys thought the Judeans were goners. But this man wasn’t afraid of Legion. He paused and gently asked him his name. Then, do you know what this gentle man did? Unfazed, he sent those demons straight out of Erastus … and into our pigs! Yes, our pigs! The pigs went crazy then. They went charging off the cliff and drowned in the sea, squealing as they fell. All of them! All our livelihood—gone in the blink of an eye. Our debt to Rome—now one hundred-fold greater. When the boys came running home to tell me, I was furious. I charged up the hill to give this healer a piece of my mind, to take a piece of his flesh in return. Everyone in the whole village was doing the same thing.
When I got there, huffing and puffing, I noticed the healer’s disciples laughing quietly among themselves. I wondered what could possibly be so funny about such a disaster.
“Ha!” I heard them say, slapping their sides, with big smiles on their faces. “Did you see those pigs? There went Caesar’s legions charging into the sea, just like the horses and chariots of Pharoah into the Red Sea. Who is like our Lord?”
They started to sway, full of joy. “Majestic in holiness, awesome in glory. He stretches out his right hand, and the earth swallows our enemies. May all Romans follow suit! It’s the dawning of God’s Kingdom! Freedom from Rome is coming—just wait and see!” Oh, how they grinned.
I didn’t understand them. How could there ever be freedom from Rome? I’m not sure I want freedom, anyway, whatever that means. I don’t want their god. I just want my pigs back. My eyes full of tears, I scanned the hillside looking for that healer. What I found made me stop in my tracks. That poor, demented Legion was gone. In his place was Erastus, the Beloved, sitting at the teacher’s feet, filled with peace, whole again. And the craziest part of this whole thing? Since then, Erastus stands tall at the gates of the village every day and talks about this Jewish teacher, this Jesus from Nazareth. He talks about healing. Erastus holds out his hand to all the people who shunned him before. He helps those who once beat and mocked him. And they are so amazed that they reach out in kind. How could such a thing be?
Rev. Anne back: When we read this Gospel at Bible Study this week, almost all of us—including me--said that we identified with the Gerasenes, with those losing their livelihood from Jesus’ action. None of us identified with Legion. Only one of us identified with the disciples, wondering at the power of God. Like my imagined Sophia, we are—more or less willingly—implicated in the powers that rule this world. Part of our despair these days, I think, is that we’re finally beginning to see the web in which we are caught. We see with our own eyes and in our own lives the death-dealing effects that modern carbon-based industry has on the environment. We see the death and terror that unbridled greed has brought to the gun industry, to the insurance industry. We watch our beloved democracy teeter on the edge of the cliff, ready to fall into the sea.
Episcopalian Diana Butler Bass writes of our Gospel story: “The naked man [Legion] leaps from the story, a shocking mirror showing the true condition of the oppression we all share under imperial power. He may be the immediate scapegoat for colonial domination, we may try to cast him out, but he runs from the graveyard and makes us see both him and ourselves.” Butler Bass wonders, too, what living under empire has done to us and to others. “Have we, suffering under today’s pyramid of wealth and power, been consigned to living among the dead … stripped of our humanity, wrought with madness? Watching the news, [she muses] it seems a fairly apt description of life in America today.”[4]
Perhaps God wants us to see Legion, to feel a connection to his pain—and to his healing. What today’s Gospel shows us and all the Sophia’s of our world, is that Jesus comes to restore our integrity, to make us whole once more. All of us. But he doesn’t start with the influential folks, or with the people who have it all figured out, or with those who lead orderly lives. He reaches out first to the least among us, to the most broken and tormented, and he calls them by their God-given name, “Beloved.” Clothing them in love, he hopes that we will see ourselves in their eyes. And that we will finally decide to take up our heavy crosses. That we will live out our baptismal covenant to renounce “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” That we will follow him on the path of healing and wholeness, the path out of the tombs.
[1] Nelson Kraybill, “To Hell with the Pigs,” Holy Lands Peace Pilgrim, March 9, 2015. Found at https://peace-pilgrim.com/2015/03/09/to-hell-with-the-pigs/
[2] Ray Vander Laan, “A Far Country Decapolis,” That the World May Know. Found at https://www.thattheworldmayknow.com/a-far-country-decapolis.
[3] Mark Essig, “I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig,” Longreads, October 14, 2015. Found at https://longreads.com/2015/10/14/i-would-rather-be-herods-pig-the-history-of-a-taboo/
[4] Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings: The Demons of Empire.” Found at https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-834?utm_source=email.
