Galatians 3. 10-14, 3. 23-29
Luke 8.26-39
Sunday 22 June 2025
©Suzanne Grimmett
“Deliver us from evil.”
Something that most of us pray every day, yet I wonder if we take it seriously?
We are brought to face evil powers in this story we have from Luke’s Gospel, which, even though it occurs in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), is only heard once in the Sunday morning three-year cycle of the lectionary. For that reason alone, I think it is important to preach on it this morning, but it is also a fascinating, dramatic and multilayered story.
The excerpt from Galatians is part of a wider message from St Paul which grounds our resistance to evil in being children of God and clothed in Christ- a salvation that is for the whole world, both Jews and Gentiles. The letter to the Galatians teaches that Christ’s redemption gives us the power to work by the Spirit, participating in eternal life now even as we are, in Paul’s words, set free from ‘this present evil age.’
So even as Paul delivers his immortal worlds, ‘there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ we have the rest of the letter to help us understand this is a form of deliverance from evil. The divisions and discord, war and violence, power and greed which separate us from one another are signs of this present evil.
But from what exactly do we need to be delivered?
We are often squeamish about the language of demons, but Rowan Williams would suggest such language is helpful as long as we take them seriously, but not too seriously! I find this reasoning from Williams compelling when it comes to understanding what we can become trapped by;
In our inherited muddle and delusion, as we go on pretending that we are somehow independent of our creator, we are very much at the mercy of forces around us which are also at odds with their deepest reality. Forget the mythical apparatus of horns and tails: demons are simply non-human energies that are cut loose from their moorings in the truth and are all too ready to reinforce and nurture our own unreality.[1]
Forces that put us at odds with our deepest reality and the truth of our being impact at every level of the human experience; political, communal and personal. So let’s explore this story from each of these levels in turn so that we might engage with more of its multi-layered meaning.
Political
The man who had demons meets Jesus and shouts, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.” Immediately we hear that the demons know they are in the presence of one more powerful and that they will necessarily have to submit to Jesus’ authority. When Jesus asks, “What is your name?’, the answer is revealing. Legion
Even when we are not familiar with living under Roman occupied power, we cannot miss the reference here. A legion was a unit of about 5000 soldiers. The colonial Roman occupation meant the legions stationed in Palestine were a constant presence and threat to the local population. To use such a term is to alert the reader to the truth that the realm of demons is, as Andrew McGowan notes, not merely interior, but social and political.[2] Once we see this, we might notice more of the military imagery in this text. For instance, the collective “herd” was not normally used of pigs but often was used at the time to refer to a band of military recruits.[3] The man’s suffering and oppression is evident in his behaviour and exclusion from community, but its source, the demons themselves suggest, is political. Evil can move in lines of power and military domination, even those whose rhetoric claims to be bringing order and peace. There are currently leaders and regimes around the world who speak of peace and prosperity, yet their actions suggest far otherwise. It should not have to be stated that human civilisation is at its greatest when it cultivates justice and peace and serves the common good, yet somehow the political rhetoric of achieving or returning to greatness has become synonymous with self-interest or a position of world dominance.
Community
It is notable that these events occur in Gentile territory, tellingly described as ‘opposite Galilee’. This possessed man is the ultimate outcast. A non-Jewish foreigner raising pigs (which are unclean to Jews), he is also found only amongst the dead, excluded from even his own people, condemned to live amongst the tombs. The possession and oppression of this outsider by the legion comes nevertheless to the compassionate attention of Jesus. This is an early sign of the liberation of Jesus being for all, both Jew and Gentile, bringing fullness of life, healing and freedom.
It appears that this deliverance, however, is not to result in the complete banishment of the possessing legion. They were afraid of returning ‘to the abyss’- a phrase that conjures the ‘watery deep’ of Jewish cosmology and in Revelation is the prison of Satan. The legion is sent out from the man by the authoritative word of Jesus but allowed to enter a herd of pigs, which immediately rush into the lake and are drowned.
Now here we might become a bit uncomfortable. It seems, after all to our modern ears, a story of terrible cruelty to these animals. First, we do need to understand this narrative in the Jewish context of animals who were unclean. Secondly, I agree with Andrew McGowan here again who notes the irony that people today are much more concerned about this aspect of the story than in the past- when in our time the factory farming of pigs kills over 5 million every year in Australia alone. Perhaps here again is a reminder of the need to have our eyes wide open to the communal practices that we routinely condemn and others that we might blindly accept. Where might industries or social structures or systems have been designed to serve greed or power, while doing great harm to the poor and oppressed or to the natural world and the health of its ecosystems? What in our societies might need to be delivered from violence and oppression, greed and apathy?
Personal
Delivered from the occupying force, the man is found clothed, sitting at the feet of Jesus and in his right mind. We might be reminded of the phrase in Galatians, ‘being clothed in Christ’. Being clothed in Christ is about being so identified with Christ in God that all our darkness is brought into the light of eternity and we can walk by the Spirit daily in new life. This man now stepping into the light, wearing the clothes meant for him, is beginning eternal life now, able to be restored not only to himself, but to his community, returned to the truth of who he is in God and with others. His deliverance was a step in healing – not the final word. Jesus returns him to his home, and here maybe we might recognize that our ultimate wholeness cannot be accomplished in an instant within ourselves, but needs the presence of community, of friendship and love and belonging.
I began by talking about evil and how maybe the language of demons is useful if it reminds us that we are still vulnerable to forces outside our world. Christianity has always taken sin seriously, and our own agency and responsibility seriously, but there is a sense in these different dimensions of evil that not everything is within our control. A return to Paul’s teaching may bring comfort and peace to any anxieties here. Even though evil does impinge on our world politically, communally and personally, God has taken initiative through Christ to conquer evil in all its forms. Christ’s saving work liberates the captives and redeems all that has been lost. We are drawn into the family of God by faith, enabled to live lives of love to one another which bring joy and healing, and delivered from the evil of this present age by the Spirit who will never leave us or forsake us.
It is spiritually wise to be aware of the powers and dominions of this world, of ways of being together which are unloving or unjust, and of our own propensity to get caught up in impulses or inclinations that take us away from our true nature in God.
However, we don’t need to be anxious.
To paraphrase Rowan Williams, ‘Keep calm and say your prayers.’ Christ shows us the way to our healing and our freedom so we may return home to ourselves again and again, declaring how much God has done for us. +Amen
[1] Williams, Rowan. Passions of the Soul (pp. 35-37). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[2] Andrew McGowan, “Legion” https://abmcg.substack.com/p/legion
[3] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Kindle edn, 190.