Luke 8:26–39
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus, who calmed the storm raging on the lake with just “one word,” now encounters a man who had long been wandering in the tombs, without a home and without clothes. Seeing Jesus, he cried out, “Jesus, Son of the Most High God, leave me alone! Please, do not torment me…”
He was bound with chains and shackles, but he would quickly break them and return to the desolate wilderness where the tombs were. Mark, who also recounts this event, vividly describes his horrifying appearance, saying, “No one could keep him under control, and night and day he would constantly cry out in the tombs and in the mountains, and cut himself with stones.”
We too often encounter such raging souls. They are lonely souls. They feel unacknowledged by anyone. They desperately want to be acknowledged, to be recognized at all costs, to make someone turn around and look at them. This intense passion rages within them, and their words sound only like “cries,” like wails. “Look at me, I’m so miserable. Look at me, yet I still want to live so much. Look at me, who did this to me?” While crying out like this, they descend into ruin, into alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, into reckless extravagance, into a wandering of self-destructive desires. Their appearance is the same as that man who cut himself with stones.
In the face of such souls, we try in various ways to bring them back, using every possible method. Sometimes we scold them, sometimes we encourage them, sometimes we comfort them. But we “cannot keep them under control.” The more we try to help and do everything we can, the more the raging soul intensifies its fervor, and its chaotic energy engulfs those who come into contact with it, dragging those who try to help them into the abyss into which they have fallen. Within us, who were supposed to be pouring out love upon them, a storm of hatred and anger rages against them, and we become unable to “keep it under control.”
Should today’s Gospel, the good news, end simply by teaching us about this human misery? …But we must recognize this raging soul as a reality of humanity, and indeed, as a reality lurking within ourselves. We must also understand that for “normal” people, this reality is merely not outwardly manifested due to various circumstances. We must understand that our “normalcy” is simply the result of the skillful and stubborn self-control of those who have been trained to “be good children,” and that this self-control still retains some reserve. Only then will we understand, as the sole hope—the true Gospel, the Good News—that when Jesus commanded, “Come out of this man, you unclean spirit, and go into the herd of pigs,” the storm of the soul, the turmoil of the heart, was instantly calmed. At that moment, we groan and praise with the Apostle Paul: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Before this one person, the only One who can subdue evil spirits, the first thing we must do is to thoroughly understand, along with Paul, our own utter powerlessness against the raging winds and waves in this soul. Knowing this, we must completely abandon the thought of trying to fight against them with our own strength—which is overwhelmingly more often a reckless arrogance of “I can fight” than a blessed spiritual courage. The belief that “I can do it, I must manage it myself” is actually a harbinger of the storm that will eventually rage and devastate the soul.
And so, let us pray to Christ, to God: Rebuke the raging winds and waves that torment his, her, and my own soul…