In His Right Mind

There was a man on the far side of the lake whom nobody could hold. He lived in the graves, he broke chains, he screamed at night and cut himself with stones, and the people of the town had given up on him. Jesus crossed the water in a storm to get to him. What happened on that shore is the clearest picture in the Gospels of what He does with a person everyone else has written off, and it ends with the town asking Him to leave and the man asking to stay.

Among the tombs

Mark takes his time describing him, and every detail lands. "Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones" (Mark 5:3-5). Luke adds that he "ware no clothes, neither abode in any house" (Luke 8:27). Naked, homeless, sleepless, living with the dead, hurting himself, and beyond anyone's help. Note the word "often." They had tried. Whoever loved him once had bound him, more than once, and he had broken it every time, and at some point they stopped coming. That is what the tombs were: the place a town puts the person it cannot fix.

Jesus has just crossed the sea through a storm that terrified fishermen, and He has crossed it, as far as the story tells us, for this one man. "But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not" (5:6-7). Running toward and screaming at, both at once. The man runs; the thing inside him talks. It knows exactly who has stepped out of the boat, which is more than the disciples did an hour earlier in the storm.

What is thy name?

"And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many" (5:9). A legion was six thousand Roman soldiers, and this was occupied country; everyone on that shore knew what the word meant. Jesus asks his name, and the man has none to give. He has been so many things for so long that the only name left is a number. Then the begging, and the swine on the hillside, and Jesus gives them leave, "and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea" (5:13).

People have argued about the pigs for two thousand years. Augustine, reading it in the fifth century, thought Jesus let it happen so that everyone watching could see what had been living in the man:

Whatever the reason, the town got its answer to a question it had stopped asking: what would it take to set that man free? Two thousand pigs. That is what he was worth to Jesus, and it was more than he had been worth to anyone in a long time.

Sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind

The herdsmen run. The town comes out. And here is the sentence the whole story was written for:

Sitting. The man who was "always, night and day" in motion, is still. Clothed. Somebody, and it can only have been one of the disciples, has given him a garment; the naked man is covered, the way the two in the garden were covered, by a hand not his own. In his right mind. Luke puts him "at the feet of Jesus" (Luke 8:35), which is where a disciple sits. Three words for a whole life handed back.

And they were afraid. Not of him any more. Of Jesus. "And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts" (5:17). Matthew says the whole city came out and asked Him to go. They had lived with a screaming man in the graveyard for years and made their peace with it. They could not live with the One who had quieted him, because He had cost them two thousand pigs and shown them that the thing they had learned to walk past could be healed. So they asked Him to leave, and He did. He does not stay where He is not wanted. That is one of the hardest things in the story, and it is there.

Go home

"And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him" (5:18). Of course he did. The one person in the country who wanted Jesus to stay was the one He had freed, and the request is the same one Jesus grants to everyone else: let me follow. He says no. "Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee" (5:19). Go home. To the town that just asked Me to leave. To the people who chained you and gave up. Tell them.

Everywhere else in Mark, Jesus tells the healed to keep quiet. Here, in Gentile country, where no one is looking for a Messiah and no crowd will turn it into a riot, He tells the man to talk, and the man does: "he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel" (5:20). Decapolis, the ten cities. One man, sent home against his own wish, became the first missionary to the Gentiles, with a testimony of exactly one sentence: look what He did for me. And two chapters later, when Jesus comes back through the Decapolis, the crowd that meets Him is so large that He feeds four thousand of them (Mark 8:1-2). Nobody says where they came from. They did not need to.

Where this lands

Jesus crossed a sea in a storm for one man that a whole town had decided was past help. He asked his name when he had none. He let the price be paid in front of everyone so that no one could say it had been cheap. He left him sitting, clothed, sane, at His feet, and then sent him back to the people who had failed him, not to punish them but because they were the ones who most needed to see it.

If you have ever been the one in the tombs, or loved someone who was, the story is for you, and the part to hold is not the pigs. It is that He came across the water on purpose. He was not passing through; there was nothing else on that shore. And the town asked Him to leave, and He went, and left behind Him one man in his right mind who would not stop talking about it. That is still how it works. The One who asks your name knows it already, and when He says go home and tell them, He is not sending you away. He is sending you first.

Related: The Noonday Demon, When the Mind Goes, The Great Commission, and He Wist Not. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.