Second Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 65:1–9; Psalm 42 (sung); Luke 8:26–39
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, June 22 2025
It is unusual for a national church to make a confession of national guilt. But this is what the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) did in 1945. Eleven church leaders met with representatives of the World Council of Churches in the ruins of Stuttgart and on October 18 issued the Stuttgart Schuldbekenntnis, the Stuttgart confession of guilt.
They said, “…we know ourselves to be with our people in a great community of suffering, but also in a great solidarity of guilt. …we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.”[1]
Some of the 11, notably Martin Niemöller, wanted passionately to make this confession. Others did so begrudgingly but recognized that it was the price of readmission to the world church.
Why did Germans generally, and German Christians in particular, support Adolf Hitler so enthusiastically?
Because they were crazy. They had been driven crazy, by the death, destruction, and defeat of the Great War and the poverty caused by the savage war reparations of the Treaty of Versailles and later by the Great Crash. They looked in their millions to Hitler as their saviour.
We can say that they were out of their minds. We can say, if you like, that they were possessed by demons.
*
We too are good Protestants. We know that we are sinners and that Christ came to save us from our sins. So we are inclined to hurry past today’s story of the Gerasene demoniac on our way to the cross. This, I want to suggest, is a mistake.
Afoot on dusty highways, in Galilee and on the way to Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the good news of God’s kingdom, healed the sick, and cast out demons. No historical fact about Jesus is more securely attested than these healings and exorcisms. And, apart from his preaching, nothing, it seems, was more important to him.
In Luke chapter 7, John the Baptist sends two men to ask Jesus, “Are you the Messiah?”: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect someone else?” Jesus has just then cured many people of diseases, afflictions, and evil spirits and has given sight to many who were blind. And he answers them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard.”
This, Jesus wants to suggest, is what the coming of the Messiah looks like.
Jesus has a more expansive understanding of salvation than we good Protestants sometimes do. He gets it from his Jewish upbringing. The Hebrew word Shalom crops up regularly in the Old Testament. This is often translated as peace, but it means much more than the mere absence of war. It means wholeness – personal and social wholeness. It means healing – freeing us from everything that hinders us from being fully ourselves and fully members of the human community. All of this is what we too should mean by salvation. All of this is what we should mean by peace.
*
Scholars writing about such stories as the Gerasene demoniac like to think of themselves as modern and scientific. In today’s brave new world, we can no longer believe in demons or devils. They often dismiss demon possession as ancient superstition and prefer to speak of mental illness.
I’m not convinced. We need – as some scholars agree – a more anthropological approach.
The story of the Gerasene demoniac has features that are fantastic and not strictly historical. But it’s not hard to decode what is going on. Jesus asks the man his name, and he replies, “Legion” – a Roman legion, the host of short, stabbing swords by which the Roman empire maintained its power and dominion in Palestine and the ancient Near East. The legion asks Jesus not to send them back into the watery abyss where demons dwell but instead into a nearby herd of pigs. The pigs rush into down the slope into the Sea of Galilee, and the demons are drowned anyway.
When people have no other way to rebel, says the Spanish scholar José Antonion Pagola, they can develop a separate personality that permits them to say and do what they could not in normal circumstances, at least not without great risk. He suggests that we should see demon possession as a complex strategy, used by oppressed people, admittedly in a dysfunctional way, to protect themselves from an unbearable situation.[2]
The demoniac in the story is crazy – driven crazy by Roman imperial rule, a rule that a generation after Jesus would lead the Jews of Palestine into the fatal Jewish revolt. Jesus restores the man to his rightful mind, and when the people of the area come out to see what has happened, they find him clothed again and back to his normal self.
*
In presenting this account, José Pagola says that “it is hard to imagine today the terror and frustration that the Roman Empire inspired in people who were absolutely defenceless against its cruelty.”[3] But perhaps not so hard, if we think of the cruelty of Israel today in Gaza.
On October 7 2023, the military wing of Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups broke out of Gaza’s open-air prison to attack Israel, killing, wounding, or abducting both Jewish Israeli soldiers and civilians. Anyone who was paying attention knew that Israel’s retribution would be swift and terrible. No one, I suspect, imagined quite how genocidal it would prove.
For more than 600 days, Israel has rained death, displacement, and destruction upon the defenceless people of Gaza, who are all seen as enemies and as less than human. Worst has been the period since March this year, when Israel tore up the ceasefire agreement, killing, starving, and most recently – in an act of supreme cynicism – killing people while pretending to feed them.
It would be nice to think that these were merely the actions of the state of Israel. But the uncomfortable truth is that most Israeli Jews fully support what their government and armed forces are doing. According to a recent poll, 80% of Jewish Israelis believe that the two million Palestinians in Gaza should be driven out of their prison. More than half believe that the Palestinian citizens of Israel, also two million, should be expelled.
We can condemn what Israel is and has been doing, and we should. But more than this is needed.
Why is Israel behaving in this way? And why do so many Israeli Jews support it?
Because they are crazy – driven crazy by the often tragic history of the Jewish people and the false promise that creating a Jewish state for the Jewish people is the solution to that tragic history.
The Jews of Israel need more than condemnation. They need healing. They need to be reclothed in their rightful minds – to see that the only solution to the dilemma on which they have impaled themselves is to recognize that Palestine is a land of two peoples that they must share, no longer as enemies, but as equals and, however improbably, as friends.
If we are serious about peace in the Holy Land, as we should be, that is what we must help them to do.
*
We could stop there. But we shouldn’t let ourselves so easily off the hook.
In 1947, two years after the end of the second world war, 65 Christians and Jews met in Seelisberg, in the canton of Uri in central Switzerland, to consider what could be done to combat antisemitism.[4]
Commission III looked at what traditional Christian hostility to Judaism contributed to modern-day hostility towards Jews. It made ten recommendations to Christians, both then and now. It listed six things we should avoid and four things we should remember.
We should avoid extolling Christianity by distorting or misrepresenting Judaism, whether biblical or post-biblical. We should avoid speaking of Jews as simply the enemies of Jesus. We should avoid presenting his death in Jerusalem as the responsibility of all Jews or of Jews alone. We should avoid quoting such sayings as “His blood be upon us and upon our children”, without remembering the infinitely more weighty words of Jesus: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” We should avoid the superstitious notion that the Jewish people are reprobate, accursed, or reserved for a destiny of suffering. We should avoid speaking of “the Jews” as if the first members of the church had not been Jews.
We should remember that one God speaks to us all through the Old and the New Testaments. We should remember that Jesus was born of a Jewish mother, and his love and forgiveness embraces his own people and the whole world. We should remember that the first disciples, the apostles, and the first martyrs were Jews. We should remember above all that the fundamental commandment to love God and our neighbour is as binding upon Christians, as it is upon Jews, in all human relationships, and without any exception.
If we are serious about peace, these things also we should do.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_Declaration_of_Guilt
[2] José Antonio Pagola, Jesus. An Historical Approximation (Miami, FL: Convivium Press, revised edition, 2019), 169ff
[3] Ibid., 170
[4] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seelisberg_Conference