Christ Casting Out the Evil Spirit

“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.”—Luke viii. 35.

The passage: The people went out to see what had happened. They came to Jesus and found the man from whom the devils had gone out sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid.

I have taken my text from St. Luke’s version of the story we read in today’s Gospel. I must remind you that the Evangelists differ conspicuously in reporting it. St. Matthew speaks of two men possessed with devils; St. Mark and St. Luke speak of one. The peculiar incidents and the exact agreement of the geography leave no doubt that it is the same miracle. Here is a legitimate subject for examination, and an honest one must lead to good. The only danger is hiding the difficulties, or twisting the evidence to remove them.

The narrative raises another question, which physician and practical divine might help each other to clear of prejudice. Are there cases like this in modern times, or were they confined to the age of the Evangelists? That question can hardly fail to bring in the whole controversy about the existence and influence of evil spirits.

I do not choose my line of thought to avoid either of these questions. I choose the one the Church suggests by using the story in this season. Today’s Gospel is meant to give us another Epiphany, or Manifestation, of Christ, and I think we find such a manifestation in whichever Evangelist we follow. Each helps the inquiry I am engaged in: what, according to the New Testament writers, is Revelation or Manifestation? If we keep that question steadily before us, I expect to find light on the others too. At any rate we shall not treat them as trivial puzzles to be left to critics; they will take on human significance and grandeur.

I. Whatever the differences between the Evangelists, none concerns the nature of the malady that afflicted the man or men. All the symptoms of outrageous madness are described, whatever the cause. St. Matthew says: “They came out of the tombs; they were exceedingly fierce; no man could pass by that way.” St. Mark, speaking of one maniac, adds lines to the picture: no one could bind him, not even with chains; he had often been bound with fetters and chains, and had torn the chains apart and broken the fetters; no one could tame him; night and day he was in the mountains and the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones. St. Luke says he wore no clothes and lived not in a house but in the tombs. Surely this is as clear and full a picture of madness as was ever painted.

II. None of these signs is rare in itself; we connect them with facts we have known and sights we have seen. Without provision for the care of the insane, nothing in modern civilization would make it impossible or unlikely that we should meet in England such figures as our Lord met in the country of the Gergesenes. The Evangelists also agree about the origin of the fury. St. Matthew says the men were “possessed with devils”; St. Mark and St. Luke say the man “had an unclean spirit.” Yet they keep the plural too: the answer “Our name is Legion” appears in both. If this language is disagreeable to us, comparing the documents will not remove it; it is as strong in one as in the other. It does not belong to one story or ten; it is characteristic of the Gospels as such. As I have said before, it is not characteristic of them as well as of the Old Testament books; it distinguishes them from those books, where allusions to evil spirits are rare and in the Gospels continual.

III. On another point also there is no difference, and it is the point for which I refer to this story and for which it has a place in the Epiphany services. St. Matthew gives the voice that met our Lord as he approached the madman: “What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us?” St. Mark has: “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.” St. Luke substitutes “I beseech thee” for “I adjure thee” and otherwise nearly repeats Mark. These expressions are familiar from other narratives in various forms. Evil spirits are always said to regard Jesus as their tormentor, because He comes to deliver a man from their dominion.

IV. What distinguishes this story from others of its kind is the entrance of the devils into the herd of swine, and each Evangelist dwells on it carefully and minutely. However we explain it, we cannot treat it as an interpolation, and it is plainly hopeless to look in one of the three narratives for particulars that might make it the least difficult to hold by.

V. Finally, the passage I took from St. Luke, which states the ultimate effect of our Lord’s command, has no exact counterpart in St. Matthew, but his account plainly assumes it. Men delivered from the tyrants that possessed them would naturally be clothed and in their right mind. I want that result kept in mind, so I have put it before you in express words; I could equally have reached it by inference from the first Gospel.

Taking the story as it stands, with no secret method of turning it from an account of spiritual bondage and emancipation into something else, I cannot doubt that many intelligent and devout people today will turn from it with annoyance and discontent. A preacher who remembers his own feelings about it at some time will not judge such objectors harshly. Unless his memories are unusual or his present convictions very weak, he will least of all want their doubts withheld; he will want them confronted frankly with the facts of experience as well as the words of Scripture. And if some of us have come to accept this record not coldly and reluctantly but as one we could not bear to lose, a strength in dark hours, I suppose the process was something like this. The inquirer began to consider the subject quietly and from a distance, very unwilling to risk his reputation for sense, asking what sort of maniac this might have been and what natural explanation there might be for his frenzy. Then the thought was suddenly thrust upon him: “What if thou art that man? What if the strange fact that he was a spiritual being is common to him and to thee? What if the other strange fact, that his spirit was under the yoke of unlawful intruders and cruel usurpers, explains what thou hast known in thyself and couldst ill explain? Hast thou not been subject to the tyranny not of one ruler but of divided, contradictory rulers? Is not their name Legion? Thou hast called them impulses, motives, principles: has that language made the fact clearer? They are invisible; they assail thy very self; foul and cruel thoughts have come from them. Is it not horrible to think they are thyself, with no distinction between them and thee? Is it not a lie? Whether thou hast resisted or obeyed them, do not the very words Resistance and Obedience imply that they are not thyself? But was there no other whom thou wast resisting when thou wast obeying them, and obeying when thou wast resisting them? What says thy conscience? Has He never manifested Himself to thee? Is He not doing so now, in all thy thoughts of good and all thy struggles with evil? And Who else manifested Himself to the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes? Was that not a crucial instance of His nature and power, showing His purpose of claiming a spirit sunk into the lowest and bitterest bondage, and that no usurper over the human spirit is too mighty for Him to overcome?”

I imagine that someone who has come this far will find in the final incident something to make him tremble rather than offend his taste. He will say: “As I see in that fierce madman a man of my own flesh and blood, such as I might become if a mightier than I did not uphold me, so I cannot deny that the swine rushing down the steep place till they are choked in the sea give the liveliest picture of what the powers that have swayed me, and always seek to sway me, would do if transferred to mere brute natures. They show me that we do not sink merely below humanity when evil masters us; the depraved Will carries into its degradation a malignity that gives the animal what it has not of its own. Surely a divine Teacher would want to teach this, by such examples, to those He came to claim as spiritual beings. And looking at the New Testament again in the light of experience, do I not see that this is the very character in which Christ is presented throughout? What does it mean that He baptizes with the Spirit? What does the Temptation mean, or every discourse, miracle and parable? Do they not all testify of One who comes to contest the possession of man, not with flesh-and-blood enemies, but with principalities and powers assaulting, if not holding, the very citadel of his being? Why does He speak of the strong man armed keeping his house in peace, and of the stronger who takes his armour and spoils his goods?”

I repeat, a man who has come by this or a like process to accept the narrative of the Demoniacs without change or qualification cannot be offended with anyone who hesitates, or who fights every step before surrendering his objections. His own experience will make him more than tolerant. There are feelings in such a state of mind that he would not for the world remove, since they are among the greatest confirmations of his own faith on this very subject. One is the dread of Superstition and Fanaticism. The deeper that dread, and the more a man regards them as horrible evils he will by God’s help not sink into, and which it would be agony to suspect in the Son of Man, the more hope there is that he will take in this story in its full length and breadth. For the direst Superstition connects evil with the Nature of God, and the next direst identifies the man himself with evil. Here both are undermined at the root. God manifests Himself in conflict with the Evil Spirit in his essence and in every form he takes. God manifests Himself in the very act of distinguishing the man from the evil that possessed him. The direst fanaticism assumes that any man’s being is the proper habitation of evil spirits; the second worst supposes that certain special men may claim the Spirit of God in a sense ordinary men may not. And all the petty fanaticisms that abound in our day, which dwindle into triviality, root in the notion that spiritual powers and influences are light topics for drawing-room gossip. Here each shape of fanaticism is laid bare. The Spirit of Christ meets the Unclean Spirit in what seems his last, securest, most legitimate hold, and declares that there he has no right. The maniac is as fit a receptacle of Christ’s power and inspiration as the highest saint. The whole transaction is full of solemnity and awe; so if it is true and comes from the source of Truth, the stories that dinn our ears must be not ridiculous but loathsome.

For all these reasons a believer in the narrative will be very afraid of using even apparently fair arguments to dispel scepticism about it. He may calmly state his conviction and how he reached it. But he cannot mind that he will not be the means of giving that conviction to anyone else. If it has been given to him, he can trust One who knows every channel of His creatures’ hearts to send it to them as they need it. He knows that insofar as he tries to drive it home by persuasion, ridicule or terror because it is his, he will mar the effect of the divine arguments, which are subtler, penetrate deeper, and carry a different kind of compulsion.

These conclusions are inevitable for one who sees this story as a revelation of Christ Himself and of His dealings with the human spirit. But I have told you in former sermons that an entirely different notion of revelation has been proclaimed in our day as the only one consistent with orthodoxy and common sense. To describe it as the discovery of the true God in the person of His Son to a creature capable of knowing Him, and incapable of freedom and peace without that knowledge, is to incur I can scarcely say what frightful charges. Mysticism is on the face of such a statement; Rationalism lies beneath it; it shows a fatal ignorance of the nature God has given us, which can never come into close contact with the Eternal and can only abstract some feeble notion of it from the things of time and sense. What then is Revelation? It contains, we are told, lessons God wishes us to receive, which though not in any strict sense manifestations of what He is, are necessary for regulating our lives. Here at last is something positive: we are not merely told by what standard we cannot judge, but what the office of Revelation is. Be it so. Then let us consider what sort of Revelation has or has not fulfilled that office.

I would still hold to the Scriptures in this inquiry, and begin with this story of the Demoniac. I am not now dealing with objectors to it, but with those who say that, being part of the Bible, it must be received like any other part, and that to cavil at it or give it any non-literal sense is perilous. Here is a case of moral regulation: a man wild and furious becomes calm and orderly, sitting at Jesus’ feet clothed and in his right mind. What wrought the change? Was it the announcement of some law God has laid down for His creatures? Of some punishment in another world for breaking it? A series of sound ethical maxims? Injunctions about prayer or self-government? Anything we understand by ordinary moral discipline? All such regulations were desirable for a man in his condition, but common sense called them ridiculous; they would plainly be wasted. Far more direct methods were tried: he was chained. That was as ineffectual as the other; the fetters were burst, the chains broken. It is just when all mere regulations, divine and human, are found vain to restrain him from being the curse of his fellow-men that Christ is said to meet the man himself, to talk with that which could hear no laws and be restrained by no force, and to free and reform that. And the result is not a new excitement in place of the old, not religious paroxysms replacing other paroxysms, but quietness and order: he is in his right mind.

Here is one instance, and, as I have shown, a type-instance, of Christ’s acts toward a class of human creatures. Now take a decidedly opposite case. Saul of Tarsus, far from being a maniac, is the most correct of men, reverencing the law and blameless in all its commandments. He has been trained to regard the Revelation given to his fathers as a regulative one, and the doctors at Jerusalem set it before him in precisely that character. The thought that it might be anything else, in any sense an unveiling of God Himself, or the promise of a more perfect unveiling, may now and then have disturbed him over a passage in the Psalms or Prophets, but he angrily dismissed it. God gave his nation a revelation consisting mainly of a law, though in compassion for His creatures’ ignorance He also gave them a system of worship and sacrifices which it would be unsafe and criminal to neglect. Then he hears of men apparently teaching another doctrine, who proclaim, if he has not mistaken them, that a crucified man has manifested or unveiled the Divine Being. All regulations and limitations are burst through; these wretched fanatics assume that the Invisible has come near His creatures and that there is a way for them to ascend to Him. St. Stephen’s speech perhaps first shows him how far they depart from all his sacred maxims. There every step of Jewish history is treated as a step toward the revelation of that Just One whom his countrymen betrayed and murdered; they are charged with resisting the Holy Ghost, who has striven with them in all ages; and the vision of a Son of Man at the right hand of God is announced openly, in language that could be only blasphemy to one who thought of God as immeasurably distant from man. He grows more furious, still against opposers of a regulative Revelation. Then comes the crisis. That regulative Revelation, the system of laws, precepts and ordinances God Himself appointed for his nation’s good, proved utterly ineffectual for his life. Instead of helping or raising him, it crushed him with its weight. Only when the same Lord who bade the unclean spirit depart from the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes claims to be Lord and Deliverer of his spirit does he become clothed and in his right mind.

What work he did then, and what sort of revelation of God he proclaimed in the city least like Jerusalem in its speculations and worship, I considered in a former sermon. If we followed that discourse with an examination of his Epistles, we should come, I think, to two conclusions. First, that he everywhere announces an actual revelation and manifestation of God’s righteousness to the spirit of man, as deliverance from a mere law, a regulative Revelation, which had never reached and never could reach the human spirit. Second, that he speaks of the Spirit of God as holding converse not only with the spirit of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, or with his own, but with the spirit of man from generation to generation; and that he regards the assurance that such a Spirit will be with us, witnessing to us, sustaining us, making us partakers of the Divine Nature, as the great assurance of the Gospel, without which it would have no power to improve the lives of men or the condition of the world.

Brethren, was St. Paul right or wrong in this? Has the Gospel of Christ produced even the slightest improvement in human society, except by carrying this message home to human hearts? In outward regulation it has done singularly little: it sent out no decrees against gladiatorial shows, polygamy or slavery. If it has cured any of these evils in any period, or given society a new face, it is because a voice was saying to the unclean spirit that possessed it, “Get thee out,” because Christ Himself was felt to be wrestling with that spirit and overcoming it. So it has been with every man. In the latest ages as in the first, messages of deliverance have come to outcast maniacs who could not be bound with chains. Through whomever they came, the benevolent physician or the sympathizing sister of charity, they were recognitions of a better spirit struggling with the evil spirit, tokens from Christ that He can free the captive and put down the oppressor. Decent men have been changed in later times as in earlier from self-satisfied, bitter haters into humble Christians and zealous apostles of goodwill. But in every case the change was preceded by the discovery that all mere regulations, whether laws of earth or of Heaven, were insufficient to make him a true man. It came when the heart owned as friend and deliverer a Son of God to whom it had been crying, “What have I to do with thee? Art thou come to torment me?” It came when the heart saw that the power it thought farthest away, in Heaven or Hell, was near. It came when the man confessed that the Righteous God, seeing he had no righteousness of his own, was clothing him with a righteousness none can comprehend and every spiritual being is created to apprehend.

I do not believe that if you strip the Gospel of its original character and of the claims Apostles and Martyrs made for it, it can still command respect on a lower ground and take a useful, recognized place among the other agents of civilization. I know such an opinion prevails in many minds. They say that

* “Reft of a crown, it still may share the feast.”

You will find it is not so. If we dare not proclaim Christ as the Deliverer of the human spirit from its bondage, if we dare not say He has come actually to reveal God’s righteousness to men, we had better cease to speak of Him at all. For men want such a one; in their inmost hearts, even when their language against the Son of Man is loudest, they are crying for him. It was so in former ages and is so now, among the most miserable and the most respectable alike. If preachers do not answer the cry, and present the Gospel only as one of the regulative processes at work in society, it will be felt to be the feeblest of them all, and the chain and the prisonhouse will prove stronger.

Brethren, this lesson is written deep on our annals, in characters of blood. On this 30th of January at least I may speak not of other men’s sins but of our own; we are no longer commanded to forget the beam in our eye while we look for the mote in our brother’s. The Church of England has herself to blame for the event this day commemorates, because she did not heed a groan that was deep before it became loud: “Give us a Gospel which speaks to us as spirits, for spirits we are. Do not merely deal with us as creatures of time and sense. Do not soothe us with shows or coerce us with rules and punishments. Tell us if the Eternal has come near to us. Tell us if we may know Him.” The voice was not understood. Those who uttered it were taken for maniacs whom chains might bind. It was supposed that a regulative Revelation, duly proclaimed, would satisfy all reasonable wishes. The experiment was made; you know how it succeeded.

Alas, the fearful lesson of this day was not warning enough. In the following century there was again a cry for a Revelation that should reach men’s spirits and present Christ as an actual Deliverer from evil spirits, claiming maniacs, robbers and outlaws as sons of God. There was clear, undoubted evidence that those who proclaimed Him so left men they found possessed with unclean spirits clothed and in their right mind. There was equally clear evidence that opposite effects often followed their preaching: fanaticism often, hypocrisy sometimes. These facts were heeded, the others not. The conclusion was drawn that preaching God as actually coming near to man, and a Spirit working upon his spirit, was not favourable to morality. A regulative Revelation must be proclaimed instead: things fitting to believe and to do, stamped with divine authority, but bearing no witness that man is meant with open face to behold the glory of God and be changed into His image. Has that attempt succeeded better than the other? Has not Methodism vanquished you, as Puritanism did before? Have you not been obliged to adopt its phrases, even some most reasonably charged with leading to mischief, because it proved stronger and more effectual over men’s minds than any mere regulative Revelation ever was or can be?

Brethren, must this lesson also be wasted on us? The circumstances are not those of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But we still have men to deal with, of all classes: the criminal and the respectable, the sane and the maniac. Shall we try again that old, worn-out experiment which has proved so helpless with them all? Shall we argue with men about the wickedness and folly of their unbelief, and tell them how to regulate themselves so as to present a comely face to the world, undistracted by tumults and doubts? Or shall we speak to them as the Church herself speaks, declaring that God has truly manifested Himself, not to the eye but to the spirit, and that His Spirit is working with theirs that they may be clean and pure within? If we could proclaim that message, what would nicknames matter to us? We could bear to be called Mystics or Rationalists or madmen or atheists, titles given to far holier men, Apostles and Martyrs, if we could but be Christ’s instruments in casting an evil spirit out of the age, and bring one man possessed by a legion of them to sit at His feet clothed and in his right mind.