Your Name is Not Legion
based on Luke 8:26-39
Rev. Karen Goltz

A lot of ink and breath has been spent on trying to work out what exactly is going on whenever we encounter people possessed by demons in the bible. Some take it literally and believe that there were actual, evil spirits controlling the body and mind of the person. Others claim that the person really had epilepsy, which was the true cause of the seizures. Others believe that these folks were probably mentally ill, in a time when mental illness was just not understood, and so demon possession was blamed. And still others will try to interpret what this might mean for us today, and spiritualize the text to understand ‘demon’ to be any negative influence in our lives, particularly applicable to addiction. Many recovering addicts can look at the man in this story and see their own road to recovery.

I believe that all of those interpretations have merit, but none of them hits it exactly. Especially in today’s reading.

“What is your name?” Jesus asks. “Legion,” the man replies, for many demons had entered him.

‘Legion’ is not a name. It’s a company of Roman soldiers, numbering about five or six thousand men. For this man to be possessed by ‘Legion’ meant that this man was probably dealing with it all: actual literal demons, mental illness, epilepsy, addiction, and countless other problems. He was constantly under attack, and could never get on top of it. He could fight all he wanted, but the powers that be just seemed to be against him no matter what he did, and they never let up. Ever.

He fought. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be normal. He wanted to have a life. But his community was afraid of him, so they chained him up so he couldn’t hurt them or himself. They learned to live with him as he was, so long as he stayed in his place. When he fought back and broke his chains, he lived in the tombs and in the wilds, the living dead on the edge of communal reality. He fought his community, he fought his demons, he fought himself. And he always lost.

And then Jesus arrives. The text is unclear as to whether it’s the man himself who is speaking, or if it’s the demons speaking through him at first. The singular ‘he’ is used, so I believe it’s the man himself. He’s still in there, despite the Legion that oppresses him. And his first words to Jesus, whom the demons inside him recognize as the Son of the Most High God, are fighting words: “What have you to do with me? I beg you, do not torment me!” He sees Jesus, knows he has tremendous power, hears him tell the demons to leave him, and assumes he’s under attack. After all, everything else has been an attack. Why should Jesus be any different?

And then Jesus asks him his name. I’m sure he had one. I’m sure he’d had parents at one time or another, had an identity of his own, but now he can only define himself by his problems. And they are Legion.

The man cannot see the hope that Jesus represents. He doesn’t see someone who can heal him and set him free. He only sees another threat. He has defined himself so completely with his problems that he can’t see that he still has an identity and a future of his own. The demons, however, know the truth. All of them.

The demons speak to Jesus, too. They know it’s over for them, that Jesus is going to get what he wants and free this person they’ve entered. They want to ensure that their own future will still be to their liking. They beg him not to order them back into the abyss, which in that time was understood as the place where disobedient spirits were imprisoned. In the man they were free; in the abyss they’d be trapped. So they beg Jesus to send them into the herd of swine instead, and Jesus consents. Then the pigs, driven by fear of their new reality, stampede down the steep hill into the lake, where they drown. The demons got what they wanted; they weren’t trapped in the abyss. But they weren’t free, either. They were dead. When evil gets its way, it’s always destructive, and ultimately self-destructive.

And what of the man? He’s free. Completely, utterly, undeniably free. And with his newfound freedom, he chooses to sit at Jesus’ feet. Big surprise.

But when the townspeople hear what happened, and come and see for themselves, they are terrified. I think they’d gotten used to the crazy guy who broke his chains and lived in the tombs. Now he wasn’t the crazy guy anymore; he was just like them. And the price of his being just like them was the economy of the town. Those pigs that drowned had most likely been the primary industry of the community; with them destroyed, so were people’s livelihoods. The townspeople didn’t want to sacrifice their livelihoods just so a crazy guy wouldn’t be crazy anymore. The hope that Jesus promised wasn’t worth that much to them. They ask Jesus to leave before he does them any more damage. They’re probably relieved that the crazy guy begs to go with him; they don’t want him around anyway.

But Jesus doesn’t let him come with him. He sends him back to town, with the order to declare how much God has done for him. As compassionate as Jesus has been up until now, this final act towards the man seems almost cruel. His future is to live among people who will always think of him as the naked crazy guy who lived in the tombs, and who is responsible for destroying their livelihoods. I’d call that a problem. A big problem. Multifaceted. Legion. Was that existence any better than the one he’d had before he’d encountered Jesus? His problems were different, but were they any less?

It all goes back to names. Names are powerful. I suspect that when I mention how powerful names are, many of us flee back to junior high school in our imaginations. You remember – 6th or 7th grade, the time when kids become unnervingly skilled at inflicting emotional damage on each other with the exchange of just a few words. Stupid. Fat. Ugly. Skinny. Dufus. Klutz. These are just a few of the many words with which we learned to hurt each other, and from which we learned the lie of our parents’ well-intentioned but utterly false pronouncement, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Names can hurt. A lot.

And truth be told, it didn’t end in adolescence either. We’ve learned subtlety in the years since junior high, but not always compassion. Names hurt because, true or not, they have the power not just to describe but to define. The names others call us, and the names we sometimes call ourselves, serve as the boundary markers of our imagination of who we are and what we can do. They become limiting factors all too often reinforced by those around us. It’s been demonstrated by countless social science experiments. Put a kid in a class for “gifted” students and she’ll score better than if she believes she’s in with the “slow” kids. The names we bear create a self-fulfilling future that can feel nearly impossible to transcend.

Some of the names people call us or that we call ourselves point to problems we need to face or issues we need to deal with. They can be descriptive. But they don’t have to be definitive. They don’t have to be the identity we claim, because they don’t take precedence over our other names. Christ the King Lutheran Church. Body of Christ. Beloved Children of God.

We all have problems, but they are not Legion. Your name is not Legion. We never did learn the man’s true name in the story, but I think we already know what it is. Christian. Beloved child of the Father, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked with the cross of Christ forever. Just like us. And just like us he wasn’t allowed to sit passively at the feet of Jesus and bask in his presence. He was told to go into the city—the city full of people who didn’t want him around, probably blamed him for their troubles, and remembered him as the naked crazy guy who lived in the tombs—and declare all that God had done for him. So he went, problems and all, but he no longer defined himself by his problems. He was no longer Legion, and he declared all that Jesus had done for him, to a people who desperately needed to hear a message of hope. And like him, we are called to go and do likewise. Amen.