Fourth Monday in Ordinary Time
Monday, February 3, 2025
Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Feast of Saint Blaise, Bishop and Martyr; Saint Ansgar, Bishop
Mark 5:1-20. Year I: Hebrews 11:32-40; Psalm 31:20-24.(Lectionary 323)
When they were caught in the storm, Jesus and his disciples were either on the way or blown off course to Gerasa (or Gadara?) in a province (Decapolis, the “Ten Cities”) the Romans had established so that non-Jews who lived there and spoke Greek could live in peace. Compare this with Isaiah 65:1-5.
This is Jesus’ first encounter in Mark with “pagans,” and the demoniac is the only one who accepts him! One wonders if the possessed man simply made visible the unrecognized condition of the others. He visibly “lived among the tombs” and in chains, symbols of death and the domination of sin. But he, at least, knew it and was grateful when Jesus delivered him from the power of evil. His more respectable countrymen, howevcr, when “those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine” told them about it, were “seized with fear” and “began to beg Jesus to leave.”
In this story Jesus is “begged” four times: first by “Legion” (or “Soldier,” Jerome Biblical Commentary) who beg him 1. not to send them out of their “territory” (χωρα: used to designate a “place the seasoned soldier claims for himself,” Bauer, Greek Lexicon) and 2. to let them go into the pigs; then by the Gerasenes, who beg Jesus to go out of their “boundaries” (oros); and finally by the freed demoniac, who begs to be with Jesus. A lot of “in’s” and “out’s” here!
Perhaps the point is that the proper citizens were enclosed in the narrow “boundaries” of their fear — fear of the unknown, fear of losing their property — which by that fact became the proper “territory” of the demonic. They were sitting “in the region (χωρα) and shadow of death” (Matthew 4:16), and didn’t know it. Like the demons, they wanted to stay there. Jesus was upsetting things, so they wanted him out of their lives. But the possessed man knew where he had been, so he wanted to leave and be with Jesus. Jesus told him to go “home” and be a missionary.
To appreciate the Good News of Jesus it helps to appreciate the bad news of life without him. Perhaps that is why Jesus said, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” and why he pointed out to the “chief priests and elders” who thought of themselves as exemplary Jews, “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Mark 2:19; Matthew 21:23-31).
Initiative: Check your “boundaries.” Are you keeping Jesus out of any part of your life? Is part of the reason fear? Or do you just want to keep your pigs?
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