The Goodness of God, the Doom of the Destroyer, and the Suicide of Swine: What Happened at Gerasa

The Gospels are creative nonfiction. Look at what Luke does here.

In chapter eight of his gospel, Luke writes his version of a story also told by the other synoptic evangelists. And it’s a thriller.

It’s a gothic horror story, in fact, worthy of H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King. In an alien country, a mysterious stranger roams the edge of town. He haunts the wilderness, living among the tombs. Luke, the “beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14), presents his notes: the subject is naked, screaming, and threatening to all decent people—since not even chains can hold him.

The Lord Jesus confronts the demon who drives him, only to be told that he is confronting such an infestation of demons that they call themselves “Legion”—after the largest unit in the Roman Army.

The story turns to ghastly farce. The demons beg to be spared being cast into the Abyss, asking Jesus to send them instead into a nearby herd of swine. The swine then immediately hurl themselves off a cliff into, yes, the lake: symbol of the Abyss.

The very worst part of this horrific tale, however, comes only at the very end . . . .

Still, though, I wonder. What about those pigs?

I confess that as a Sunday Schooler (Sunday Scholar?) I ignored the rest of the story. I got stuck on the suicidal swine. Why in the world did the demons want to enter them, only to have them then kill themselves in the lake—thus apparently forsaking the whole point of possessing the pigs?

Real scholars have wondered about that porcine problem for centuries. Luke provides us some clues in how he sets up this story. So let’s investigate.

But, you might say, just a second now. What is this business about “setting up”? Luke is a truth-telling disciple of Jesus, faithfully recording the ministry of Christ. He isn’t “setting up” anything. He’s just telling us what happened. Right?

The Gospels as Creative Nonfiction

I can still recall, fifty years later, my outrage as a traditional teenage Bible reader when I was told that the Gospels were composed, rather than merely reported. To make the shock particularly acute, this little bomb was lobbed at me in the classroom of a faithful little Bible school on the Canadian prairies: surely the safest place on earth for conservative Scripture study.

As our New Testament class compared the Synoptics, however, it became evident that the same stories often were being positioned by the three evangelists in different orders to make different points. They weren’t trying to merely chronicle Jesus’ public ministry, like conscientious annalists. They were painting their several word-portraits of Jesus, each of which highlighted aspects of his person and work while leaving others to be foregrounded by other accounts.

Why left to other accounts? John himself declares at the end of his own gospel—and declares it twice—that “there are also many other things that Jesus did” (John 21:24; cf. 20:30). Indeed, John exclaims, “if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

Luke himself provides a stunning example of the richness of materials facing the gospel authors. He is the only one who tells the story of Jesus blessing the widow of Nain with the restoration of her dead son. That’s right: Luke is the only evangelist who decides to mention this little story about—a resurrection. And he spares just seven tight verses to do so (7:11–17). Clearly, the gospel writers had a lot of material to pick from.

The Gospels are not, therefore, mere logs of Jesus’ sayings and doings. They are what we nowadays would call “creative nonfiction.” Unlike traditional scholarly history, which tends to proceed in a strictly chronological way, creative nonfiction deals with what has happened with the freedom of a novelist. The author sets things before the reader in any order, and from any point of view, in order to portray the author’s subject in the way the author sees it.

Early in my academic career I taught European history at a small private college. A large challenge of that job was trying to interest students taking my mandatory first-year course on Western Civilization. Most of them “knew” that history was just a boring recitation of “stuff that happened”—as Mark Twain is supposed to have put it, “just one damned thing after another.”

I put some of my thoughts about creativity and history into an essay, wherein I compared writing history with taking photographs:

Historians must decide on analogous issues.  They must decide on what is to be studied (the subject), but also on composition (context and relative impor­tance/posi­tioning of various items in the portrayal), lighting (emphasis), exposure time (depth of analysis), lenses and filters (breadth of view and compensation for possibly distorting elements in the evidence), and angle of vision (whether sub-discipline, like economic, political, or intellectual history, or worldview, whether Marxist, Christian, or historicist).

Further, like the photograph, the historical interpretation which results from these decisions is not merely the sum of the parts, as the historian like the photographer seeks to work these all together to produce an image, a single, rich portrayal of the subject toward which all the elements contribute.

The historian and photographer are indeed limited to the objects brought before their (metaphorical or literal) cameras.  The nature of these disciplines precludes "making things up": in this sense they are both bound to reality and so have less freedom than their artistic colleagues in literature and painting. ("Writing History instead of a Novel: Is Description Creative?" Fides et Historia 23 (Summer 1991): 4-10).

Don’t take the word of my callow self for it, though. Take the word of seasoned New Yorker contributor and Princeton University writing professor John McPhee, as he muses about creative nonfiction:

The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how do you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your pros, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the peace (does it get up and walk around on its own?), The extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth. Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have. (John McPhee, Draft No. 4 [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017], 185).

The Gospels are such. And Luke demonstrates in this spooky story that he knows how to write.

The Contextual Clues

Nowadays, we like to discuss “intertextuality” in Scripture study. That term points to how Biblical authors bear in mind other books of the Bible, as well as what they themselves have written. It also indicates how the Holy Spirit sets up resonances across the canon which the authors themselves wouldn’t have seen—particularly by mentioning something that a later text would bring further into focus.

In any given passage, therefore, we may find links—explicit or implicit—to other passages. The Biblical authors are not merely taking dictation but artistically constructing their narratives. We should expect to see illuminating connections throughout our Bible reading.

We need to discern those links to get the full force of what each author is saying, since the force is meant to be the combined force of those several connected scriptures. And we need to discern those links to understand, sometimes, even just what is going on—as in today’s enigmatic tale of lemming-like pigs.

Let’s confine ourselves for sake of time merely to the single chapter in which this story occurs: Luke 8. Here are some pertinent elements given as context for our story in this chapter. (I suggest you give Luke 8 a quick read before proceeding.)

Ministering Women  Vv. 1-3 introduce us to some women among Jesus’ followers. Besides their names (Luke is the only evangelist who does name the women who followed Jesus), he records that they “had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses” including “Mary, who was called Magdalene, from whom seven spirits had gone out.” These women both joined the (other) disciples in following Jesus and also supported Jesus and those (other) disciples financially. So our meditation begins and ends today with blessed souls who were delivered from demon possession and who embraced instead the Lord of life.

The Parable of the Sower  Vv. 4-15 give us Luke’s version of the famous parable of the sower—and the four soils. Because of what is to come, we shall note specifically the first soil. This is the hard ground of the road. Hard-packed (hard-hearted), it stolidly refuses to admit the seed of the Word of God. So the devil comes and snatches it away so that they “will not believe and be saved.”

Exhortation to Listen Well  Jesus then warns his disciples in v. 18: “So take care how you listen: . . . whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away from him.” (The first soil—in fact, all three soils of the previous parable—results in this outcome. Luke thus might be foreshadowing the withdrawal of the implicit offer of healing presented in the person of Jesus—himself the Word of God—to all the Gerasenes.)

Jesus’ True Family  Jesus’ mother and brothers immediately show up as test cases. Mark 3 tells us that they had come to “take charge of him,” worrying he was deranged. Luke 8:19–21 merely depicts them outside waiting for Jesus—but not inside, listening to his teaching. And he implicitly chides them, in the same terms as the parable of the sower: “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and do it” (21).

The Stilling of the Storm  Vv. 22-25 brings us the verge of our own story with the story the other Synoptics also link to our central tale: Jesus stilling the storm. We have several observations to make here.

The disciples, some of whom were experienced sailors, were terrified that the storm was too much for them. Their boat was taking on water and they were too far from land to swim for shore.

Our English translations have them shouting to the sleeping Jesus, “We are drowning!” What the Greek actually says is chilling, for those who get the intertexuality here: “Master, master, we are being destroyed.” The phrase is just three words: Jesus’ title twice, and then apollumetha.

Those of you in the front row of Bible class are immediately thinking of Revelation 9. In that chapter, stinging locust-like creatures swarm up out of “the bottomless pit” (also known as “the Abyss”) to afflict for five months those not sealed to God. Note the “bottomless pit” and note who is in charge of this horrible horde: “They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.”

“Apollyon” means “the Destroyer”—with the same root as the disciples’ terrified cry: “We are being destroyed!” Apollumetha! “Abaddon” in the Old Testament is the (bottomless) pit of death. The disciples fear that the chaos of the sea will drag them down to Abaddon, to the Abyss.

Jesus then “rebuked the wind and the surging waves” (that is, not just peaceful little laps on a tranquil shore). This term “rebuke” should make us sit up straight. Aside from this story, it is reserved in the gospels for Jesus dealing with demons (Matthew 17:18; Mark 1:25; 9:25; Luke 4:41; 9:42). The other exceptions confirm the rule. Jesus rebukes Peter for sounding like Satan (Mark 8:33) and James and John for wanting to be destroyers (9:55).

In each case, then, chaos threatens to destroy cosmos, and chaos is compelled to submit instead to Logos—the Word of God.

The Suicidal Swine

Jesus comes ashore and enters into the heart of darkness: Gentile lands, a wilderness of tombs, a landscape scarred by violence and demons. Here is a story with a climax of unclean animals and a denouement of faithless fear and rigid rejection.

Jesus meets the demoniac. This poor soul is enduring an anti-life. His demon lords did everything to this man except kill him.

They force him to wear the constant shame of nakedness. This isn’t the innocent nudity of Eden, but the stripping bare of a parodic anti-Eden. He must live in the tombs, literally the next thing to dead. He has been “bound with chains and shackles,” subjected to slavery, pain, and humiliation from those who hated him. He then was empowered to break free, only to be driven into isolation and deprivation in the desert, the badlands of wild(er)ness.

The demons recognize Jesus and recognize the absolute threat he poses. He is their Superior and their arch-Enemy: “Jesus, Son of the Most High God, I beg you, do not torment me.” They know right well that punishment is their due and that Jesus is The One to dole it out.

Why, however, did they fear Jesus would torment them? Jesus never tormented anyone, not even demons. Are they anticipating hell? Or are they projecting onto Jesus, as wicked ones do, their own malicious traits?

They worry about torment, but they also seem to know that Jesus might be persuaded to be merciful. So they ask for a reprieve from their worst fear. And what is that fear? To be sent back into the chaos from which they came, much like those scorpion-locusts of Revelation 9: “They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss”—the deep, the chaos. “Don’t destroy us!”

Wild-eyed, they spot the pigs. “How about there? Surely the Jewish God won’t care about unclean animals!” Jesus consents—and then Luke doesn’t even pause for a new sentence: “and the herd stampeded down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.”

Modern sensibilities might be offended at this brutal end to the pigs. Is the narrator, and even our Lord himself, indifferent to the welfare of these animals?

We should beware congratulating ourselves on our elevated outlook—given our factory farms and the much more common personal experience among the ancients of actual sheep, goats, and pigs. Jesus likely knew what would happen next. The pigs’ quick death released them from demonic oppression even as it also hastened their otherwise inevitable and violent exit from this life, since they were being tended for only one reason: human consumption.

Now to my Sunday School perplexity. Why did the pigs stampede? Perhaps the swine resisted these horrible invaders in the only way they could. Perhaps instead the demons deliberately drove them to annihilation.

Either way, the demons ended up in the lake—the local version of the abyss. They ended up in the very destruction the disciples had feared in the previous story.

It’s as if the fiends can’t help themselves. Jesus is life and shalom; they are destruction and death. In a diabolical apokatastasis, they return to the primeval chaos out of which God spoke his beautiful creation in Genesis 1. At the other end of the Bible, those same evil spirits will face another lake, but this one is of fire. Intent on chaos, they are destined for judgment.

Why did the pigs die? Because demons do what demons do: destroy. Even at their own cost. That is the madness of sin.

The Worst Part of the Story

One might think that in this bleak tale we have had all the horror we can handle. Life-threatening storm followed by death-shadowed demonism. But Luke has more dark parody ahead.

The herdsmen in charge of those swine understandably ran away. They also had to account for the lost livestock. So they reported it.

Keen Gospel readers will recall certain herdsmen reporting what they had seen and heard around a different town: Bethlehem (Luke 2:17). And, as in that earlier story, the townspeople people came to see what had happened.

Here, the people come and see the mysterious stranger healed. Luke also, for good measure, tells us that they were treated to both “show” and “tell”: they see the man and are also told what happened (vv. 35, 36).

What then do they do? By chapter eight of this gospel, the reader is expecting the usual response: astonishment, giving glory to God, and the request for healing for others.

Here, however, we encounter the exact opposite. Luke says that the people reacted only with fear. In fact, in this compact account Luke notes their fear twice (35, 37).

Fear versus faith. The disciples crying out in terror prompted Jesus to ask them where their faith had gone. Later in this chapter, Jesus will assure two faithful people not to be afraid (47, 50).

The Gerasenes’ fear hardens into loathing. Jesus has upset the order of things, and therefore has upset them. This disordering of their order must be remedied—as they fail to appreciate that Jesus has ordered this victim’s frightful disorder.

What they want from Jesus is simple, basic, and absolute. “Go away. Leave us alone.” The Gerasenes ask of Jesus exactly what the demons asked of him.

What could be a worse ending for a story? “Go away, healer. Go away, Word/Logos of God. Go away, Son of the Most High God. What have you to do with us?”

This is a worse ending: Jesus doesn’t argue with them. He doesn’t reason with them. He doesn’t plead with them. What could he say after what they had seen and heard?

Luke concludes the story with these laconic words of doom: “And he got into a boat and returned” (37). They were left to themselves—on the shore of the abyss.

A Remaining Puzzle—and a Promising Reception

Jesus had left “the ninety and nine” to seek “the one.” And only that one, the demoniac, made the right response. He begged to follow Jesus.

He was told instead to return to his city and proclaim what had happened, which he did. (Compare the opening of Luke 8: Jesus thus doesn’t gain another follower, let alone more financial support. His kingdom doesn’t trade in mere numerical growth nor financial increase.)

Note that the demoniac exactly fulfills Jesus’ word in v. 21. He hears the Word and obeys the Word. He is thus elevated and transformed: from an outcast, screaming into the void, to a brother of Jesus—and his apostle, proclaming the Word of life.

Luke’s transition verse points the way forward for Jesus and his work (v. 40): “As Jesus returned, the people welcomed him, for they had all been waiting for him.”

That’s more like it. And Luke proceeds to conclude his jam-packed chapter with two of the most-preached stories of miraculous blessing in the Gospels: the raising of Jairus’s daughter and the healing of the hemorrhaging woman along the way.

Careful reading of these careful Bible writers is always repaid. Notice what is said, and what is left unsaid. Notice repetitions of motifs, themes, even individual words. Notice that stories are placed among other stories for a reason, and not just because they occurred in that chronological order—since they sometimes didn’t, and chronology isn’t the point anyhow.

So two last details. Remember our friend the demoniac who had his zombie-like “walking death” turned into joyful new life? Forbidden from following Jesus, he is commissioned by Jesus to tell his good news throughout the city—the city that had ostracized and injured him, the city that had preferred things as they were, without Jesus? (That was a tough assignment. He must have been quite a guy.)

Jairus and his wife, however, received the opposite command from Jesus after receiving back their daughter from the dead: “Her parents were astounded, but he ordered them to tell no one what had happened” (56). Why did Jesus give such startlingly different commands in the same chapter? Why does Jesus invite some into his circle and others he sends away to proclaim what (little) they know as best they can?

That must be another mystery for another time. But my guess is that the answer lies in one promising direction: reading more of Luke.