The Man Who Was Sent Back

Mark spends more words on this story than on almost any other healing in his Gospel. He wants us to see the whole picture. A man living in a graveyard. Chains that could not hold him. Night and day crying out and cutting himself. Then a boat pulls up on the shore, and Jesus steps out, and the man runs to him. Everything in the man that is still human runs toward Jesus. Everything that is not human begs to be left alone.

What follows is strange and quick. A name, Legion. A herd of pigs. A stampede down a bank into the lake. The townspeople come out, see the man sitting there dressed and calm, and they are afraid. Not relieved. Afraid. They ask Jesus to leave. They had learned to live with the demoniac. They did not know how to live with the power that had healed him.

The one idea in this passage is this. Jesus does not need permission to do good, and he does not stay where he is not wanted. He gets back in the boat. But he does not leave the region empty. He leaves a witness. The man wanted to come along, and Jesus sent him home instead. The Decapolis, ten Gentile cities that had just asked Jesus to go away, now had one man walking through their streets telling what had happened to him. When Jesus comes back to that region later in Mark, crowds are waiting. Somebody had been talking.

Here is the turn toward life. Most of us would rather leave than stay. A fresh start somewhere else feels cleaner than a slow rebuilding among people who know us. But the ordinary calling of a Christian is usually the harder one: stay, go home, be a changed person among unchanged neighbors. You may not be able to make them welcome Jesus. You can make it impossible for them to forget that he was here.

If you have been praying for a new place or a new set of people, it may be worth asking whether the Lord is instead sending you back to the old ones with a new story to tell. That is not a lesser calling. It is the one he gave the first missionary to the Gentiles in Mark.