A the start of this year, I joined a group of people who wanted to read through the New Testament in the year. It’s a convenient exercise to do, because there are 260 chapters in the New Testament, which makes accomplishing the feat involve reading 1 chapter a day, 5 days a week.

Anyways, it has been a good semi-accelerated way, with some accountability, to be reading the Bible most every day, and it has been a nice way to remilitarize myself with the New Testament after some time and distance from it. When I was a teen and a new Christian, I was so remarkably passionate about reading Scripture. I filled myself in it day after day, and it changed my life, for sure. But I got older and other things crept in.

Anyways, our approach for reading through the New Testament is dictated by when each letter or book was dated as having been written, so we might move through them in a somewhat chronological order. We’re not rigorists, dissecting the gospels to read pericopes or verses of texts interwoven with sections from letters. But we’re following a loose ordering for when each chapter was completed as a unit.

We began in Galatians, and then read James, and now we are in Mark, and today we read Mark 5.

I wanted to bring up the first story in this chapter because it is painfully haunting to me.

Some cross-conversations between members about Mark highlight how uncomfortable his stories are at times. Jesus seemingly barks at his mom and brothers when they come to take him home. Jesus is contrarian to everyone at some point, it seems. And that is a neat facet of Mark. He reminds us that God is not necessarily trying to make us comfortable in changing us when we follow him.

And that means all of these stories may not make full sense to me either.

In the lead story in this chapter, Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee and ended up in the vicinity of the Gadarenes. Now, somewhere near the lake were a complex of tombs, because the text says a man came out from them to meet Jesus when he was getting out of the boat.

The man had superhuman strength. And he was utterly broken, because he lived in tombs, crying out and cutting himself.

Others had tried to bind and secure him, as he was a frightening figure in the region, but whenever he was captured and secured, he always broke out of the bonds.

We also read the he is a foreigner to the area, which also suggests he is a stranger and alone in his torments.

And his torments are sizable, because when Jesus asks him his name, the man no longer has one. A legion of demons inhabiting him respond to Jesus instead.

As I sit and thought about this man, I couldn’t help to power his plight at that time. He was an alien to the area who simply frightened everyone. And he was also an alien to himself- a man with no name any longer.

Here is a man who, for whatever reason, had ended up living in a foreign cemetery, tortured, isolated, and forgotten- by himself, and by those might have cared about him at one time.

The story made me think of so many of us, who have struggled with similar things, if even to a drastically smaller scale. A fuzzy identity. Isolation. Being utter lost. Being utterly enslaved to something inside of us, that drives us to hurt ourselves.

How long had he been in the rocks, slicing his body at a voice’s suggestion. Yelling uncontrollably when seized and commanded by another inside.

Thinking about this story and about culture today, I realize, with the modern recognition of so much mental illness, and the downright crippling power of addictions, maybe this guy isn’t so far off from being like thousands, or millions, of others in this world today.

No, he isn’t.

The beauty in this little story lies in the fact that the desparate demoniac, tortured and abused by his possessors, his mind, and his own hands, naked and dirty and stinky and scabby, finds clarity even within that prison he is in, to see hope in the man stepping off of the boat. And he goes to him.

Because he thinks the man- he hopes the man- he throws everything he has on the bet that the man can and will set him free.

The hopeless soul trapped in that body, shut down and shut up and shut out by evil, finally sees hope in Jesus, and says I need you to help me.

Hope for the forgotten.

Jesus heals him by sending the thousand demons into a herd of pigs, and the pigs rush to their demise to drown in the lake.

The man is soon discovered by the locals as normal, clothed and contained, and they freak out.

They freak out about the healer being there, and ask him to leave.

I liked this story very much for how life turned around for the man after Jesus helped him.

It is yet hard to read about how the man, with nothing holding him at this place where he had settled some time ago because of his afflictions, pleadingly asked Jesus to let him go on away with him and his disciples- and for the reasons known to himself, Jesus told him no, and instead, sent him home, to tell those he knew about how God had poured his kindness and mercy on him.

I suspect that was not an easy direction for the man to embrace.

But I reckon he understood why he had to do it, and suspect some of it had to do with the need for reconciliation and reconnection with his own family.

I suppose when a man gives you your mind, your heart, and your life back, you accept his suggestions for your to-do list as good recommendations.