Compassion and It's Cost

Mark 5: 1 – 20 (CEB)

 

I begin by sharing a portion of Fr. Greg Boyle’s bio from the Homeboy Industries website:

 

“A native Angeleno and Jesuit priest, from 1986 to 1992 Father Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. 

 

Father Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called “decade of death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992.  In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, he and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.

 

In 1988 they started what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women who walk through its doors every year seeking a better life.”

 

In books and podcasts and video clips, Fr. Boyle’s stories of his experiences are nothing short of breathtaking. His book “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion” has the power to reshape hearts and worldviews toward a more compassionate response to a world that is both brutal and beautiful – a “brutiful” world.

 

Story after story is about a person who was on the edge of killing or being killed, coming out of incarceration, or drug dealing and addicted. And story after story is about someone that Fr. Boyle loved, expected more of, tried to help. 

 

In that book, he dedicates a chapter to defining compassion – and sometimes definitions are better when they come from illustrations. 

 

In that chapter, he writes….

 

…I will admit that the degree of difficulty here is exceedingly high - kids I love killing kids I love.

 

There's nothing neat in carving space for both (victim and victimizer) in our compassion. I can recall a woman in the audience at a talk I gave in Orange County rushing me during the question-and-answer period. She wanted to do me real harm. People had to restrain her and remove her from the audience. Her daughter had been set on fire by gang members. I represented to her the victimizers. It was a sobering moment, underscoring the precariousness of being too glib here.

 

As I swam around in today’s story, Fr. Boyle’s work - the work of loving those often deemed unlovable - sat heavily on my heart.

 

Let’s try to unpack our text today through a lens of compassion. 

 

The story begins with Jesus and his followers crossing over “the sea” (which is simply big lake known as the Sea of Galilee) after having calmed a storm on the rough water overnight. 

 

If you were with us last week, recall that right before this episode, Jesus was in a boat offshore teaching to those gathered on shore. Jesus was teaching on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, and today he has crossed over to the east side, to the region of Gerasene.

 

There are commentaries that suggest that the western shore was predominantly Jewish and the eastern shore was predominantly non – Jewish (typically referred to as “gentile”).  In truth, it probably wasn’t quite that clean, but in Mark’s narrative, the action of traveling back and forth across the Galilee suggests that Jesus in moving between “his people,” and others.  This is a boundary crossing, and when we are reading scripture, we should pay attention to boundary crossings.

 

So…Jesus gets off the boat and is met by a man who is described as possessed by an evil spirit. He lives away from other people in the hills, among the tombs, and we’re told he howls night and day and cuts and beats himself with stones.  

 

In scripture, and historically, people with disabilities or mental illness are often described as “possessed.” It’s important to name that we have different understanding of health, wellness, and wholeness today. There is a good chance that you have experienced someone on the streets who is loud, agitated, perhaps intimidating, and likely experiencing psychosis or some other illness.  While not an “unclean spirit” or perhaps a “demon” in a supernatural sense, they certainly are grappling with something that makes life among others difficult. I think it is important to bring our modern sensibility about mental illness to stories like this one in scripture. It is very likely that this man was wrestling with an illness that we would diagnose and treat in our modern world.

 

The man addresses Jesus – naming him as the Son of God. He asks not to be tortured….and the text says this is because Jesus has already addressed the “unclean spirit,” commanding it to come out. So…it is the unclean spirit that is actually speaking here.

When Jesus asks about the man’s name, the answer in one of the most unsettling lines of scripture – the NRSV translation is straight out of a horror movie:

My name is Legion…for we are many.

 

The text describes a dialogue that ensues between Jesus and Legion. The spirits don’t want to be tortured by Jesus, and so rather than just destroying them, Jesus casts them out of the man and into a heard of 2000 swine on the hillside. The possessed swine stampede into the lake and drowned.

 

Ok. 2000 pig corpses in a body of fresh water seems like a bit of an ecological disaster. 

 

Not to mention the economic loss to the owner who was counting on selling a lot of pork parts.

 

The swineherds run and tell other folks what has happened, and a crowd gathers on the hillside.

Where once there was a howling man who could not be restrained by chains and shackles, they now find someone fully dressed, composed, in his “right mind” we might say.

 

And those folks, looking around at the situation - at the man whose life has been restored and at the 2000 pigs floating dead on the water – ask Jesus to leave. In their awe, their fear, they “begged Jesus to leave their neighborhood.”

 

As Jesus gets back in the boat, and the man he has helped begs to join him. Jesus instead commissions him – SENDS HIM - to be an evangelist in this gentile mission field – instructing him to tell others about what Jesus has done for him. And the man does just that… throughout the Decapolis – called the Ten Cities in the translation we heard today.

 

Putting this in the context of first century Palestine, Jesus has entered gentile territory and waded around in a bunch of things that would have been deemed impure in the Jewish culture. The man he helps is living among the tombs, and to have any contact with corpses and tombs was a source of impurity or uncleanness that had to be addressed by ritual in Judaism. And then there are the 2000 swine – pigs were unclean, not kosher. 

 

Amid all of this, Jesus does an amazing and compassionate thing – he helps one man who is living outside of community. He restores the man to himself. He makes him whole, capable of living with others once again.

 

Helping that one man comes at the cost of a herd of swine, and that seems to upset the locals. They drive Jesus away, back across the Sea to his own people.

Meanwhile the man who has been helped travels through an enclave of Hellenistic cities to talk about what Jesus has done – this man is the first preacher of good news among the gentiles.

 

It is likely, that within the original context of Mark’s gospel, this was very much a story about reaching gentiles at any cost. 

 

But for today, in our current world order, I believe it is a story about the good news of Jesus’ compassion…and the story raises questions about whether we will tolerate the cost of such radical acts of love and healing.

 

Is one man’s life worth 2000 swine? 

 

In Jesus math it is. 

But the people in this story seem to be doing different math.

 

I wonder what calculations the people in this story were making – about their safety, about their security – personal and financial, about their way of life, their sense of order? 2000 pigs for one man’s wholeness? That’s a awful lot…

 

I think about Fr. Boyle, about his doors open to violent gang members. About the way the neighbors might have felt when he first started offering refuge to those that they feared. I think about that mother whose daughter had been set afire by gang members. I can understand her anger about Fr. Boyle’s willingness to help people who would do such things.

 

But Jesus…

Jesus isn’t doing that calculation.

And isn’t that good news for the person with the evil spirit, for the person with cancer, for the person who has a criminal record, for the person who can’t seem to hold down a job, for the person coming out of prison…

 

I think compassion – the wild, radical kind that Jesus enacted – has a real cost. 

I think the cost has to do with giving up our sense of security or our sense of righteousness so that every beloved child of God finds wholeness.

 

And I know that not every act of radical compassion is my work to do…but I think it is worth our asking as a community of folks seeking to become followers of Jesus what acts of compassion ARE ours to do…

 

…recognizing that doing the work of compassion will likely make some very uncomfortable. 

 

We might even be asked to leave the places we go to serve.

 

But there are worse things. And maybe someone we’ve helped will go tell of the mighty acts of Jesus in their lives.

 

May it be so.

Amen.