When We Ask Christ to Leave

The Terrible Comfort of the Familiar

“Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gadarenes asked him to depart from them; for they were seized with great fear.”

— Luke 8:37

There are passages in the Gospel whose terror lies almost hidden.

This is one of them.

We see the man among the tombs and imagine that he is the frightening figure in the story. He is naked. Violent. Possessed by a legion. He cannot live among men. Chains cannot hold him. He has become a stranger even to himself.

Yet he is not the most frightening figure.

The most frightening people are those who are clothed.

Those who live in houses.

Those who appear sane.

For when Christ restores the man to himself, they ask Christ to leave.

They had learned to live with the demons.

They knew where the possessed man was. They knew what to do with him. Bind him. Guard him. Keep him outside the city. Let him inhabit the tombs. His misery had become part of the landscape.

Terrible things can become ordinary when we live beside them long enough.

The fathers understood this.

The heart can make peace with almost anything except repentance.

We become accustomed to anger.

Accustomed to resentment.

Accustomed to lust.

Accustomed to judgment.

Accustomed to ambition.

Accustomed to the small cruelties we permit ourselves in thought.

We arrange them carefully within us. We learn their movements. We give them explanations. Eventually we cease even to experience them as bondage.

We know how to live with our demons.

But Christ does not come to negotiate with them.

He comes ashore.

And immediately everything hidden begins to cry out.

“What have You to do with me?”

This is what the presence of holiness does. It reveals what has been permitted to remain unnamed.

The demons know Him.

This is one of the strange ironies of the Gospel. They know exactly who stands before them.

“Jesus, Son of the Most High God.”

The townspeople do not.

The demons tremble because they recognize His authority.

The townspeople tremble because they recognize what His authority might cost them.

And perhaps this is why conversion can become frightening.

We imagine that we want Christ to heal us.

But often we want Him to comfort us without disturbing the arrangements we have made with our passions.

We want peace without purification.

Prayer without repentance.

Christ without the death of the old man.

We want Him near enough to console us, but not so near that the swine begin running toward the sea.

For when Christ truly enters a human life, something must drown.

Something cannot remain.

The fathers never romanticized this.

They went into the desert because they knew that the Gospel was not an ornament added to an otherwise intact life. Christ comes to raise the dead. And resurrection necessarily means the ending of our intimacy with the tombs.

The possessed man had lived among the dead.

Christ restores him to the living.

And then comes one of the most beautiful images in the Gospel:

He is sitting at the feet of Jesus.

Clothed.

In his right mind.

Nothing spectacular remains.

No chains breaking.

No screaming.

No violence.

Only a man sitting quietly before Christ.

Perhaps this is one of the clearest images of salvation.

To become simple again.

To become whole.

To sit before God without being driven from place to place by every thought and passion.

The desert fathers called this hesychia.

Stillness.

Not merely external silence, but the gathering together of the fragmented heart.

The legion has become one man again.

This is what Christ does.

He gathers what the demons scatter.

He makes one what the passions have made many.

And strangely, this wholeness terrifies the townspeople.

They see the man healed and “they were afraid.”

One would expect rejoicing.

Instead there is fear.

Because the presence of a healed man exposes the sickness everyone else has agreed not to see.

His freedom reveals their accommodation.

His peace reveals their bondage.

And so they make their terrible request:

Leave us.

There is perhaps no sadder prayer in Scripture.

And Christ grants it.

He does not force Himself upon them.

He gets into the boat.

The One who commanded a legion of demons to depart will not compel a single human heart to receive Him.

Such is the terrible gentleness of God.

He can command the sea.

He can command the demons.

He can command the dead to rise.

But before the human heart He waits.

The elders understood that hell begins here: not necessarily in dramatic rebellion, but in the quiet preference for life without God.

We may prefer the familiar bondage because freedom feels too costly.

We may prefer our resentment because we no longer know who we would be without it.

We may prefer our judgments because they protect us from seeing ourselves.

We may prefer the tombs simply because we have lived among them for so long that they feel like home.

And Christ stands before us.

Not accusing.

Not coercing.

Simply present.

The question of the Gospel is therefore not whether demons exist.

The question is whether we have grown comfortable with them.

What have we permitted to remain within us because confronting it would disturb too much?

What darkness have we renamed personality, necessity, prudence, woundedness, righteousness?

What herd are we unwilling to lose?

The man who had been possessed understands something the others do not.

He begs to remain with Jesus.

Once you have known the tombs and then tasted freedom, there is nowhere else you desire to be.

But Christ gives him an unexpected obedience.

“Return to your home.”

Go back among the people who asked Me to leave.

Carry into their midst the life they were afraid to receive.

And perhaps this is why Christ can depart without abandoning them.

He leaves behind a man.

A living witness.

Someone who had been dead and now lives.

Someone whose very existence says:

You need not remain among the tombs.

The Gadarenes asked Christ to leave.

But mercy found a way to remain.

Perhaps this is the final tenderness of the passage.

Even when we fear His coming,

even when we cling to what enslaves us,

even when we say,

“Depart from me,”

God leaves some trace of His mercy behind.

A word.

A memory.

A healed man sitting quietly among us.

Something that continues to whisper:

There is another way to live.

And perhaps one day,

when we have finally grown weary of the tombs,

we will remember Him.

And ask Him to return.