The man had been dwelling among the tombs,
and no one could restrain him any longer, even with a chain.
Sin makes one prone to self-destructive behavior. To an extent, society can help restrain such ones from anything too extreme. But there is only so much that most others are willing to do. They are often willing to help at first, but less so when it exposes them to danger themselves. And ultimately it is often a problem beyond their scope, wherein restraining the evil only delays the eventual recurrence of the behavior. Society can't address the forces that reduced an individual such as this to such a state. Such forces are not merely economic or psychological, but spiritual. And these are often sins in which society itself is complicit, even as it attempts to mitigate its most unsightly effects.
Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside.
And they pleaded with him,
“Send us into the swine. Let us enter them.”
Legion was apparently tied in some way to the surrounding geography. It desired to express its identity by causing harm in that area and that people rather than another. If it was going to be cast out from a person it would settle for a herd of swine. If it couldn't hurt the man it formerly possessed directly, causing problems where he lived was a sufficient backup plan.
The herd of about two thousand rushed down a steep bank into the sea,
where they were drowned.
Jesus, for his part, was interested primarily in healing the afflicted human person. He did not show much concern for the destabilizing effect the loss of the swine might have had on the local economy. Rather, he was content, for now, to see the man who been possessed "sitting there clothed and in his right mind". They were still in a place among tombs, with a drowned herd of unclean animals nearby. But none of these things was enough to be able to prevent the healing and restoration Jesus gave to the man who needed him.
Then they began to beg him to leave their district.
We see from the fact that they begged Jesus to leave that they seemed to prefer the comfort of the old normal to the invasive and unsettling elements of the healing power of Jesus. Their swine economy was functioning perfectly well until he disrupted it. What was one human casualty? Well, to Jesus, one such casualty was everything.
“Go home to your family and announce to them
all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.”
In this call from Jesus to the formerly possessed man we see the way in which Jesus typically goes about changing systemic issues in society. He first sets free individuals, makes them his witnesses, has them continue to live among the people they knew in the places they were from, and, as a consequence, their transformed lives begin to change the world around them as well.
Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis
what Jesus had done for him; and all were amazed.
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