Perhaps the most frightening experience one can have is for someone with bipolar or borderline personality disorder snapping and just losing it. The behavior such individuals can display during an episode can be a horrifying and scary experience. One can say that in the early Christian times severe mental illness was believed to be a sign of demon possession or being under the influence of Satan.
Like many severely mentally ill people, the Gergesine demoniacs were unfit to live in normal society. They were aggressive and self-destructive. The demons recognize Jesus as the Son of God and have nothing in common with him and are tormented and very uncomfortable by his very presence in their midst. They are surprised that their power is terminated even before the Last Judgment. The Lord rescues people from the devil even before his resurrection and before the Last Judgment—in fact, he rescues people from Satan even today!
The deceitful demons knowing their power is over ask that they may enter the swine, thinking by their guile they can fool the Lord and the readers of this account. It is by God’s will that the demons went into the swine. For the devil has no power even over swine. Even the demoniacs received the providential benefit of God’s care.
The demons going into the swine is a visible sign of the demoniacs’ healing. The Lord not only heals physical infirmities; he heals mental illnesses. Jesus has sovereign power over both physical and mental illnesses. Even today, the Lord heals mental illnesses. In one of the parishes I served at years ago, a parishioner with a severe mental illness was healed sufficiently that he was able to function as the parish’s sextant through the power of prayer and assisted to some extent with medication.
This passage provides a clear message that the devil has power to tempt and create problems, but only if we give it to him. The devil has no power even over the swine they destroyed. The swine went over their cliff to their destruction to save themselves from torment. For it was better for the swine to die than to be in the control of Satan.
It is interesting to note that Mark and Luke both describe demonic possession. They describe one demoniac living in the tombs in the region of the Gaderenes. It appears that they really may be the same account from a different perspective. Matthew is the only evangelist to specify that there were two demonaiacs suffering from demonic possession.
For the Jews swine are ritually impure. They didn’t get that the Lord has power over Satan, and the illnesses that plague us. They were so locked into the letter of the Mosaic Law that they missed the divine paradigm shift that was happening before their eyes!
We too must make the paradigm shifts necessary to understand and apply the deeper meaning of our faith to our daily lives and to our interactions with a diverse population of people. Many of these people are not Orthodox Christians or even Christians at all—yet we have a golden opportunity to witness to them—not by thumping the Bible—rather, by living our faith in the way we interact with them at work, school, and wherever else we meet them.
In the final analysis, it is not the letter of the Law that is important, it is the spirit of the law that saves. The spirit of the law embodies the deeper meaning of faith and the power of real healing—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.