Swine and the Divine

Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. Luke 8:32-33

We bible buffs have read this passage too often to grasp its full meaning or to realize how appalling it is.

I mean, we’re talking demons and pigs here – a legion of fiends and two thousand filthy, stinking, snorting, disgusting pigs. 

If you think about it, this dramatis personae has the making of a summer blockbuster similar to World War Z  or Dawn of the Dead.  

But this is more than a repulsively thrilling story. It is a reminder that dark forces share our world with us, spirits and demons exist, and Jesus has power over the forces of evil.

Jesus is fairly casual in his response to the man whose soul has been displaced by hundreds of foul demons. 

Frankly, most of us are ambivalent about the notion of demon possession. In the 1973 thriller The Exorcist,  I was horrified by the vivid scenes of a little girl possessed by a hideous demon, but I stepped out of the darkened theater and reminded myself, “Of course demons don’t exist.”

These days, exorcisms are rare and most experts regard demonic behavior as the manifestation of schizophrenia, sociopathic personality, or bi-polar syndrome. 

But to most of us, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that dangerously crazy people are controlled by demons. How else can we explain why fiends take guns into theaters, elementary school classrooms, or political rallies?

In 1970, a young German woman named Anneliese Michel began hearing voices that told her she was damned and going to hell. As her condition worsened, she saw Satan’s face leering at her several times a day. 

When anti-psychotic drugs had no effect, Anneliese and her parents concluded she was possessed by a demon. They dismissed the doctors and hired two priest exorcists. According to one account, 67 exorcism sessions lasting up to four hours, were performed for ten months. 

During the grueling process, Anneliese refused to eat and died at her home. The autopsy stated the cause of death as malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while exorcisms were performed. She weighed 68 pounds at death. Both Anneliese’s parents and the priest exorcists were charged with negligent homicide.

But the question won’t go away: was Anneliese possessed like the demoniac Jesus confronted? Or did she have a mental illness that could have been cured by psychopharmacology?

The incident with the demoniac on the Sea of Galilee also stimulates modern skepticism about miracle cures and faith healing. There are those who believe stories of Jesus’ miracles were made up by the evangelists for dramatic effect, or if people were really cured, it was accomplished by Jesus’ charismatic powers of suggestion.

Perhaps you were listening to NPR’s Radio Lab Saturday  as hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich guided listeners through the Placebo Effect. This is a well-known phenomenon in which people are cured by the power of suggestion. Anecdotes included tales of witch doctors who knew they were using trickery in their trade but cured people of their illnesses anyway. The hosts interviewed a woman whose carpal tunnel syndrome was cured – temporarily – by an evangelical faith healer.

But the program suggested the placebo effect also happens outside of faith settings. A physician reported his experience with the electrodes that are implanted in the brain to halt the hand tremors of Parkinson’s Disease. The doctor said he would tell the patient he was sending a mild current through the implants that would cause the tremors stop. And so it would. But when he failed to send the current and didn't tell the patients, their tremors also stopped.

All these accounts are enough to make one downright skeptical. Demons don’t exist. Miracle cures are a psychosomatic, mere figments of the mind. There no mysteries left in life. How boring is that?

Thank God for the pigs. These disgusting and certainly unwilling players are convincing evidence that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our feeble philosophies.

The story appears in all three synoptic gospels: Jesus converses coolly with a man full of demons.  The eerie scene forces us to face the possibility of eternal damnation, where unredeemed sinners darn socks that smell.

The man’s demons frankly terrify us mere mortals, but it is immediately clear that the demons are terrified of Jesus. Shouting out to him in a monstrous chorus, they beg him not to cast them back into hell.

Instead, they spy a herd of two thousand pigs – as if one could miss a herd of two thousand pigs in Israel – and beg Jesus to cast them into the belching, farting creatures.

Two thousand pigs.

I can’t even imagine a herd that big. Never in my life have I seen so many pigs in one place. 

Even one pig is too protuberant to ignore. In Cuba, many of our relatives and their friends keep a prize hog in a pen behind their tiny houses. The creatures are hard to miss. They serve as a convenient garbage disposal but mostly they are a hedge against starvation. A small family can eat for months on a single swine.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania I occasionally drove past roadside pits where a half dozen enormous porkers submerged themselves in fecal mud, luxuriating in orange rinds, potato peels, corncobs and other items of the compost du jour. You could smell them a mile away.

So cover your nose and try to imagine two thousand stinking pigs scattered across an acre of ground reeking with decaying dung and muck. 

The more I think about it, the more appalling the scene becomes.  

Now close your eyes and imagine two thousand pigs suddenly rousting themselves from their personal stys, shaking off chunks of half-chewed garbage from their sodden jaws. Listen the deafening roar as eight thousand cloven hooves assault the muck and the beasts violently jostle one another as they charge off the precipice into the lake.  Watch as the impact of the monstrous herd churns geysers of fetid water high into the air as pigs drown in the lake without so much as a “th- th- that’s all folks.”

Is there a more bizarre scene in all of scripture? Certainly no scene in Man of Steel is messier, louder, or more expensive to produce.

But bizarre or not, one has to ask: who could make up such a thing? The story of Jesus, the demoniac and the pigs captured the attention of thousands of people and it was passed down by oral tradition for dozens of years until it arrived intact in three separate gospels.

The reason the story remains unchallenged two thousand years later is that it has the ring of truth. The unmistakable message:

The dark side exists, and it is populated with atrocious demons and hideous fiends.

The thunderous massacre of two thousand pigs got everyone’s attention, then and now.

Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him. Luke 8:37-39.

Two thousand years later, the message is clear: 

God has given Jesus the ultimate authority over us all: the good, the righteous, the weak, the tempted, even the repugnant creatures of the nether regions.

And those who bask in the warmth of that authority will always have Jesus’ protection from the evil one. 

And they will safely reside forever in the presence of the God of infinite love.