Call the Demon by Name
Mark 5:1-10
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
February 16, 2025
Image: Koenig, Peter. Casting Out Evil Spirits, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville,
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgJn3StDXI
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation about baptism with a friend. This person was raised as a Christian, but is now active in a non-Christian faith. They had recently attended the baptism of a friend’s child and were horrified that it still included an exorcism of the Devil. In many churches, the baptismal service contains these questions:
Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?
Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
When my friend referred to an exorcism of the Devil, I think they must have been referencing those questions.
Like the person who is appalled by contemporary people speaking of the Devil as a real thing, we may have difficulty knowing what to do with the notion of the demons in this incident from Mark’s gospel. We will get to that.
Jesus and the disciples have crossed the sea of Galilee into Gentile territory. The crossing was rough. A bad storm with strong winds had stirred up the waves, and the disciples, many experienced fishermen among them, had been afraid that their boat would sink. But Jesus had rebuked the wind and the waves until it was calm.
As soon as they step on shore, they encounter a storm of a different kind. A man comes out to meet them. He comes out from the tombs, which are in caves, occurring in the hillside. He is used to being in the shadows, hiding, existing in this place between life and death. He looks like someone experiencing homelessness, someone who hasn’t bathed or eaten or had a real conversation with another living person very often.
He shouts Jesus’ name “Son of the Most High God.” So far, in Mark’s gospel, it is only demons who know Jesus’ real identity. Jesus had recognized the demon first. Before the man spoke, Jesus had called the demon to come out. Now that the demon, or the man, has named him, Jesus asks for his name.
The demons answer for the man. We don’t know his real name. All the identity he has left is the very thing that has robbed him of his health and sanity, destroyed his connection with his community, and made him a danger to himself and others. Speaking with the man’s voice, the demons say “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
If we take the story at face value, it seems to mean that there are a lot of demons inside this poor guy. We don’t think we have much firsthand experience with demons, so we may read this as a crude first-century explanation for mental illness or we put the entire incident in the literary category of fantasy. But let’s stick with it for a bit longer.
Jesus is just the latest person to confront this uncontrollable force. The man has a consistent record of attacking again and again. Every effort at control has failed. The violence erupts again, and the cycle repeats itself. Again. Despite best efforts. When the village restrains him, he breaks their chains, wrenches open their shackles and no one has the strength to subdue him any more. [1]
“My name is Legion, for we are many.” “Legion” is no proper name, it just is a way of saying: “The opponent you face is big beyond counting, and persistent beyond your patience.”[2]
A legion is the largest unit of Roman soldiers, about 5,000 soldiers. It is an indication of the quantity of this man’s suffering. The sources of his brokenness are myriad. The assault on his mind, soul, and body is multi-pronged; it comes from many sources braided together.[3]
On one level, we can read this as the story of one person’s healing which can set him on a path to address all the other issues in his life.
But we might notice that the unclean spirit does not ask to be sent out of the man, it asks Jesus “not to send them out of the country.” And then, we might understand that this is not really a story about an individual man, but about a representative character meant to stand for the country or the people of Israel.[4]
The demon identifies itself as Legion, which is to say the Roman army, which was in fact in possession of Israel.
Obery Hendricks writes, “Mark’s veiled description of his country has having gone wild with self-destruction corresponds to the reality of his situation. . . . Israel was best by an unclean spirit that expressed itself through a number of extreme social pathologies. The crime rate was so high that Josephus said it looked like the country had been ravaged by a war. The numerous matter-of-fact refences in the Gospels to insanity, lameness, depression, abject dejection, bands of robbers, disposed farmers, enslaved debt defaulters, diseased beggars, disrupted menstrual cycles (which are often the result of extreme social tensions and anxiety) and revolutionary upheavals depict a society that in many ways appeared to be coming apart at the seams.”[5]
The village has identified the man as the problem. He howls at all hours. He lurks in the graveyard, frightening anyone who needs to go there. He harms himself. They have done everything they can think of, but they feel powerless to help him or themselves. He is a menace.
But Jesus demands the demon’s name. The name of the problem is Legion, which immediately implies the army. The underlying evil is not homelessness or mental illness, but the exploitation and mistreatment by their rulers. The impact of the Empire was so pervasive and so all encompassing that it stripped the man of his humanity and that pattern was repeating itself over and over again across the land.
Jesus calls the demon by name to free people from self-blame or scapegoating and to help them identify the real source of evil. It is an uncontrollable force. It attacks again and again. Every effort at control has failed. The violence erupts. The cycle repeats. No one has the will to combat it any more.
That kind of sounds like gun violence or racism or toxic masculinity, poverty, homophobia, ableism, any of the ‘isms. They wear us down and we feel powerless against them and may accept the status quo.
The letter to the Ephesians says “Our struggle is not against the enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12)
The Biblical writers understood the dehumanizing systems which run our world.
William Stringfellow was a theologian and civil rights activist who took seriously the Bible’s warnings about principalities and powers. A White graduate of Harvard Law School, he moved to a tenement house in Harlem in 1956 to live alongside and represent poor Black and Puerto Rican clients. He was also active in the Episcopal Church, fighting for the ordination of women and against the church’s longstanding homophobia.
Perhaps his most influential book was An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I tried to read it this week. There’s too much to share, but let me offer just a few of his ideas.
According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name...They are designated by such titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…
Stringfellow says, “And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language, they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more. The principalities and powers are legion.”[6]
He argues that the most powerful people seem most susceptible to the power of death. “There is unleashed among the principalities in this society,” he writes,
“a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults, dispirits, defeats, and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership.[7]
Jesus banished the demons and restored the man’s dignity and humanity. He was clothed and in his right mind.
Stringfellow says that we resist death by living humanly. For him, Christian ethics is less about being right than about being a sign of life in the midst of death, to keep on being a human being in the midst of the chaos and evil around us. He calls that spiritual warfare. It consists of small, even symbolic, daily acts of resistance subversion within systems to protest the dehumanizing effects of living with the principalities and powers.
Elmer Bendiner was a WW2 B-17 navigator. In the thick of the war against the Nazis, one of the most incredible stories unfolded. Bendiner explains: “Our B-17 was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was not unusual, but on this particular occasion, our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a twenty-millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was not quite that simple. On the morning following the raid, Bohn had gone down to ask our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that not just one shell but eleven had been found in the gas tanks–eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had been parted for us.
It seemed like a miracle. After the war, Bendiner learned that when the unexploded shells were opened, there was no explosive charge inside. They were all empty and harmless. Except for one. It contained a carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech. Translated, the note said, “This is all we can do for you now.” At least one prisoner of war forced to work in a munitions plant in Czechoslovakia was engaged in small acts of resistance.[8]
Living humanly means living within what you know to be true, refusing to accept the lies that the authorities want you to believe. It means calling the demon by name.
Friends we know a bigger story than this one incident in Jesus’ life. Here, he cast out the demon, defeating the power of death that was crushing this man’s life. We also know that Jesus went on to defeat the power of death forever in resurrection. If we believe that, we become even more threatening to the powers, because their threat of death loses its hold over us, depriving our adversaries of that system of control.
Stringfellow says that the threat of death holds no fear for the confessing community and therefore puts us outside the systems of control which threaten us because the worst they can do is kill us.
In the chaos of the world right now, we can call the demon by name. Jesus offers us the opportunity to name and challenge the madness in the world around us instead of accommodating ourselves to it. In Jesus, we can claim an identity of resistance which says that we will not be bound by our loyalties or our compulsions or by the status quo or our fears, even our fears of death. Thanks be to God.
[1] Richard Swanson, https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/a-provocation-fifth-sunday-after-pentecost-luke-826-39/
[2] Swanson
[3] Debie Thomas, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2259-legion
[4] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted, (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p p 145-46.
[5] Hendricks, p 146
[6] William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, chapter 3, excerpted here https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-ethic-for-christians-and-other_23.html
[7] As quoted by Mac Loftin in The Christian Century, February 5, 2025
https://www.christiancentury.org/print/pdf/node/43877
[8] recounted by Elmir Bendiner in his book The Fall of the Fortresses, retold here https://greglewisinfo.com/2020/04/18/the-b-17-saved-by-a-miracle/