Legion

Reflections on the Lectionary for June 22nd

Jesus and the demoniacs (based on the version from Matthew, in which there are two men). Otthenrich-Bibel, folio 18v, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikimedia.

I’m sitting very near the middle of nowhere, in the forests of southeastern Tennessee, watching a light fog sink over the hillsides. It has been stormy this week, so the ground is heavy with rain and the creeks are running high. I’m one week into a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction program, submerged in a swirling world of literature and a stream of new faces and new ideas. I write all day, basically—when I’m not reading or walking. The campus is sprawling and extravagant: stone buildings and green knolls, bells chiming on the hour and the half-hour, and deer trotting by the road under towering oaks. Most of my needs can be met at either the library or the dining hall, and I pass the days conjuring words onto pages, or trying to.

Every so often I surface into the real world. Cell coverage is spotty here, and I still haven’t figured out how to permanently connect to the wifi, and I’m mostly too busy to invest much time in the news, even if I wanted to. But every so often I catch a glimpse. I’m so disconnected from the real world that it’s hard to put the strangeness of the news in context. The Marine Corps is deployed to Los Angeles? Trump did something with the National Guard? People are carrying out political assassinations in Minnesota? Israel is bombing Iran? Another passenger plane met another harrowing end? There’s a Soviet-style military parade? It feels a bit like the setup of an apocalyptic movie, and I’m the oblivious protagonist missing all the clues that the world is beginning to unravel around me. I’m aware, as I actively neglect my duty to be an informed citizen, of how good it feels not to know. I’m finding reasons to sustain the persistent pleasure of not having any idea what Donald Trump put on Truth Social this morning. It can feel good, for a season, to be driven out into the wilds.

The gospel text in the lectionary for this week comes from Luke, and it tells the story of a man on the fringes of society, living very near to the middle of nowhere. This man had also been driven out into the wilds. Mark and Matthew tell versions of this story too; it’s one of the places I send my New Testament students to learn how to notice how differently the three Synoptic Gospels can tell the same story. (Compare Luke 8:26-39, Mark 5:1-20, and Matthew 8:28-34, and notice where the story takes place, how many men there are, what the demons are called, and what other events surround the story). In Luke’s version, Jesus has arrived at the “region of the Gerasenes” (or the Gadarenes or the Gergesenes, depending on which ancient manuscript of Luke you read—this part of Luke is messy). There’s a motif in the Synoptic Gospels that Jesus often encounters troubles or unrest as he moves eastward across the Sea of Galilee away from Judea, and he conversely finds easier and more peaceful conditions as he moves westward across the sea back toward home. (You can see this motif in action in the passage immediately preceding this one in Luke, actually; in 8:22-25, a passage across east the Sea of Galilee brings the storm that Jesus eventually calms). That motif holds here; as they arrive on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus is greeted by “a man from the city who had demons,” who was naked and living in tombs, who would sometimes be captured and chained up by the townsfolk, but who “would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.” Notice this man’s relationship with society and with other human beings; he is from the city but living at the periphery of it, from the world of the living but living among the dead, and held captive in chains but freed into wild places. This man is described as out of place, living a transgressive life, never where or who he is supposed to be.

Many of the most interesting interpretations of this passage ask questions about disability. This story is told in Luke (and the other gospels) as a story of demonic possession, and Jesus is described as a kind of demon-conquering liberator who is freeing the man from his tormentors. But—many of these readings point out—the man does not ask for Jesus’ liberation, and indeed he begs Jesus not to interfere with his life. “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me,” the man cries out to Jesus, falling at his feet. Jesus ignores the man’s wishes and casts out the demons anyway. This mirrors many other gospel stories about Jesus’ healing activities; more often than not, Jesus’ healing comes without someone’s permission or in spite of their requests to be left alone. This contributes, many scholars point out, to the idea that differing abilities (including what we might call mental illness) are pathologies, deviations from normalcy and wholeness, and only suitable for correction and restoration. There’s no sense that someone might live a satisfied and happy life with a body or mind that others might call disabled. The way passages like this one describe disability (including mental illness) as the result of sinfulness or demonic possession has real effects in our world today. Everyone must want healing, whether they ask for it or not. Everybody must want to conform to some ideal of wholeness or health (that no one actually meets), whether they say so or not. Everybody must need Jesus to fix them, even if they say they don’t. The scholars who read this passage with disability theory in mind often point out that harmful ideas about human flourishing are made worse and more common by readings of the New Testament, and that stories like these make life harder for people living with all kinds of disability, both visible and invisible. It’s no wonder that this man found himself on the edge of society, driven into the wilds—he might have been sent there by the relentless need of other people to regulate and comment upon his existence.

But to me, the most interesting part of this passage comes when Jesus asks the man’s name. This question is part of the setup for the story; in the ancient world, knowing the name of a supernatural being gave you power over it. (Something similar still holds true in some cultures today; many folktales and legends warn against telling your name to a stranger you meet in a wild place, since by doing so you might inadvertently surrender yourself to a malevolent spirit). In Luke, Jesus’ request to know the man’s name is an opening move in attempt to “heal” him; knowing its name is a necessary condition for casting out the demon. But the man’s response is fascinating. “Legion,” the man said, and the text explains, “for many demons had entered him.”

Now, here is where I find myself thinking about the news and the wilds.

Imagine that you met a man like this, on a street corner or at a gas station or by the dumpsters behind a building. Or imagine that you met him in a cemetery on the outskirts of town—you can imagine any kind of place where most people are not known to hang out, or not really supposed to linger. Imagine that you met him in June of 2025, with everything that’s going on in the world. You ask him his name, and he tells you that his name is National Guard. Or, perhaps, he tells you that his name is Marine Corps, or SWAT, or ICE. What would happen, in that moment?

Probably first of all, you would notice that it was not a usual kind of name. Instead of a name like John or Evan or something, this man has given you a name that you have never heard used as a name for a person before. But second, you would notice that the name itself was symbolically chosen. Not only was it not a usual name, but it was unusual in a particular way: the name points to a militarized kind of power. Whether you had positive or negative views of the Marine Corps or SWAT teams or ICE or the National Guard, there would be no escaping the fact that this man’s name was functioning symbolically, connecting him to something going on in the wider world, and suddenly, standing there beside the dumpsters or the gravestones, you would realize that the man might not be mentally ill, as you had perhaps suspected, but that he might be attempting a strident commentary on the condition of society, and that he had positioned his whole life as a way to say something important about the world. It would not have been an accident that he was standing there calling himself Marine Corps; it would mean something. What looks like madness might simply be a reasonable response to a mad world. More on that in a moment.

This is what happens in Luke 8. The man’s name is Legion, which is not a usual kind of name, and in fact it is an unusual name in a certain kind of way. There’s a little ambiguity in the text in English, because “legion” can in fact mean “many,” and there’s a way to read the man’s response simply as an admission that the demons possessing him are plentiful. But English obscures what’s going on here. In a text written in Greek—a language endowed with many possible ways to say “many”—the text of Luke suddenly switches to Latin for this man’s name, and it uses the Latin word for a large and powerful unit of the Roman military. A legion was plentiful, sure; a typical Roman legion was about 4,500 men strong. So the name certainly does convey the sense of a lot. But it’s not just any kind of a lot, it’s a lot of Roman military power. The man gives his name as the most prominent destructive force of empire and violence that he knew; he names himself for a terror that hovers over his life and the lives of everyone around him.

Why? And what does it have to do with this man living “in the wilds,” on the edges of civilization, without clothing and not “in his right mind”?

I recently had a student write a nice masters’ thesis about this passage, reading it alongside madness studies. Oisín (my student) noted the ways madness is socially constructed, tied to various kinds of norms, and enforced in many visible and invisible ways. Sanity is hardly objective or universal, but we pretend that it is. Madness (so-called) shows up in the world as aberration and pathology; “madness” is one of the ways we talk about the things that make people stand out or look different—like this man Legion, living naked in a cemetery. (There is a lot more nuance to this, in both Oisín’s thesis and in madness studies generally; I’m just scratching the surface here). But what looks like madness to some feels decidedly un-mad to others, and anyway, the world around us demands a touch of madness, doesn’t it?

Most of the time, I stay pretty engrossed in the news. I’m an above-average knower of current events, keeping informed about things as well as most folks do. Why does it feel so good to withdraw from all of that? Why does it feel so good to bury my head in literature in a forest, like I have been doing the past week, and not have much of a sense of whether Trump’s military parade went off without a hitch? I think it’s because the world around us presses down on us and introduces stress into our lives. The world around us demands our attention and it commands our response, whether we want it to or not. It’s easy to get sucked into cycles of news-checking and doomscrolling, getting hooked on the adrenaline bump from each new headline about each new atrocity or outrage. It’s easy to let our lives be defined by our responses to a mad world.

We don’t learn much about the backstory of the man in Luke 8, except that he was from the city but now living in the tombs, having been driven …into the wilds. When asked for his name, the man responded in a strange way, not with a usual name but with a single word evoking the violent and menacing world in which he lived. It was as if he was responding to a larger question than the one Jesus had asked, giving not only a name by which he could be called but also a rationale for the way he showed up in the world. Legion, the man responded, perhaps as a way of saying I am this person you see because of the way the world has pressed down on me and driven me away. My madness—if you want to call it that—is a response to the conditions of my life.

Think back to the scenario above—meeting a stranger by a dumpster or on a street corner. The stranger doesn’t say much, but he does keep saying the words Border Patrol. Those words would tell you right away something about the man’s story. Without knowing anything else, you would know that this man has found himself on the periphery of society—on the street, by a dumpster—because of someone else’s exercise of power, because of society’s collective use of violence against him, and because of the fear he has learned to have of a mad world. A person found at the peripheries of society, saying the name of one of this society’s most aggressive harasser of people—we would understand right away that this person’s life exhibited some kind of scar, and that his madness or demons (if that’s what we decided to call it) came from the conditions of his life.

The same is true for Legion. We don’t know the precise conditions of his life, and what kinds of encounters with Roman military power might have led him to flee to the wilds and the tombs. We don’t know the whole shape of his relationship to the world he lived in, and we never will—except that when he was asked to say something about himself, all he could do is point to a power outside of himself, a condition of the world he lived in, that had put him where he was that day. Border Patrol, ICE, Marine Corps, National Guard, SWAT team, the economy, homophobia, racism, climate change, the decline of religious life, sprawling and spreading war, political violence, environmental destruction, disease brought on by industrialization, misogyny, hatred—we could all give names to the forces that have driven us into the maddening wilds.

This man’s name was Legion.