The Beautiful Upset (S2): WK4 - MON

BOUND IN THE TOMBS
Mark 5:1–5 (NLT) “So they arrived at the other side of the lake, in the region of the Gerasenes.[a] 2 When Jesus climbed out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil[b] spirit came out from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the burial caves and could no longer be restrained, even with a chain. 4 Whenever he was put into chains and shackles—as he often was—he snapped the chains from his wrists and smashed the shackles. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Day and night he wandered among the burial caves and in the hills, howling and cutting himself with sharp stones.”

Jesus has just crossed a lake in a storm that nearly sank the boat, and the first thing to greet him on the other side is a naked man running out of the tombs, bleeding from stones he's been using on himself. Nobody in that town would have walked out there on purpose.

Mark lingers on the chains. They tried them often enough that the man's wrists must have carried the marks. I don't read the townspeople as cruel. They were doing what people do when someone's suffering is too big to fix, which is to contain it and then move it far enough away that you stop hearing the screaming at night. The graveyard was where they put the problem.

Earlier this summer I was rushing out the door, already late for a full day of meetings, when my phone rang. It was a man from our community calling from the San Bernardino Central Detention Center, asking if I would come see him. My first reaction wasn't compassion. It was irritation at what this would do to my day. I stood in the doorway with my keys in my hand and realized I was thinking about him the way that town thought about the man in the tombs, as something to be managed at a distance so the rest of life could keep its shape.

Jesus crossed a storm for one man and let it rearrange his whole day on that side of the lake. I went to the detention center, a few hours behind and not especially holy about it. I tend to picture Jesus the way I picture my own calendar, moving efficiently from one important place to the next. Mark keeps showing me a Jesus who gets out of the boat at a graveyard and seems to think that's exactly where he meant to go.

1. What have you been trying to keep chained, in yourself or in someone close to you, because facing it directly would cost more than you planned?
2. Who in your life has been moved out to the edges, somewhere far enough away that you no longer hear them? What would it take to walk out there?
3. Where might Jesus be waiting for you in a place you'd rather not go, somewhere that doesn't fit your picture of where he's supposed to be?