The Waters of the World
The First Sunday after Trinity 08.00 Eucharist
Isaiah 65.1-9
Luke 8.26-39
Here at the Cathedral of the Sea, we pray daily for those who serve upon the waters of the world. Those prayers extend today to encompass all who served in our armed forces during the Falklands Conflict, and all who lost their lives during those ten weeks between the 2nd April and the 14th June, forty years ago.
So many of our images from those times are sea-based: the iconic pictures of the Royal Navy ships passing the Square and Round Towers, contrasting with scenes of destruction as ships were torpedoed and struck by missiles, and the strange sight of hastily-requisitioned cruise liners – the Canberra and the QE2 – steaming south to join the operation.
And yet, on these remote islands, the land became deadly too. The battles at Goose Green and Stanley have passed into the history books, with victory only coming at considerable human cost.
Our daily Cathedral of the Sea prayer tacitly acknowledges that the sea is a place of danger; in Scripture, it is the realm of chaos and disorder – the darkness over which the Spirit broods at the beginning of creation, and the darkness which will pass away in the end times, when there will be ‘no more sea’. And in Luke’s gospel, as in Matthew and Mark, the story of the demoniac which we have heard this morning comes immediately after Jesus calms a storm which has whipped up on the Sea of Galilee. ‘Who is this,’ marvel his companions, ‘that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’
But then Jesus steps out onto land, and here, the chaos and disorder doesn’t just whip up, but comes to meet him. There is a personal engagement in Jesus’s rebuking of the wind and the waves, as he directs his power at them, and so it is with the spirit in this man: he calls it out; he confronts it so directly that it begs him, ‘torment me not’. The power of darkness cannot bear the searing love which will not let it go – which relentlessly pursues it until it is driven into submission.
And this encounter is of course not only personal to the spirit, but personal to the man himself – Legion – who after he is healed sits at Jesus’s feet and, by contrast to his multitude of demons, begs to stay with him.
But as well as being a specific action, this exorcism is highly symbolic: Jesus here demonstrates who he is and what he does for us. He shows that he has power over all the dark forces that hold the world in thrall – and like his healings, his exorcisms are not only, or even primarily, for the benefit of the person concerned, but for the onlookers – and the onlookers include us.
The devils beg Jesus not to be sent into the deep; they want their chaos to remain land-based; they want to continue to bind this often-chained man, or to drive him into the wilderness. But even when they enter other land animals, their trajectory is inevitable: once Jesus has cast them out, their fate is sealed, their descent to the depths assured. And because even the depths are not beyond the relentless love of Christ, as they drown, they are choked by the searching love which will pursue them to the ends of the earth.
So what is the key to this particular love, the love which will fills the seas as well as the land, which calls out chaos and rebukes evil?
At the heart of it is this: Jesus does not ever render like for like. He puts a stop to the earthly system of retaliation by absorbing all the world’s chaos into himself. He drowns the darkness, once for all, descending to the depths with all the world’s corruption and malice. And in return, he renders only light.
The pigs, and the naming of the demoniac as ‘Legion’, are not-so-subtle references by Luke to Roman occupation. There is a link here between the political and the supernatural powers that be. This is about the relationship between God, and disordered powers. Power, in human hands, so quickly turns to self-interest, oppression, the defining of ourselves over-against perceived enemies. And here, in this exorcism, is a sign that corrupt human power – even the mighty power of Rome – will be no match for the power of God in Jesus. This is the power which both frees us from the bondage of our human ways of doing things, and also gives us a pattern for living within them well.
Our remembrance of the Falklands Conflict is set against the backdrop of continuing wars, most notably for us that in Ukraine. The conquering of the demons does not mean that none exist: instead, it shows us that they are not and cannot be ultimately victorious. And in that sure hope we pray for courage in the face of evil, and for love in the face of hatred, for in the words of the Psalmist [Ps. 65.7] ‘You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples’.
Amen.