Sleeping well and a herd of a swine: what it means to have a ‘right mind’
Second Sunday before Lent, Evensong, 4 February 2024
Our gospel reading this evening begins and ends on the water; first Jesus sleeping during a storm, and then latterly a large herd of swine plunging into the very same lake.
There are themes here both ancient and contemporary: our approach to sleeping, our view of water and the sea, our relation with animals and the whole of creation. So let’s explore how Holy Scripture sheds light on these topics for our context and time, helping us see with the ‘right mind’ of the Gerasene man healed by Jesus, from whom he has cast out a whole legion of demons.
I recently read a whole book on sleeplessness. In its Samantha Harvey reflects on her experience of struggling to sleep for a whole year. Her book made me reflect that insomnia has become one of the defining afflictions of our age. Because of our various worries and responsibilities, because of the relentless nature of digital communication (with the smartphone on the bedside table), because of the political, economic and environmental issues we face, the human race has never slept so badly.
Later in the Gospels, the night before he dies, it is Jesus who is awake while his disciples fall asleep. While those around him slept, he worked out what he needed to do, and in all that happened next, he demonstrated that death and chaos do not always prevail, that new life and peace are possible, that we can imagine a future in which we will be able to sleep more soundly, for all is well.
So when Jesus sleeps on the boat during a gale, it is a glimpse for our insomniac age of the kind of sleep we might be able to have when we realise that God has not forgotten us, and that by God’s grace the issues and problems we face will not overwhelm us. In Hebrew culture, the sea often symbolizes chaos and destruction, which make Jesus’s ability to sleep on the waters, and then to calm them, even more striking.
Nowadays, you can learn about the sea by studying oceanography, and the world’s economy depends on shipping. This very week an aircraft carrier will leave Portsmouth to take part in a NATO exercise. In days gone by British naval power enabled the passage of ships on hugely profitable journeys to India, China and many more. In this period our primary image of the sea had ceased to be one of chaos and destruction, and so we encouraged the building of cities on coastal sites avoided by our ancestors: Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York and many others. In Japan, medieval stone markers on the coast of Fukushima, warning against building there, were ignored as that country was drawn back into global trade after centuries of isolation.
Nowadays we are learning the hard way that the biblical view of the sea is not antiquated or superstitious, and perhaps it is us who have had it all wrong. In 2011 a tsunami devasted Fukushima, including a nuclear power station. All coastal cities are increasingly threatened by increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather and rising sea levels caused by global warming and climate change. Millions are currently being spent on sea defences for Portsmouth. More things to keep us awake at night.
And as once again we become more aware, as our ancestors were, of unpredictability and danger in the weather and the sea, so a new awareness of the way humanity is affecting the natural world is forced upon us – whether through pollution, plastics or the shocking loss of biodiversity. Once we lived in constant and close proximity to all kinds of animals. Now we live in a world where more and more people crowd out other forms of life, with the possible exception of our pets and those we breed for our dinner tables. No longer, unlike the man in the garden of Eden in our first reading, do many of us even know the names of the species being driven to extinction, let alone the different kinds of birds still to be seen in Old Portsmouth.
Both our readings this evening speak of a world with a greater affinity between human beings and animals. In Genesis, as I’ve said, all the animals of creations pass before the man, who names each one. In Luke’s Gospel unclean spirits – demons – pass, following Jesus’s intervention, from a man overwhelmed by chaos and destruction to a large herd of swine. To understand more fully the significance of this, and as a case study from a culture more in tune with the whole created order than we are, it’s worth spending a minute or two reflecting on the place of ‘swine’ in first century Palestine. We are talking about wild boars or pigs, which in the Hebrew Bible are prohibited to Israelites, and should not be kept or eaten. The reasons for this prohibition are not straightforward – there are a number of theories – but they clearly run deep.
In the New Testament, what is holy must not be given to dogs – so it says in the seventh Chapter of Matthew’s Gospel – and neither must pearls be thrown before swine. In Luke’s gospel, seven chapters on from this evening’s passage, we hear in a parable how the prodigal son became a keeper of pigs, which expresses extreme degradation for a Jew. So in relation to those unclean spirits passing to a herd of swine, the symbolism is pretty clear: the swine are unclean animals to be shunned, and so fit bearers for demons. The herd are then drowned in the lake, which brings us back to the Hebrew association of waters and seas with the forces of chaos and destruction.
At the end of all this we have a man sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. No longer is he shouting or in chains. Tonight he will sleep better than he has for years. This man is an image of what Christ can do for us; a healing and transformation encompassing body, mind and spirit. In our right mind, we can live as God intended, in our relationships both with one another and with the other living creatures with whom we share this creation. In our right mind, we can face our own powers of destruction, and our tendency to self-destruction and blindness. In our right mind, we can tell others, as the man is instructed to do, of what the good news of Christ can offer to us, our society, and our world.
For ultimately we need to face what is coming, the challenges of our age – both known and unknown – together. If we are to sleep better as a human race, more of us will need to respond to Jesus’s invitation to sit at his feet, clothed and in our right mind, and allow our future words and actions to be shaped by him. AMEN