This Lent I've been thinking about one of the stories of Jesus' life, found in Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39, with a different, abridged version in Matthew 8:28-34.
The story concerns a man whose name we never learn. He lives in 'the region of the Gerasenes' (with variations on the place name in the other gospels), part of the Decapolis on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. This region is a set of multi-ethnic towns, with many residents being veterans of the Roman Army as well as local ethnic peoples including some Jews. We don't know if this man is a Jew although it seems likely - none of the gospels tell us one way or the other.
What we do know is that he had an 'impure spirit' - that is, he was inhabited by a demon.
"This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones."
Perhaps if we met him we would conclude that he had a mental illness, or maybe a brain injury.
It's not clear why his fellow towns-people tried to chain him up. Perhaps they were worried about his safety, but it's more likely that they feared for their own. He is very strong, and perhaps not in control of his own actions. In the end, he is exiled to the town graveyard as if he were already dead.
Then Jesus and his disciples come sailing across the lake after a busy teaching and healing tour of Galilee. On the way Jesus calms a dangerous storm. As they land, the man with the demon is among the first to meet him.
"When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, 'What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!' For Jesus had said to him, 'Come out of this man, you impure spirit!'"Then Jesus asked him, 'What is your name?'
"'My name is Legion,' he replied, 'for we are many.' And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area. (Luke says they begged Jesus 'not to order them to go into the Abyss'.)
"A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, 'Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.' He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned." |
| The Miracle of the Gadarene Swine Briton Rivière, 1883 |
Of course the pigs are not unattended and the herdsmen rush off to tell their fellow townsmen, who may well be the owners of the pigs who the village herdsmen were tending.
"When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well. Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region."Clearly the townspeople are not impressed by Jesus and can't wait to see the back of him. Only one person dissents from this view.
"As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, 'Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.' So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed."
***
This is a complex, multi-layered story and there's a lot to unpack here. For instance, Rene Girard suggests that the man is a kind of scapegoat, first captured and held and then driven out of his community to live among the dead not so much for his own sins as for the sins of his whole community. It's also interesting to reflect on the shifts in the story between singular and plural - is there one spirit, or are there many? Is the man talking, or is it the spirits?
What intrigues me the most, however, are the pigs. When we read about Jesus casting out spirits they often react to his presence by calling out or resisting in some way, but when he commands them to go we don't hear what happens to them afterwards. Yet this group of demons begs Jesus, as an act of mercy, to send them into (or 'among') the pigs rather than banishing them altogether.
So what's with these pigs? The story is troubling for those of us who understand animals as having thoughts and emotions and as being capable of suffering. Has the suffering of an innocent man been replaced by the suffering of a herd of innocent animals?
One way of understanding them is that they represent the Roman Legionaries - hence the identification of the spirits as 'Legion'. The legionaries were a continual presence in the Decapolis, as in the rest of the Empire, and this area was home to large population of military veterans. The X Frantesis legion, founded by Octavius/Augustus, had a boar as one of its symbols - this legion was certainly active in the area at times, including participating in the Jewish War under the Emperor Vespasian. Jews regarded both pigs and Roman soldiers as 'unclean', and it could be that the story is a coded reference to Jesus' superiority over the Romans.
Perhaps this is a little esoteric. In a more straightforward reading the pigs are unclean animals, symbols of impurity, and they and the 'impure spirit/s' belong together. Some commentators suggest that the pigs' owners and herders were Jews (since if they were not it's likely the gospel writers would have mentioned it) and that they were raising the pigs to sell to the legionaries and retired soldiers, contrary to Jewish law. Not only is the man being cleansed of his impure sprits, the community is being cleansed of its impure commerce.
These two readings are not necessarily alternatives because the gospel stories are capable of holding more than one meaning.
So then think about the pigs' owners. When they arrive at the scene they hear good news and bad news. The good news - the 'wild man of the tombs' has been freed of his tormenting demons and is 'dressed and in his right mind'. The bad news - all their pigs have been drowned. You might expect it to be the drowning of the pigs that frightens them but it is not - it is seeing the man safe and well. Could it be that they don't want him to be healed? Could it be that he holds some secrets about them that they would rather not be revealed? When they hear about the pigs this seems to seal the deal - they ask Jesus to leave.
The man's healing comes at a cost, and this cost is not to himself (he has nothing to give) but to the whole community. For him to be healed, they have to give up their pigs, whatever meaning these pigs hold. Perhaps they need to be better Jews and give up their unclean farming practice. Perhaps they need to be less embedded in the imperial economy, earning their living by selling unclean meat to Roman soldiers and colonists. Either way, this is not a simple choice for them to make. They are poor rural people, and it could be that their pigs are the difference between comfort and poverty. What will take their place? How will they survive without them?
There is every chance that once Jesus has left, they will go back to herding pigs. If so, what will happen to the man who has just been freed of his demons? Once they have finished with the pigs, will they return to torment him once again? This risk is encapsulated in one of Jesus' stories, told in Matthew 12:43-45 and also in Luke 11:24-26.
“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”
Perhaps his fear of such an outcome is part of his reason for asking to go with Jesus. Instead, Jesus sets him a new task - to spread the word of Jesus' mission, and its effect on him. The last we hear is of him heading off on a journey of his own, telling people throughout the Decapolis what Jesus has done for him. 'And all the people were amazed'. We don't know what happened next. Did this filling of his house protect him? And what of his community? Did his message lead to a wider transformation? Or did they just return to business as usual and have to find a new scapegoat?
***
Now let me tell you another, more recent story, about a young man called Charles Anderson. Charles was a British naval seaman in the early 19th century who received a serious head injury in battle. This left him with permanent brain damage which, among other things, meant that in situations of threat or stress he became uncontrollably angry, especially after he had been drinking.
There were no veterans' pensions or Gold Cards in 19th Century Britain, and Charles joined the thousands of wounded veterans struggling to survive with their various impairments. Inevitably, an assault committed in a fit of rage brought him into conflict with the law and he was transported to NSW in 1834, barely 18 years old.
The entire convict system at that point was based on the idea of extreme deterrence. Minor offences, whatever the reason behind them, led to harsh punishments. Further offending in custody led to more punishment - the triangle, the lash, the chain gang. None of this could possibly be effective with Charles, who had lost the ability to control his reactions. He found himself caught in an endless cycle of rage and punishment. He spent two years chained to a rock on Goat Island in Sydney Harbour. He escaped from there three times, only to be recaptured, flogged and sent back. His lash wounds didn't heal properly and became infested with maggots. He became an object of entertainment as others with more freedom would row out to the island and provoke him to rage, or throw food at him and watch him eat. Later he was sent north to Part Macquarie, from where he escaped again and lived for a time with an Aboriginal group before being recaptured and flogged again.
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| This is the rock he was chained to - he slept in the cavity. |
Finally he was sent to Norfolk Island, the ultimate 'prison within a prison', where re-offending convicts would be sent to have their punishments redoubled. Prisoners could receive 100 lashes or more for crimes such as 'smiling while on the chain', 'singing a song', 'insolence to a soldier' or 'neglect of work'. The island had its own specially reinforced whips because of the heavy use to which they were put, the prisoners taken down from the triangle with their backs flayed to the bone and streaming with blood. As if this were not enough they could be subjected to a range of medieval tortures - labouring in heavy irons, weeks of sensory deprivation in an underground cell, months of solitary confinement, chaining to the wall, gagging with an iron bit.
All of this could only enrage Charles further and cycle continued. He was flogged repeatedly and spent most of his time chained to the wall in a solitary cell, tormented by both guards and fellow prisoners. The torment could only end with his death, no doubt at a tragically young age.
Then something remarkable happened. In 1840 the command of Norfolk Island was handed to Captain Alexander Maconochie. Maconochie had arrived in the colony as private secretary to Sir James Franklin, the famed Arctic explorer who replaced George Arthur as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land. He developed a passion for prison reform and proposed a radical new system. In place of punishment, he aimed at rehabilitation. To do this he proposed what he called the Mark System. Instead of sentences being defined by the passing of time they should be defined by the earning of a fixed number of 'marks'. These could be earned in a variety of ways - good behaviour, hard work in their prison labour, gaining new skills or education. While earning these marks, prisoners should be treated with mercy and fairness, and once the marks were earned their sentence would be over.
Maconochie's optimism about the possibilities of his system must have seemed delusional but he was so persistent in his advocacy that he was eventually given permission to try the system on Norfolk Island. There could hardly have been a less promising place to begin but his zeal and, it has to be said, arrogance had a way of sweeping problems aside. His first act was to declare a public holiday for all prisoners in honour of Queen Victoria's birthday which fell just five days after his arrival. The occasion was marked by all hands being given a tot of rum, excused from work and treated to plays, concerts and other forms of entertainment
For the prisoners, what followed was a glorious relief. The whips were destroyed, prisoners were unchained and released from solitary. Instead they were introduced to a system of promises and rewards - extra freedoms and privileges, meaningful work and, at the end, the opportunity for freedom. Maconochie built up a library for the use of prisoners which included the works of Shakespeare, which he encouraged the prisoners to perform. He spent money on musical instruments and formed bands and choirs. He allowed the prisoners to erect headstones for those who passed away and allowed proper funerals and memorials.
The results were remarkable. The prisoners embraced the system enthusiastically. The prisoner memoirs and letters that survive refer to him as an angel, a deliverer. Ill discipline, crime, assaults and insubordination dropped dramatically. Productivity improved, the lash turned out to be unnecessary, punishment cells sat empty. Maconochie was generous in distributing praise and 'marks' and before too long many had qualified for their ticket of leave. Sadly, Maconochie's remit didn't extend to the mainland, so they only gained the freedom of the island but it was better than chains and the lash.
Charles Anderson was 24 when Maconochie arrived on Norfolk Island but he already looked old, treated as and acting like a wild animal. Maconochie released him from the cell where he was chained and put him in charge of a herd of half-wild bullocks, permitting him to sleep in the field with them rather than return to the jail and further bullying. When he did the job well Maconochie praised him and promoted him to the management of a remote signal station where he lived cheerfully and productively.
"While Charles' brain damage could never fully be rehabilitated, the former 'wild beast' of Goat Island was now busying himself in a sailor's uniform, his demeanor was open and frank and he appeared more human than he ever had since touching Australian shores."
When Governor Gipps visited the island in 1843 he could hardly believe that the man in charge of the signal station was the 'wild man of Goat Island' he had known back in Sydney.
Unfortunately there was a problem. While the prisoners, especially Charles, loved Maconochie and his system, the colonial authorities didn't. It was partly that Maconochie was annoying, constantly disobeying orders he disagreed with, writing long tomes to his superiors and asking for more money. But there was also a more fundamental problem - he was undermining the logic of deterrence which was the foundation of the whole prison system. If you got better results with praise, education and useful work then what was the point of this vast architecture of punishment?
In the end, Maconochie's system was not abandoned because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. It set out to improve the prisoners' lot and turn them from criminals to citizens. Yet the English aristocracy and their pale imitators in New South Wales didn't give a fig for the prisoners. What they cared about was the effectiveness of the deterrent. The worse the stories filtering back from this hell on earth, the stronger the deterrent. The prisoners themselves were merely pawns in this big game of crime and punishment, their lives a necessary sacrifice to a greater good.
***
Neither the unnamed Gerasene nor Charles Anderson were passive victims. They railed against and fiercely resisted what was being done to them, but they were powerless to change it. Charles was a victim of war, and then he was a victim of a cruel, violent criminal punishment system which he tried several times to escape. The Gerasene was caught up in tides of commerce and colonisation and fought his chains with superhuman strength. Each in his own way was a scapegoat, the person who must suffer in order to cover the flaws of the wider society.
Neither of them could be relieved of their suffering unless others were willing to change, and this change came with a cost. The Gerasene's demons could only be banished at the cost of the village's herd of pigs and the dirty profits they brought. Charles Anderson's demons could only be banished by transforming a system designed to humiliate and punish to one that addressed the root causes - his brain injury and the system of torture that exacerbated its effects. And behind this there are bigger systems still - the Roman colonialism that brought large numbers of soldiers into the Gerasene community, the raw capitalism of the Industrial Revolution which made the capitalists rich and consigned unwanted workers to homelessness, starvation and crimes of survival.
People benefited from these systems. The Gerasene farmers earned an income from their pigs. The Roman colonists who bought their pork were rulers of the Mediterranean and were not willing to give up the spoils of empire. The guards and officers of the colony of NSW were not going to give up their rank and salary, and the capitalists of Britain were not going to pay taxes to foot the bill for proper poverty relief and medical care for the poor and sick.
These costs are not insignificant, and can't be simply swept aside. It's easy in theory to say that the British capitalists should be taxed properly irrespective of their protests, and this is what eventually happened despite their best political maneuverings. It is not so easy to say to the humble soldiers and officials that they should just give up their jobs. Would they then be unemployed themselves, and turned out to starve? And while we could say that the corrupt Roman administrators and Emperors should be driven into the lake, the humble soldiers and the farmers who sell them pork are just getting by as best they can. How would they live, if the pig trade were abolished?
There are good ethical and practical reasons to consider these people's needs. Ethically, they are our fellow humans and it will not do to treat them as expendable, to sacrifice one group of poor people to lift up another. This would just continue the cycle of oppression, swapping one set of oppressed for another.
Practically, if all but the least powerful people in a community feel a change will harm them, then the change will never be allowed, whatever its benefits to those who suffer. The resistance of the imperialists and capitalists is a given whatever we do, but it can only be overcome if we don't give them the opportunity to draw ordinary workers and citizens to their side. Otherwise they will divide and rule and we will be left shaking our fists impotently, or else in jail.
***
I think you can see where I'm headed with this. To take a contemporary example: in 2019, Bob Brown led a protest convoy (the Stop Adani Convoy) from Tasmania all the way up to Clermont in Central Queensland to try and stop the approval of the Adani Corporation's Carmichael coal mine. They picked up supporters along the way and held rallies wherever they went. They attracted a lot of support, and the Federal Labor Opposition, with an election looming, found itself torn, considering stopping a coal mine on climate grounds for the first time in Australian history.
The strategy, which started out with high hopes as a massive people power movement, ended up backfiring badly. The Federal Labor Party, which had dallied with the movement, was wiped out in regional Queensland and lost the unlosable election (although there were other reasons for this, too). The Queensland Labor Government, which had been sitting on the fence and following due process as Adani persistently failed to provide key pieces of environmental information that were needed to assess their impact on water resources, got badly spooked. The Premier ordered a decision be made in 6 weeks, leaving little doubt as to what that decision had to be. The mine went from being a doubtful environmental proposition to being an inescapable fact.
These regional Queenslanders are not that different to the Gerasene pig keepers. Queensland's regional economies are heavily invested in the coal and gas industries. Without coal mines, Clermont would be a tiny town littered with empty shops and houses, surrounded by a few cattle stations. Even regional cities on the coast - Rockhampton, Gladstone, Mackay, Townsville - rise and fall with the vagaries of the mining industry. If you are going to travel all the way from Tasmania to tell them this industry needs to stop - which it clearly does for the sake of the planet - then you need to think very carefully about how these communities will live instead.
Of course if the Gerasenes give up keeping pigs that doesn't mean they have to give up farming. They could keep goats instead, or sheep. Perhaps it would be a bit less lucrative but perhaps they would actually do better, selling wool as well as meat. Then, if the change gained momentum, they could diversify into spinning thread and making garments as well and in the end they would be better off than they started. But this would not happen overnight, and they would need retraining, and a transition plan.
In 2020, not long after the Stop Adani Convoy and it's unfortunate blowback, Next Economy commenced a much lower profile intervention in Central Queensland aimed at answering the question, 'how can Central Queensland transition to a low-carbon economy?'. They started with a set of discussions with industry, unions, local government, Traditional Owners, environmentalists. These discussions culminated in a two-day summit in April 2021, sponsored jointly by Stanwell, CleanCo, Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), CQ University and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC). Over 140 people attended from across the various interest areas and the summit came up with a detailed action plan which involved clean energy investment, employee and community support, retraining options, infrastructure and coordination.
This plan didn't attract the same media storm as the Stop Adani Convoy, and its outcomes remain partial and uncertain, but it represents an attempt to take the concerns of local communities and workers seriously, to get them on board with the necessary transition. It represents both a respectful dialogue and a smart, pragmatic approach to neutralising opposition.
Not that I think this is an either/or question. Jesus drowned the pigs, and the former demoniac spread the good news among his neighbours. It's easy to blame the Stop Adani Convoy for inadvertently causing what it was trying to prevent, but the Queensland Premier had previously visited Gautam Adani in India and talked up the benefits of the Carmichael Mine. It is likely that the election result, which had more causes than just the Convoy, merely empowered her to override the doubters in her Cabinet and do what she had wanted to do all along. We need protesters out on the streets calling into question the social licence of the companies that are ruining our planet, just as Jesus needed to trigger the drama of the mass pig drowning to draw attention to the issue. At the same time we need the slow process of change and rebuilding - the work of the healed man travelling from community to community bringing them the good news that things can be different, Next Economy bringing together regional stakeholders plan for life after fossil fuels.
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