Jesus said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” (Mark 5:19)
Almost every story of miraculous healing in Mark's gospel ends with Jesus sternly warning the healed person not to tell anyone what has happened. When the healing involves an exorcism, Jesus commands the unclean spirits not to say anything about him, because they recognize who he is on the spiritual plane. But not this story. This story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac in the fifth chapter of Mark ends with this unusual note of Jesus telling the healed man to go home, to go to his friends, and to tell them all about how much the Lord has done for him, and the mercy he has received.
Many commentators on Mark say that this feature of Jesus telling people and spirits not to talk about him -- formally called "the Messianic secret" -- has to do with Mark the evangelist trying to tell his own community something important about their faith. Commentators theorize that Mark's community looked to Jesus as a wonderworker, a figure of power who could in turn save them by granting them power. Mark, however, understood Jesus' obedience to God's will, even to the point of crucifixion, as being the center of his saving work; and he wanted to turn his community's attention less toward deeds of power and more toward the work of obedience in their own lives. So he wrote his story of Jesus in such a way as to show Jesus caring less about power than about discipleship, so that his congregation, too, would care about their discipleship. That's why Mark's Jesus doesn't want people who've experienced his power to talk about his power.
Except for the Gerasene man who had been possessed by a "Legion" of demons. He is directed to go tell all his friends. Why?
Perhaps it is because this miracle of Jesus is less about power than it is about gentleness. Mark goes out of his way to say how strong the man with the legion is: the demons give him supernatural strength, so that no one can subdue him; his neighbors try to restrain him but he gets away; they try to chain him but he bursts the chains; the demons give him so much power that it has no place to go, but the man sits in the tombs and howls and bruises himself with stones. But when Jesus meets him, he doesn't try to overpower him or subdue him or restrain him. Jesus meets him with mercy, with assurance, with gentleness. When the neighbors come running up, they find the man sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, calm, gentle, intent, aware. (Jesus even shows gentleness and mercy with the legion of demons: when they state their fear that Jesus will torment them, he gives them permission to leave the man of their own accord, not to be driven out, and to go instead into a herd of pigs; unfortunately for the demons (and for the pigs) their addiction to abusive strength overpowers the pigs and turns them self-destructive, too; they rush down the steep bank in a frenzy and drown themselves in the lake.) Jesus meets power with gentleness, and his mercy draws forth an answering mercy, and the man is healed.
How often do we attempt to meet strength with strength? How often are we tempted to oppose power with power of our own? Could we instead learn from Jesus that strength will spend itself, and that we can respond with the gentleness that endures? That is a lesson that Mark could endorse for his congregation, and that needed no secret to redirect it. That is an invitation to us all to know -- and to tell -- the mercy God has shown us.
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