St. Botolph’s Parish, 5th Sunday after Pentecost, 27 June 2010
‘What have you to do with us, O Son of God?’ (Matthew 8.29)
When you look in a mirror – a ‘looking-glass’ – what do you see? Most of us, I suspect, do not even look in a mirror. We glance. Is my hair straight? Does my necktie match the rest of my outfit? Have I covered the pimple on my right cheek? If you are vain enough, you stare in a mirror for hours and think: ‘How can anyone look that good?’ If you detest the way you look, you shun mirrors, or store windows, or the surface of a pond: anything that reflects the image that you fear. But you seldom look deeply. Deeply: beyond your wisp of hair, your collar, to the person you really are. Most of us do not have eyes to see who we are. What did the Oracle of Delphi warn those ancient Greeks who went to worship the god Apollo? ‘Gnóthi seautón – Know thyself!’ That was the sum of all wisdom, the most courageous act. Dare to know who you are! The Oracle was a mad priestess but that one word was sane. Her body twisted and convulsed, she fell into a trance when the god possessed her. But in her madness, she recognized the road to sanity: ‘Know thyself!’ If you know who you are – not who they say you are, not who you think you are, but who you really are – you will know the One who created you. Do you dare to know who you are? Do you dare to look that deeply in the mirror? Or will you say to the real you: ‘What have you to do with me?’
We do everything to keep from knowing who we really are. We tell ourselves: ‘I am too busy to “think about” who I am. My business suit tells me who I am, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Leave my spare time to me. Let me block it out in front of the TV, let me block out all the questions’. We shun the mirror at the back of our minds, the mirror that asks: ‘Who are you, really?’ If we do not shun the question at work, we shun it at leisure: ‘What am I going to buy?’ becomes more important than who is buying it. We shun it in gossip, in politics, in church. We do not think about the faith; we ask, ‘Who’s bringing the hardboiled eggs?’ We keep busy, we try everything to forget the question: who are you, stripped of all your defences? We fill our lives with trivial worries, trivial concerns. It is like driving a herd of pigs across a field: we are too busy getting them to move to ask why we are doing it. Worst of all, by never asking why, we call ourselves practical. ‘I’m a practical fellow, I don’t think too much’.
But a time comes when you have to ask. Call it … rock bottom. You lose your job. Your loved one. You find a cancer eating away your life. All your excuses, all your petty, ‘practical’ concerns go flying off the cliff. You are left with the question: ‘Who am I?’
When the time comes, we all ask: ‘Who am I?’ At the irreducible core. In those silent moments, when I wake up at four in the morning and cannot get back to sleep. ‘Who am I?’ The time has come. The time – the kairós – the moment of truth, when every mask is torn away and every secret laid bare. It is the time when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead.
But all that Christ does is hold up the mirror: the mirror of your soul reflected in his face. The mirror that reads, ‘Know thyself!’
When Jesus Christ comes to the region called Gádara, on the far side of the Jordan, the locals have no idea who he is. They are practical fellows: herding pigs to sell to the Gentiles. Busy, practical people. No time to ask questions or look inside. They have a business to run: so they send outcasts, like two men possessed with demons, into the desert, among the graves. Suddenly, out of the graveyard, the two madmen appear. At the sight of Jesus, the two bodies twist and convulse and fall into a trance. They cry: ‘What have you to do with us, Son of God?’ They know him, they recognise him! The demons see what his own people cannot. ‘Have you come here to torment us before the time?’ They bide their time; but the time is now. The kairós has come. Jesus says no word. He does not lift a finger. Simply by being there, he threatens the father of lies – with the truth. Demons, you see, have no bodies. They must lie to us, take our bodies, or fall back into the outer darkness. ‘The swine!’ they scream. ‘Send us into the swine!’ and the herd runs down the bank into the river water.
The whole city of Gádara comes out. To thank the Healer? No, to tell him: ‘Go away, leave us alone! Leave us our swine, our livelihood, our comfortable and familiar life! When we look in a mirror, let us see only what we want to see!’
What the demons shout, we say whenever the truth closes in on our ‘practical’
lives. ‘What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come to torment us before the time?’ But the time is now. The time of the mirror, the moment of truth. What is the mirror that exposes all our secrets? It is the face of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who loves us too much to flatter us with lies. The face that only reveals the truth of who we really are.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ: the truth is terrifying. Truth can be brutal. Like a word of power that convulses two men, possessed by demons. Like the word that drives the swine down the steep bank, into the water. Like the word of the priest that exposes every wound that still needs to be healed. But, without the word of truth, ‘the time’ of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ shall never come. Christ comes to remove every mask of madness and lies, to expose all our well-guarded secrets. To force us to ask: ‘Who am I?’ Christ himself is the mirror that cannot lie. The practical people of Gádara do not want the truth, so they tell him to leave. Better not ask: better to forget the truth in a million trivial pursuits. Better to herd pigs than look too closely in a mirror. For all we know, the good people of Gádara lived happily ever after in a familiar web of lies and hypocrisies, telling the truth: ‘We don’t want you here’.
But those two men who hit rock bottom – naked, outcast, living among graves, possessed by tormenting spirits, with no idea who they are – they found out what the Gadarenes never did. They looked in the mirror of truth and are now, and for ever, free.