So what is the story of the Gerasene Demoniac (Mark 5:1-20) doing in Mark's gospel?
The key, I believe, is the context.
First, consider the events before it. Mark 4 contains Mark's rendering of Jesus' “parables of the kingdom”. These end with the account of the mustard seed, which grows into the largest shrub in the allotment by a long way. It is so large that birds of the air will nest in its shade. The Old Testament sees the birds of the air as the nations of the world, as they take their shade in the mighty empires of Egypt and Babylon. However the kingdom of God, though small in its beginnings, will grow to be so large that the nations of this world will take their refuge in its shade. Many nations, in the fulness of time, will wonderfully be explicitly Christian nations.
This is followed by Jesus crossing the sea, and calming the storm on the way over. In the Bible, the sea often represents the Gentile nations. Having learned that the mustard sea will grow and take over the whole world, he then gets into a boat where the sea gets a little turbulent to say the least. With a single word, the same word that is sown in Mark 4:1-10, the sea is calmed and subdued. Whatever else is going on, this is an enactment of the parables from earlier in the chapter. The word of Jesus can quiet the turbulent, chaotic nations of the world.
This is the background to the story of the Gerasene demoniac. Here is another chaotic, turbulent Gentile who needs to be subdued. And, with a word, he is calmed. Just as with the storm, the calm arouses greater fear in the primary witnesses than the storm did. The people of the region were terrified by this man; that is why they tried to chain him up. Much as they knew him well, and were scared by what they knew, the sight of his health restored was far more scary. The story of Legion is deliberately set by Mark alongside the calming of the storm for us to compare the episodes.
In my next post, I will consider the following context, before writing a third post to draw a few conclusions.
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