The Man No One Would Touch

Open with me to Luke chapter eight, verse twenty-six. Jesus has crossed the lake. He has left the familiar shore. He has stepped onto Gentile ground, and the very first person who meets him is a man no one will touch.

A man with no clothes. A man who lives among the tombs. A man who has been chained, and who has broken the chains. A man with so much pain inside him that when Jesus asks his name he cannot give one. "My name is Legion." Many. We are many.

I want you to see this man clearly. Not as a caricature. Not as a horror-movie figure. As a man. Somebody's son. Probably somebody's brother. A man who, before something broke in him, sat at a table and ate bread and laughed. The town has not forgotten this. The town remembers. That is why the town keeps trying to chain him. The town has not figured out what to do with him, so the town has settled for containment.

You know this town. You have lived in it. So have I.

"And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs." — Luke 8:27 (KJV)

Now here is the thing I want you to notice. Jesus did not stumble onto this man. Jesus crossed the lake to get to this man. He left the crowd at Capernaum. He left the people who already believed. He sailed across to the Gerasenes. And the FIRST person he meets is the one nobody else will touch.

The Lord crosses lakes for people like that.

Think for one minute about whether you ever expected him to cross a lake for you. Not the cleaned-up version of you. The version with chains broken in the closet. The version with names you have never told another human being. The version with the things you do when nobody is watching. The Lord crossed a lake for THAT version of you. He still does.

And here is what happens next. The man falls down at his feet. The legion speaks. Jesus does not negotiate. He casts the spirits out. The spirits go into a herd of swine and the swine run down the bank and drown in the lake.

The keepers of the swine see this. They run into the city. They tell what has happened. And the townspeople come out to see for themselves.

Now watch the people. The man who used to live in the tombs is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Clothed. In his right mind. The most beautiful sight any of these townspeople have seen in a generation. And what is their response?

"Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid... Then the whole multitude of the country of the Gadarenes round about besought him to depart from them; for they were taken with great fear." — Luke 8:35,37 (KJV)

They were afraid. Of the man who was healed. Of the healer. Of what it cost to heal him.

Because here is the thing. The pigs are dead. Somebody owned those pigs. Somebody's livelihood just ran off a cliff. The healing of one broken man cost the comfortable order of a whole village. And rather than rejoice that a son had come home, the village asked Jesus to leave.

I want you to sit with that for a minute. There are people in your life right now whose healing would cost you something. The cousin whose sobriety would mean you have to stop covering for him. The coworker whose honesty would mean you have to listen to what is actually wrong on the team. The neighbor whose story would mean you have to stop pretending you do not see him. The relative whose pain would mean you have to actually be in their life again.

We say we want people to be healed. But sometimes what we really want is for their brokenness to stay quiet. To not cost us anything. To stay in the tombs where it is convenient.

The townspeople asked the Lord to leave because his healing was too expensive.

Here is the hard turn. And I am going to look you in the eye for this one.

Who in your daily orbit have you written off? The man at the gas station who always asks for change. The woman three pews up at church whose marriage you have heard rumors about. The teenager next door who plays his music too loud. The relative whose name you do not bring up at Thanksgiving anymore.

You know who. You felt their faces while you were reading this. Stay with the face that came up first.

That is the one the Lord is asking you to see this week.

Not to fix. The fixing is the Lord's work, not yours. You will not heal this person. You are not equipped to. Jesus is the one who casts out the legion.

But you can stop being one of the townspeople. You can stop being one of the people who chained him. You can stop being one of the people who asked Jesus to leave because the cost was too high.

You can look at this person and say their name. You can ask one honest question. You can linger for five minutes when you would normally walk past. You can let them know that there is one person in their orbit who has not written them off.

That is small. I know it is small. But the man who was healed at the lake was sent back to his village. Not to follow Jesus on the road. Sent BACK. To the same town that had chained him. To the same neighbors who had stood at a distance. To publish, the scripture says, what great things the Lord had done unto him.

"Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him." — Luke 8:39 (KJV)

Your village is your village. Your tombs are your tombs. Your people are your people. The Lord is asking you to be the witness right where you are. To stop crossing the street. To stop chaining what you do not understand. To stop asking him to leave.

A village that watches one person treated like a human being instead of a problem starts to remember what humans are.

That is how revival begins. Not from a stage. From a sidewalk. From a checkout line. From a phone call you have been putting off.

Cross the lake. Just to the one person. This week.

Amen.