Biblion Bible Commentary
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Legion
Luke 8:26-39
26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee. · WEB
A man who lived among the tombs is found dressed and sane — and the town asks the man who did it to leave.
They arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee Luke 8:26.
The crossing lands them in Gentile territory, which is the first thing to notice. The pigs later in the passage are not a puzzle; they are a signal about where this is happening.
The account is told in the earliest telling Mark 5:1–20. This one keeps the details that show the man's condition as a social fact: He wore no clothes, and didn't live in a house, but in the tombs Luke 8:27, and he had been kept under guard and bound with chains and fetters Luke 8:29. The community had tried. Restraint was the only tool available, and it had failed.
"What have I to do with you, Jesus, you Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torment me!" Luke 8:28. The title is exact again, and the plea is for mercy from the thing inside the man rather than for the man.
"What is your name?" He said, "Legion," for many demons had entered into him Luke 8:30. A legion was six thousand Roman soldiers, and the word would have meant one thing to anybody in an occupied country: an organized, foreign, overwhelming military presence. The name is a description of what it is like to be him.
They begged him that he would not command them to go into the abyss Luke 8:31. This account alone names what they fear, and it is not the man's recovery. There is a place they do not want to go, and they treat this man as the one who decides.
The pigs and their destruction are told in the earlier account. What follows is this chapter's real subject.
They found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid Luke 8:35.
Three words undo the three facts given about him at the start. He is sitting, where he had been driven; clothed, where he had been naked; in his right mind, where he had been beyond restraint. And at Jesus' feet is the posture of a student — the same place Mary of Bethany takes later Luke 10:39.
The reaction is fear. Not relief that a dangerous neighbor is well, and not curiosity. The account repeats it: they were very much afraid Luke 8:37.
All the people of the surrounding country of the Gadarenes asked him to depart from them.
The request is the most unsettling sentence in the chapter. A whole district, having seen a man restored whom they had chained for years, asks the person responsible to leave — and he goes. The cost of the pigs is part of it, and the account does not pretend otherwise. But the fear came first, and what frightened them was the restoration.
The man from whom the demons had gone out begged him that he might go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your house, and declare what great things God has done for you" Luke 8:38–39.
The one man who wants to follow is refused, in a book where following is everything. He is sent home instead — to the district that had just expelled his healer — and he is the first person in the Gospels commissioned to tell his own story. He went his way, proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him. He was told to speak of God, and he speaks of Jesus, and nothing in the account corrects him.
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