Clothed with Christ

[From our Gospel this morning:]  Then the people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind (8.35).

[And from our Epistle:]  As many of you as were baptized into Christ[, you] have clothed yourself with Christ (3.27).

What we wear, our clothes, is something that matters to some degree to most of us.  Even the otherworldly cleric or academic with holes in their shoes or the elbows of their jumper – one feels – and maybe I am just a little cynical – is displaying a sort of ‘constructed humility’ by their apparent indifference to what they wear.  Most of us have had the embarrassing experience of turning up for something wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes.  I once thought I had ruined of friendship of decades by mistakenly telling a friend that a dinner at my college was ‘black-tie’.  Well, it wasn’t, and he was the only person in black-tie.  Boy, was he cross with me all evening – though I was eventually forgiven.

There is a conventional Christian piety that we shouldn’t be bothered about clothes and outward appearance.  Jesus certainly has some things to say to members of my profession who obsess about having the right bits and pieces of clerical apparel to indicate our status.  (I acknowledge the irony of me saying that and being up here in the pulpit dressed liked this.)  What we wear can be a form of vanity or extravagance on our part.  It can be a means of deception.  We can use clothes to hide our real selves from others – and others to us.

And yet, both our epistle and gospel this morning have something to say about clothes and their rightness – of putting on the right clothes.  In our gospel this morning, Luke’s version of what has to be the strangest of Jesus’ healing miracles in the gospels (and that’s saying a lot), we have a man so out of his right mind, so divorced from his true self, that ‘For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs’, that is, among the dead, not the living.  His nakedness is not an indicator of an Eden-like, pre-Fallen innocence, but a sign of his profound distress and his alienation from the human community.  What has driven him to this terrible condition?

Jesus, in this story, as he is in so many others, is transgressive; that is, he crosses boundaries.  First of all, geography:  he is in gentile territory coming to the aid of a gentile in a gentile community – an even bolder transgression than the healing of the Centurion’s slave in the previous chapter in Luke.  At least the Roman Centurion was a generous benefactor to the local Jewish community.  Secondly, Jesus does not shy away from mental illness.  Jesus does not do whatever the first century equivalent was of pretending to be getting off at a stop on the London Underground but in fact to be changing carriages because of the disturbing behaviour of someone on the train.  (I’ve done that – have you?)  The man in the story lives among the tombs – among the dead – another form defilement according to Jesus’ religious code – and Jesus transgresses that.  

The story takes a surprising turn, and I do not mean those unfortunate demons and the herd of swine, but much more unexpected and astonishing.  Because it is the supposedly ‘mad’ person who sees who Jesus really is, not the ‘sane’ people around him.  The man cries out: ‘“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”’  What does Jesus do?  He asks the man his name.  Can this be the first act of compassion, of dignity, of humanity, that the man has received in years of terrible treatment?  Jesus treats him as a human being for the first time in who knows how long.  Luke tells us that, as a result of Jesus’ authority, that when the man’s neighbours came to find Jesus, they ‘found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind’.  

Then we have St Paul too in a clothing line of thought:  ‘As many of you as were baptized into Christ[,] have clothed yourselves with Christ’.  I can see why the compilers of the lectionary put these two readings together.  For Paul, we are like the man in Luke’s story:  fettered, naked, living in a world of illusion or indeed of delusion.   Christ restores our true selves in Baptism and now we are ‘clothed’ and back in relationship to the human community and with God.  But Paul, who is not greater than his Lord, also knows that this community of the Baptized is about transgression of boundaries:  Jew/Greek, slave/free, male/female ‘for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’.  

This passage from Galatians (which may be an early baptismal liturgy) powerfully reminds us of the transgressive reality inaugurated in Jesus’ earthly ministry which is at the heart of the work of the Gospel of Christ.  Transgressions are frightening.  Did the neighbours of the man in gospel story thank Jesus for restoring the man?  You betcha they didn’t:  they told Jesus to get out of town.  Jew/Greek; slave/free; male/female – all those divisions and boundaries – in Baptism they are ‘transgressed’.  But in Christ this does not result in an annihilation of difference.  In this sense, ‘complementarianism’ – a theological term usually associated with conservative and strict categories about matters like gender, for example as a way of saying that the subordination of women to men isn’t really ‘subordination’ – oh, no, no, no you’ve got that completely wrong – but is really about how men in leadership and women in obedience ‘complement’ each other.  (You can see I’m starting to get into ‘the zone’ for General Synod next month.)  But, if this doesn’t sound completely loopy, ‘complementarianism’ might be understood in a different way, with a transgressive and transformative resonance and meaning. 

Because since the beginning of world, no two human beings have been or are alike – that’s the miracle of the thing – any two people are ‘complementary’.  Any two people ‘complement’ each other.  We are each ‘clothed’ in Christ – and that is what we are struggling to see in each other – and in ourselves, in the Church and in the world.  Like the man in the gospel passage, Christ gives each of us back our name in baptism; through Christ we are ‘clothed’, restored to the community of the living, and, we hope, in our ‘right mind’.