A Moral Compass

Over the last couple of years, I have been working on a research project with colleagues from the University of Birmingham. It all began when I worked in Cambridge and the University Library managed to purchase an old New Testament manuscript which had been languishing among its rare manuscripts for some time. Rather embarrassingly, the Bible Society, who owned it, wanted to flog it, but the Syndics of the University Library decided to buy it instead.

The manuscript is called ‘Codex Zacynthius’. It is a palimpsest. Because writing materials were so expensive in the ancient world, they would often be repurposed. The pages of parchment would be bleached and wiped clean, the old text discarded and something new created. So a palimpsest has an overtext and an undertext. But as the years progressed the faint lines of the undertext would often begin to re-emerge. Scholars noticed in the nineteenth century that underneath this Byzantine lectionary dating from the 12^th century, another text was beginning to emerge. As part of this project and with the aid of multi-spectral imaging, we have been able to recover and transcribe the undertext, which dates from the 8^thcentury and forms a commentary on eleven chapters of Luke’s gospel. I played a modest part – as if I don’t have enough to do – in working on the commentary which lay in the margins of the text.

It’s fair to say that the original text has been chopped around a bit, but the passage which we have heard today about the Gerasene demoniac features in this codex, and it’s fair to say that early commentators may have found this text as bewildering as we do. For a start, the translation that we used today refers to the fact that Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee and came to the country of the ‘Gerasenes’. The problem is that Gerasa is miles away, modern day Jerash lies 50 kilometres to the south east. Early biblical scholars puzzled about this, some assuming that Luke’s geography was a bit shaky, and so early manuscripts suggest a number of different cities: some suggest Gadara, which we find in Matthew’s gospel and lies about 10 kilometres away. Codex Zacynthius, along with a number of early commentators, suggests Gergesa, which at least had the merit of being close to the sea.

So why the error? And why do modern commentators persist in ignoring Zacynthius and other manuscripts and suggesting Gerasa as the most authentic reading?

The trouble is that all this detective work kind of misses the point. Luke is alerting us to the fact that Gerasa is gentile country. By crossing the Sea of Galilee, Jesus had arrived in the area of the Decapolis, an area dominated by ten Hellenistic cities, and preeminent among them was the city of Gerasa. And to emphasise the point that this is gentile country, he describes this poor beleaguered man possessed by demons living among the dead. According to Jewish sensibilities, cemeteries were impure, as were pigs. But there is more to the imagery of this story than perhaps meets the eye. Not only was Gerasa the capital city of the Decapolis, but the Decapolis was basically a Roman creation. It was the Czechoslovakia of the ancient world. When the Roman Empire incorporated Syria in 63 BC, the Hellenistic cities east of the Jordan were freed from Jewish rule. The appearance of the Roman legions was associated in the minds of many Gentiles living in these cities with freedom and liberation, and yet these legions remained very much forces of occupation. The tenth legion, Fretensis, had been stationed in Syria since the year 6CE, during the lifetime of Jesus. On their standards and seals, they had among other things, the image of a boar. So wherever people heard the story of the Gerasene demoniac, and wherever the tenth legion was known, the story of the exorcism by the lake would have awakened associations with the Roman occupation.

And it is no accident that we find people talking about demons in this context. Admittedly, we are reading texts which emerged in a context where the majority of people had a worldview very different from our own, a world populated by angels and demons. The Twentieth century American theologian, William Stringfellow, saw very clearly that the powers and principalities of this world were the institutions, the systems, corporations, ideologies, and other political, economic and social powers, which enslave us and which crush the human spirit. These are ‘demonic’ forces. And the language of ‘possession’ enables us to draw immediate parallels with the experience of occupation. When we see the images on our TV screens of the experience of occupation in Ukraine, the terror, the violence, the demoralization, the devastation wrought on people’s mental health, their sense of well-being, the distinction between good and evil is clearly drawn. There can be no moral ambiguity, - on the one hand, on the other hand, - no solace or purpose in wringing our hands in helpless denial. The battle-lines are clearly drawn.

And what does Jesus do? He sets this man free. He sends the legions packing, racing to embrace their own self-destruction in the sea. And this is where the story gets really interesting – because when the people saw what had happened, 'they were afraid'. They were terrified. They were 'seized with great fear'. Why?      

William Stringfellow, a lawyer who spent most of his life doing pro-bono work in Harlem among people who were vulnerable and often helpless, saw that our subjugation by the principalities and powers (and the way we seek to appease them, the many ways in which we collude with them, the authorities, the corporations, institutions, traditions, structures, bureaucracies, ideologies and systems) had led to our moral incapacitation, our moral impoverishment. That is why the people are afraid in this story – the system is being shaken. And yet they are complicit with the system, they have made their peace with the system, and in their comfortable lives, they might have too much to lose. That is why those Gerasenes are afraid. That is why they ask Jesus to leave.

And if we are honest, we too are afraid. We only need to close our eyes and think for a single moment about the state of public life today to recognize the moral poverty, the moral decadence, that prevails in modern Britain. We shrug our shoulders with a sense of helplessness. But if these were the shores of Gerasa, if Jesus had washed up in a little boat on our shores, this story would have ended with Jesus and his disciples not simply being asked to leave but by being rather unceremoniously despatched to Rwanda. The only consolation is that at least the Rwandans would have offered them a warm welcome.

Perhaps the enigmas about questions of geography in the gospel story with which I began alert us to the fact that what we need now more than ever is a compass, a real moral compass, and perhaps we need to begin not by inviting Jesus to leave, but by paying attention to his teaching, by listening to his good news, that the powers and principalities will be overwhelmed by the love and grace of God’s Kingdom. This is ‘how much God has done for us’, but to recognize any of that, we must first listen… attentively… to that still small voice…. of conscience.