Their boat is disappearing beneath the waves. The
disciples are not weekend anglers—they are seasoned
fishermen. They’ve spent their whole lives on this lake.
Now they are convinced they’re going to die on this
lake. And Jesus is asleep, apparently indifferent to their
imminent demise.
Lord, save us! We are perishing!
You know the prayer. It’s the prayer that rises when the
prognosis is devastating, when the marriage finally fails,
when you’re lying awake at 3 AM, your mind racing
toward the worst-case scenario. It’s a prayer, but it’s also
a kind of accusation. The unfiltered charge of one who
feels abandoned in the shadows.
Save us! Don’t you care?
Silently, Jesus rises. He speaks one word to the wind
with an unsettling audacity. Suddenly, the sea goes flat.
This is not a pause in the wind. It’s an eerie unnatural
stillness. Matthew calls it a dead calm.
The sea is still, but the fear only intensifies. The disciples
were terrified of the storm. Now they are terrified of this
man they thought they knew. But suddenly the stakes
have been raised. The disciples understand a raging sea.
They know what to do. You bail and you row and you
pray. But a man who speaks and the wind and the water
obey? That’s a whole different kind of threat.
The storm was a danger to their lives. Jesus is a danger
to their world.
The boat bumps against the shore. From storm at sea
to stench in the graveyard. This is Gentile territory—the
“other side” of the sea. And as soon as they step off the
boat, the shadows shift.
Two men come howling out of the tombs. They were the
local embarrassment, the town’s open wound, a problem
not solved but skirted by cold, calculated avoidance. You
know, take the long way around, adjust your commute,
tune out the screams from the cemetery.
Then Jesus arrives, and the demons recognize him
instantly. What have you to do with us, Son of God? They
already know what the disciples are trying to grasp,
trying to understand.
They attempt to negotiate, but Jesus casts them out
with a single word. Go. There’s a rush of pigs down the
bank, into the sea where they drown. And the men—
these two men who terrorized the town, who were
themselves terrorized—are suddenly set free.
And perhaps you’d expect a celebration. The terror
that haunted that cemetery is gone. The road through
that part of town is safe again. But the whole town
gathers, and with one voice, in one unanimous vote,
they beg Jesus. Leave our town. Leave our town. Why?
Because Jesus is a wrecking ball; he is a danger to
their world.
Look at the pigs. A whole herd gone. Jesus freed the
men and destroyed an industry in the same breath.
We do the math too. Whenever transformation comes
with a price tag, we calculate the cost. And sometimes
we decide that the pigs are worth more than the
person. Sure, it was a miserable arrangement, but
at least it was stable. The suffering of strangers can
be preferable to the disruption of change. The fear of
chaos now gives way to fear of the cure.
The demoniacs were manageable precisely because
they were possessed. As long as they stayed in the
tombs, the situation may have been tragic, but at least it
was contained. You could pity them from a distance and
then go home by a different road and lock your doors.
You could be compassionate without being disrupted.
But look at them now. There they are, standing in the
town square. Clothed. Coherent. In their right minds
and no doubt looking for a meal, or a conversation, a
community, a place to belong.
Here’s the truth we must confess: it is easy for us to
love from a distance. But whenever Jesus heals people,
whenever in the Gospels Jesus heals people, he brings
them close. He turns “those people out there” to “our
neighbors right here.” And that’s when we begin to have
our doubts. On second thought, maybe better for this
foreigner from the other side of the sea to go back where
he came from. They begged Jesus. Leave our town.
Because beyond the fear of the storm, beyond the fear
of the demons, there is a fundamental fear he forces us
to face. If this man can calm the sea, if this man can heal
the broken, what else might he see? What more might
he ask? And what if he turns his vision toward us?
The townspeople were not possessed, but they weren’t
free either. And maybe they realized if this man can see
and speak to demons, he can see right through us, too.
Maybe they knew their status quo could not withstand
his presence. Jesus is a danger to their world. Better to
send him away.
So they beg him to leave. And—here’s the heartbreak—
he goes. He does not resist. He does not argue. Jesus
will not force his grace on those who prefer their pigs.
He will not stay where he is merely a guest of our
convenience. He will not bless our careful compromise
with captivity.
The townspeople had their reasons, and so do we.
The polite, cultural Christianity of the past half-century
is emptying out. Maybe we should let it go. It offered
a kind of throw-pillow Jesus—decorative, comfortable,
carefully coordinated so as not to disturb our decor. But
a faith that demands nothing eventually means nothing.
Now, don’t be fooled by the alternative. Right now,
there is a loud, clanging cymbal kind of Christianity
that has deftly swapped the cross for a battering ram.
They march Jesus into places of political power like
a captured mascot, this beautiful faith we all love
fashioned into a weapon for a war our Lord would never
wage. They speak of their courage, but all I see is white-
knuckled fear, that frantic grasping of people willing to
burn the graveyard down just to keep the demons quiet.
Same fear as the townspeople. Louder megaphone.
In the boat, the disciples feared that Jesus was too weak
to save them. In the town, the citizens feared he was too
strong to be managed.
Whether we retreat to our sanctuaries or rush to the
barricades, it’s the same fear, the same move. We want
to keep Jesus contained. We want to keep Jesus on our
side. We want to send him away when he starts making
trouble…for us.
We all want a God who’s on our side. Our prayer is for
a God who sees what we see, who fears what we fear,
who hates what we hate. A God who shows up when we
need an ally and stands down when we need a lesson.
But that’s not the Jesus who shows up on the shore. This
is a God we cannot control. A danger to our world.
Jesus refuses to be an accessory to lives devoid of deep
meaning. He’d rather we be free than powerful. And
we’ve never quite forgiven him for that. And so, yes, we
too send him away. Not out loud. We’re polite people.
We quiet quit. We find a church that won’t disrupt us. We
domesticate his transcendent truth. We fashion a God,
we craft a God, we make a God that is just large enough
to meet our demands and just weak enough to go along
with our plans. It’s a faith thin enough to be safe.
But listen to this. A faith thin enough to be safe is too
thin to save us. We must confess that sometimes we
don’t even want to be saved. We want to be stable. We
prefer our pigs. Our profits. Our prejudice. Our power.
We choose managed torment over disruptive grace.
We would rather be comfortable in our chains than
frightened by our freedom.
Managed torment. You know managed torment. It is the
soul-crushing job that you hate, but you stay because
the status and the security are too high a price to pay.
You know managed torment. It’s the family dinner
where everyone stays silent about the addiction or the
abuse because a stable lie carefully contained is easier
to manage than an intrusive truth set loose. You know
managed torment. It is the political tribe we cling to
even when it requires us to abandon our conscience
or ignore our God, so terrified are we of being cast out
of the club. We’d rather keep the demon we know than
accept the Savior insisting we start over.
But Jesus will keep sailing through our storms. So, keep
walking toward the tombs—the ones our economy
depends on, the ones our politics ignore, the ones
where people are still screaming while the respectable
world carefully takes the long way around. Jesus simply
will not turn away from the tormented. He simply
refuses to ignore the oppressed.
And so, my friends, the question is not whether he is
dangerous. Of course he is. The question is simpler
and more terrifying than that. Knowing what you
know, will you let him stay?
Grace is not a siege. He will not batter down your
door. He will not guilt you into transformation. He will
never shame you into surrender. All he will do is look
at you with full knowledge of everything you protect,
everything you deny, and everything you are afraid to
lose—and he will wait.
Will you let him stay? Will you let him disrupt your
life? Will you let him change your heart?
When I was in the fourth grade, I begged my parents
for a puppy. I was organized and made a presentation.
I wore them down with a long list of promises. I shared
nineteen life lessons I would learn if only I had a puppy.
So, Smokey was mine, which meant the dog duties were
mine. What I didn’t anticipate was the falling darkness.
We picked Smokey up in September—my birthday—and
not long after, we moved the clocks back. Suddenly
evening chores happened after sunset. Smokey’s pen
was at the bottom of a hill, far from the house. Every
night after dark, I would sprint down that hill, heart
pounding. I would pour the food out into the bowl and
run back up the hill as fast as I could.
For weeks, I ran down the hill and back up again. One
night I made it to the top, out of breath, and I’m not sure
why, but I turned around. And here’s what I saw. My
father was standing at the back door. Just out of sight.
Watching. Waiting. And that’s when it hit me. He’d been
there every single night. I just hadn’t seen him.
He’s been there in every fear. Every night you ran. Every
moment you clung to control. Every time you tried to
manage the storm. Jesus is a danger to your world. He
is standing on the shore. You can send him away. Or you
can let him stay. Amen.