Luke 8:26-39
Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29
We humans, bipedal thinking animals that we are, operate in one particular time and space, and while we may know that things are often more complex than they seem, we tend toward a mental Occam’s Razor, choosing the easiest and simplest construct whenever possible. So it is that we eat Italian food, take vacations in Italy, maybe brush up on our Italian on the plane, all while thinking that Italian is a thing. But Italy as we have understood it in our lifetimes, is fairly new, emerging during the Risorgimento, the consolidation of many small states, that was not completed until 1871. Even the language we think of as Italian is a construct of that era, drawn from a form of Tuscan that was primarily literary and spoken by the upper class. Neapolitan and Sicilian are not dialects of Italian but instead distinct languages, distant cousins evolved from the same street Latin root. Spain, France, Germany, each was formed as a nation, as an identity, as a language, by distinctly human forces. God forbid I should say it, but the same is true for the United States, what is in and what is out.
If nations can be brought together by force of will, so too can they fall apart. Today, the word used for the dissolution of a nation into small and competing tribes is thought of as Balkanization, something we tend to associate with the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, with horrific war, with genocide, and with the Dayton Accords. In fact, the term first referred to the break-up of portions of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires a century earlier.
The modern nation-state of Israel is a construct. Some of you were even alive when it happened. The ancient state that shapes our thinking and comes to mind isn’t quite what real either We tend to conflate Israel and Judah, to assume the contours of the Holy Land where Jesus taught and healed were roughly analogous to the contours of the Kingdom of David and Solomon. But that kingdom existed for a mere hundred years. Conquest, exile, and immigration made for no clear borders, for cosmopolitanism in some places and for segregation in others.
Our first reading, Jesus and the man possessed, appears in all three synoptic gospels. In Matthew, it takes place in Gadara, a town six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee in what we think should be Jewish territory. In fact, the town was part of the Decapolis, a set of ten prominent Gentile cities in the region, and had been given to Herod by Augustus. Mark, the source of the story, and Luke, who follows Mark, places it in Gerasa, also part of the Decapolis and a further 27 miles southeast. Gerasa was larger, more grand, and though founded by Alexander the Great, by the time Jesus got there, it was thoroughly Roman.
Of course, we might have known that it was not a Jewish town, whichever town it was, because… well, you know… pigs. Continue reading “Balkanization: June 23, 2019”