Mark 5 - In Depth Bible Commentaries

6495.7 And, having cried out with a loud voice, he says, “What do you and I have in650 651common, Jesus, Son of the God, the Highest? I put you under oath, by the God, that649Here again (see footnote 601 on Mark 4:35), Mark uses a present tense verb, therebymaking his readers a sort of “contemporaries” with the story being told.650Literally, “What to me and to you...?” Compare Mark 1:24. Of course, the implicationof the question is that “We have nothing in common.”Luccock sermonized that “In a deeper sense it has been through the years astandard question put to Jesus both by individuals and by disordered societies...Theanswer to the demoniac was that Jesus had much in every way to do with him...Jesus hasmuch to do with the individual disordered in body and mind.thOne of the most notable advances of the present [20 ] century in the whole realm ofmedicine is the discovery of the place and power of religious faith in healing. We arelearning that the line between body and spirit can never be rigidly drawn. Physical ills havea close relationship to mental and spiritual states. Jesus has much to do with illness, in thebringing of the gifts of a real faith–peace of mind, inner security, the calming of fears andneurotic storms, the calling forth of new interests, lifting life out of the shallow miseries of adebilitating self-concern.“Jesus has much to do with chaotic lives, not torn with physical disease so much astorn with conflicting desires, making an anarchy rather than a kingdom...Jesus has much todo with turning chaos into harmony, coming into disintegrated lives, and making ‘out of themany, one.’ He has much to do with society...He has much to do with marriage, and thehome, with education, with profit making...Jesus has cast out unclean spirits from men andwomen, the unclean spirits of greed, licentiousness, aggression, pride, race hatred. Thatis not theory; it is history. It is history reaching back to the dawn of the Christian era, toPeter and Zaccheus, to thieves and runaway slaves. It is contemporary history whereverlife has been brought into one great allegiance to Jesus as master, out of the frenzies ofmany passions.” (P. 714)Surely this kind of interpretation is a proper understanding of this text–not the kind ofinterpretation that rejects the modern view of mental illness, and spends its energies inattempting to defend this ancient way of describing mental illness as “demon possession.”651See Mark 1:1 with its footnote 7, and Mark 1:11 with its footnote 54. This crazedperson with an “unclean spirit” makes a completely orthodox confession concerning whoJesus is–“Son of the Highest God.” See the earlier story in Mark 1:23 with its footnotes114 and 115.“Highest God” is !Ay*l.[, lae, )el (elyon in Hebrew--see Genesis 14:18, 19 where itis the name used by the Canaanite Priest of God Most High [ôï èåï ôï øßóôïõ, toutheou tou hupsistou], Melchizedek, which is then adopted by Abraham and later used by(continued...)412