Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

by Brian D. McLaren

The man wasn’t the only one healed in the story. The whole village was healed too. A new level of meaning suddenly appears in the story: All of us were sick, not just that one man, they say. We were not behaving well when we banished him and put him in chains. We were all under terrible stress. We were all out of our right minds. We all had been possessed—by the domination of the Romans. We couldn’t trust one another. We couldn’t trust ourselves. We, the dehumanized and oppressed, began dehumanizing and oppressing one another. How could we have become so cruel? Maybe our cruelty has something to do with the fact that the Romans invaded us and now occupy us. They’ve been exploiting us, dominating us, dehumanizing us, and traumatizing us for generations, and asking us to be happy about it. Under their oppression, we have lived with humiliation for so long that we started blaming and shaming one another. Think of it: we raised pigs, which our own religion forbade us to eat, so we could sell them to the pork-loving Romans. We were so compromised by the Roman economy and stressed by the Roman occupation that we scapegoated this poor man, pouring out all our shame and anxiety upon him, as if doing to him what the Romans had done to us would bring us relief. His sickness was related to our sickness, which was related to the Roman mechanism of domination. This powerful truth, however, is politically unspeakable, so the story is embellished (in two of the three versions) with the n...