Why the saints aren’t smiling

“[Jesus] had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For it had often seized him, and he was kept under guard, bound with chains and shackles; and he broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the wilderness. Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion,’ because many demons had entered him” (Luke 8:29)

The holy church sets the Gadarene demoniac [Matthew has two demoniacs] on two Sundays through the year. The message is vital for our salvation. It has to do with passions and the imperative to conquer them before we leave this lifetime.

A basic problem is that for our society passions are considered to be expressions of sincerity. A good thing. Honest emotions from a warm heart. From our secular culture point of view, an unemotional person is thought of as passive, dull and uninteresting. Watch the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger [which I never do] and note the perpetual motion through the performance. Athletes, even when they don’t have the ball, “trash talk,” which expresses their uncontrolled energy. We’ve been conditioned to expect such displays of emotion as normal and acceptable. Even the sport of tennis, once considered a gentleman’s sport, was startled by the bratty behavior of John McEnroe and has never been quite the same.

For the true Christian, on the other hand, passions are the place where evil resides. The one who is a victim of his emotions is in a sense really passive, not free, because he or she is a slave to passions. They “see red,” indicating they don’t see anything at all other than the cause of their pent-up anger. They have lost perspective. They are blind to the consequences of what they are about to do. OJ Simpson, once a national idol to football fans, is now a pariah for one uncontrolled outburst leading to the deaths of two persons. Zinadine Zidane lost the World Cup championship for France by a head butt.

The one out of control and subject to his or her passions, even for a split instant, is not really free—he is a victim helpless to hold his emotions in check. He may think of himself as expressing his true feelings and in that way being a true personality, but the release of an impulse is a suppression of true personality. Who we are and who we are becoming are known but to God. Note the “white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it” (Revelation 2:17). Only “him who overcomes” will come to realize his true personality. And that will happen when the person keeps himself or herself genuinely open to the Creator despite all that happens to him through a lifetime of constant challenges. The victim of impulses is blind, even if he isn’t aware of his blindness. He has surrendered the gift of freedom to a whim or impulse of the moment. He comes to believe that freedom is nonexistent—that all is conditioned, all reality is either determined or chaotic, and freedom is an illusion. He feels that his passions make him free, but he is unpredictable even to himself. The Gadarene demoniac’s name was not “Legion.” That was what he called the demons that possessed him. That he even gave a response to the Lord was at least a start in seeking to know who he was.

The Spirit-filled people of God are concerned to discover who they are in God’s eyes. They find that liberty is a matter of overcoming emotions. What makes us happy can be taken away. They spend a lifetime laboring to transcend fleeting feelings. Today we may laugh, tomorrow we might cry. Both smiles and frowns are signs of a world that is but a prelude to a far greater experience in the kingdom of heaven. True freedom is a glorious gift from God, but one that requires cooperation with the Giver.