15 July 2026 • Friday of Trinity 6 (observed) • Mark 5:1–20 · James 3:14–18
In the name + of Jesus. Amen.
No one could bind him. They tried. Chains on his hands, shackles on his feet, again and again, and every time he tore the iron apart like thread. So they quit trying. They left him out among the tombs, in the hills, night and day, howling, cutting himself with stones. A man living in a graveyard, bleeding by his own hand, and not one person in that whole country strong enough to stop him. “No one had the strength to subdue him” (Mark 5:4).
James, in the epistle, already told you what kind of wisdom builds a life like that. He calls it wisdom. Not foolishness — wisdom. A shrewd way of running things, a way that looks smart, that gets results. But listen to where it comes from. “This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic” (James 3:15). Earthly. Unspiritual. Demonic. And James tells you what it grows: “For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there” (James 3:16).
I have that wisdom. I’m fluent in it. I know how to look at what my neighbor has and want it. I know how to keep score, to nurse a grudge, to work an angle, to come out ahead and call it prudence. Bitter envy — I can taste it in my mouth. Self-seeking — it’s my native tongue; I don’t even have to think about it. And it does exactly what James says it does. It makes confusion. It makes every evil thing. It cuts me. Not with stones. With the words I can’t take back. With the two-in-the-morning replay of everything I resent. With the walls I build around myself and then blame on everybody else. That’s the demonic wisdom, and it is not out in a graveyard somewhere. It is the reasonable-sounding voice in my own head that has me, right now, bound and bleeding and calling it a life.
No one could bind that man. And here is the terrible thing — nobody wanted to unbind him either, once they saw the cost.
Because Jesus comes and ends it, and watch what the town does. The demons go into the swine — two thousand of them — and the whole herd stampedes down the bank and drowns in the sea. And the people come out to look, and they see the man. The man no one could bind. He is sitting there. Clothed. In his right mind. And they do the arithmetic. One man restored; a herd lost. And “they began to plead with Him to depart from their region” (Mark 5:17). They ran the numbers on the pigs, and they picked the pigs.
That is demonic wisdom too. That is mine. Better a sin I’ve made my peace with than a Savior who overturns the whole economy. Better the tombs I know than the Son of God who costs me something. I would rather keep my pigs than lose them to the One who could put me in my right mind. No one could bind that man, and no one could talk that town into keeping Jesus around. That’s the wisdom from below, and left to it, every one of us sends Him back across the sea.
Then Jesus. He crossed the water for this. He didn’t wander into the country of the Gerasenes by accident. He got into the boat, He crossed the sea, He stepped out onto unclean pagan ground, into a graveyard, and the first thing to meet Him was a man full of hell. That is who Jesus came for. That is who He crossed the water to reach. And Legion saw Him and knew Him — knew Him better than the whole sane town did. “What have I to do with You, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” (Mark 5:7). The demons confess it out loud, the thing the townspeople won’t say and I can’t say for myself: the Son of the Most High God, standing there on the shore.
And Jesus speaks. “Come out of the man, unclean spirit” (Mark 5:8).
That’s all. No chain. No wrestling. A word. What every shackle in the Decapolis could not do, the word of Jesus does in one sentence. Legion — many, strong, iron-tearing Legion — out. Into the swine, into the sea, under the water, drowned, gone.
And the man is sitting. Clothed. In his right mind.
There it is. There is the wisdom from above. Not a better philosophy. Not a technique you finally mastered, not five steps to a calmer life. A man who could not be bound, sitting still, clothed, sane — because Jesus said a Word over him. “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits” (James 3:17). That is not a ladder of virtues you climb up to God. That is the mind of Christ, handed down, put onto a man who had nothing but demons an hour before. Peaceable — the howling stopped. Gentle — the stones dropped out of his hands. Full of mercy — because Mercy Himself had crossed the sea and was standing in front of him, speaking.
And that word is for you.
You have been bound. You know it. You’ve cut yourself with the wisdom of this world and called it living. So hear what Jesus does with Legion, and hear it as the best news you own. He drowns it. Down the steep bank, into the sea, the whole unclean legion under the water, dead. That is your Baptism. That is what happened to your demons in the font — drowned in the flood, dead in the water with Christ, and you were brought up out of it sitting, clothed, in your right mind. Clothed — not in the rags you crawled in with, but in Christ Himself, His righteousness put over you like a robe. “Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you” (Mark 5:19). He did them. He had compassion. For you.
And He has not stopped. He keeps crossing the water to the graveyard, and He crosses it here. The devil is the master of a thousand arts, and he cannot endure one word of Christ. He couldn’t stand it on the shore, and he can’t stand it in this room. When your pastor stands in front of you and says, “I forgive you all your sins,” that is the same word — “Come out” — spoken over you again, and Legion has to go; he cannot stay where that word is said. When you come to this altar, Jesus feeds you His body given on the cross, and His blood shed for you, laid into your mouth, His life covering your death — and the unclean spirit has no place at that rail. Not off on some far shore. Not back in the old country. Here. Today. Jesus, crossing the water to the tombs one more time, for you — to drown what binds you, and to seat you, clothed and quiet and sane, at His table.
That is the wisdom from above. His body. His blood. For you.
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin