Saturday, March 6: Grace Without Limits

My understanding of this story is that it intends to dramatically illustrate the degree to which the grace of God extends to everyone. No one is excluded. No one is beyond the helping hand of God. Mark 5:1-20

For me, this story is about the grace of God and nothing else. Everything else in the story is extraneous.

A brief summary: Jesus, a good and pious Jew, intentionally goes into a gentile area to heal an outcast. The poor guy helped by Jesus was not only an outcast from the Jews, as were all gentiles, but this guy was an outcast from the gentiles as well. He was an outcast of outcasts.

In this story, we see Jesus intentionally going into a religiously forbidden area for no apparent reason except to minister. In going into this gentile territory, Jesus became ritually unclean… something pious Jews scrupulously avoided because cleansing oneself ritually was a pain and took a long time. In getting near a gentile, Jesus became ritually unclean to a second degree. Then, if becoming ritually unclean in two different ways was not enough, Jesus messes with someone believed to be demon possessed. All three of Jesus’ individual “offenses” made him unclean. Together, the accumulative effect is he is so unclean it is beyond reason and imagination. To be cleansed for these “offenses” would take a lot of time and during his cleansing efforts, he would be excluded from being with pious Jews.

To help someone considered totally hopeless and dangerous, Jesus is willing to go against the religious beliefs of his peers; he is willing to be ostracized from “good people” and he is willing to pay the price of having to “jump through the hoops” to get back into his normal life.

Jesus goes the extra thousand miles to help this poor outcast who is isolated from everyone and living without hope. But, he is not an outcast to Jesus. In this story, we see that no one is beyond God’s love and help!

Much of my work in Honduras is about helping folks see the grace in this story rather than the demons.

God, help me to better realize and accept the enormity of your grace.

Rev. Glen Evans, former pastor of CUMC
now serving as a missionary in Honduras.
glenevans@artforhumanity.org