Great Expectations

Not everyone leaves their hometown. Perhaps such folks find themselves lingering in a place far longer than they ever thought; they had intentions to go abroad for a great adventure at some point, only it never materialized. Not, at least, in the way they had once expected.

We see a picture of this reality in Mark 5. Just before Jesus returns to His own hometown of Nazareth in Mark 6, we read the story of a man who, though he desired with all his heart to leave his home and follow Jesus, was nonetheless commanded by the Lord to stay put.

Just before this encounter, right at the tail end of Mark 4, Jesus displays his divine power as God incarnate over the howling winds and roaring seas—“Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:39). At the voice of Jesus, a great calm immediately rushes over the once tumultuous water where the disciples’ little boat was only just a moment before being tossed to and fro with great violence.

Once Jesus and His disciples step ashore on the other side of the sea in the country of the Gerasenes, the Lord is straightaway confronted with another raging tempest in the form of a demon-possessed man: “And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit” (Mark 5:2).

Jesus had only just finished displaying His divine power over nature. Now, He turned His divine love towards man. As with the stormy sea, the man with the unclean spirit needed only a few words from the mouth of Jesus to calm his troubled soul—“And people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid” (Mark 5:14-15).

As with the people of His hometown of Nazareth in the coming chapter, Jesus is met with a mixture of fear and rejection by the Gerasenes. Indeed, all but one began to earnestly “beg Jesus to depart from their region” (5:17). The man afflicted by a host of demons only a few moments before his encounter with Jesus did not join the crowd in begging Him to leave. Instead, he “begged [Jesus] that he might be with him” (5:18). Like the townspeople, the man was fine with the Lord leaving—provided, of course, that he could follow after Him.

In this story, we see a vivid picture of the Gospel: a sovereign Lord graciously condescending to a sinful man blinded by the kingdom of darkness, wandering bound among the tombs, who is then delivered into the Kingdom of Light. The man who had just tasted true love and kindness from the hands and heart of the Lord now could not stand the thought of being separate from Him. The once sick man had tasted life abundant from the Author of life, and it was now his singular passion to love and serve Jesus for the rest of his days. In other words, the man went from demon-possessed to Jesus-obsessed.

He assumed—as many of us might as well—that this new life would include, at the very least, him leaving his hometown to follow Jesus. A fair assumption. After all, throughout the Gospels we see Jesus routinely calling people to leave all they have to follow Him, both spiritually as well as quite literally, physically, and geographically.

The man who had been demon-possessed didn’t want anything else out of life other than to now follow after Jesus. Who could blame him? It was the citizenry of his hometown that banished him to the outskirts of the city, binding him with chains and shackles among the tombs; in addition to Satan himself, it was the very people he grew up amongst who consigned him to this life of abasement and loneliness; and worst of all, it was his hometown who spurned and rejected his Savior and Lord. Why would he want anything to do with his hometown?

And yet, Jesus did not permit the man to accompany Him. Consider the Lord’s response to the man as He and His disciples make their way back into the boat: “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you” (Mark 5:19). Bold of the Lord to assume the poor man had any friends left! Perhaps Jesus meant for him to make some and then to share the good news with them. Indeed, the healed man was being deployed with the Gospel to the very people who had abused him these many years. To the very land of darkness and shadow which had for so long been under the twisted thumb of the evil one.

The Jesus-obsessed man wanted to follow Jesus; Jesus gladly permitted this request. Indeed, the man was given his mission orders from the Lord Himself, even if the mission wasn’t one he necessarily would have chosen for himself. Such is life, is it not? The account ends with these words—“And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled” (Mark 5:20).

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo is told by Gandalf that he must leave the Shire if he wishes for his hometown to remain safe from the forces of Darkness. Frodo acquiesces, but it’s with a heavy heart that he responds to Gandalf:

“I should like to save the Shire, if I could—though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.”

As the healed man left Jesus on the shore and made his way back home, did he think similar thoughts about his hometown and those people who resided there? That the inhabitants were “too stupid and dull for words” and that “an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them” after everything they had subjected him to? If you ask me, I think the man forgave them. Did he wish he too could be crowded among the disciples in their little boat with Jesus? Perhaps—but I really don’t think so. Not everyone is called to be a Peter or a John, after all.

After Jesus left, the man went away joyfully, burning with an evangelistic zeal for the people Christ sent him to. His inward love for Jesus was subsequently directed outwards to those around him in his little hometown. The man came to realize an important truth which Paul later spells out in Acts 17:24-27: that God sovereignly determines the times and places in which each man lives, to the end that they might find Him and make Him known.

“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.”

Part of maturing is realizing that we must hold our dreams and ambitions with something of a loose grip—not because our plans for our lives are too big, but because they are too small. We have great expectations for our lives, to be sure; thankfully, the Lord’s plans for us exceed each and every one of our own.

Though we cannot always see it, it stands true that the Lord always has other, better work in mind for us. This is the kind of work that pierces through the temporal and mundane with eternal purpose. Though much of our living here below can feel ordinary, as though we are laboring in utter obscurity in some dusty corner of the world, what an encouragement that this is nonetheless just the place where the Lord would have us for the time being.

By resting in His perfect wisdom, care, and timing, we can take heart that everything done as unto the Lord will send echoes not just through our little cities and hometowns, but through the halls of eternity itself. Such that, when all is said, done, and unveiled, all of creation in the New Heavens and New Earth will swell with His praise for the better and brighter because of it.

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Photo by the Art Institute of Chicago, Unsplash

Author’s Note: This article is a follow-up to my post from last week, “A Portrait of My Hometown.” Think of them as two parts of a larger whole, and as such, I would encourage you to read them both!

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