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.

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?

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