Notice that these were Jews who were nevertheless raising unclean animals, swine, in violation of God’s Law. In acting to heal the man as He had, Jesus was doing two things. He was cleansing a man and showing His power over evil spirits, and He was also rebuking the people of the town for having departed from the Law of God to deal with unclean animals. He had accomplished two cleansings: the man’s was a blessing, but the town’s was a rebuke. Yet the townspeople did not repent; instead, in fear they pleaded with Him to leave their region. There are some people who, if you offered them a deed to property or a spiritual blessing, would choose the material over the spiritual. They are not like Solomon, who was wise enough to realize that to choose the spiritual blessing was to choose everything one would ever need. These townspeople saw only the threat to their livelihood. So the Lord Jesus obeyed their terrible request and left them.
Christ’s humanity, though not fallen, was very real. As this story opens, He is asleep in the boat. He had a body that would grow tired, and no doubt His heart and mind were weary too. He had been preaching and healing, as we saw in the last chapter, only to face the blasphemous accusations of angry religious leaders and the attempts of His own family to remove Him because they thought Him insane. He then left them, going on to teach the crowd in a series of parables (4:1-33), though His heart was full of loneliness and sorrow at the falling away of weak friends. Jesus is just the Saviour needed by tired bodies and weary minds. He understands the sorrow of disappointment and deception. As we read in Hebrews, we have a high priest who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15). Every day He is with us, so that we may secure the comfort and refreshment we need from Him.
When we look at the Lord Jesus, what exactly is it that we see? “True God and true man” is the answer given by the ancient church, and hundreds of pages have been written to explain exactly what that means. Certainly we cannot answer the question definitively in the course of this study; nor was that Mark’s chief purpose in writing his gospel. But in the next few chapters, mark does provide us with many incidents that offer glimpses into Jesus’ unique nature. He shows us the way Jesus, like no other man, was able to bring the earthly and the spiritual together.
The religionists saw Jesus through eyes that had never submitted to God the Father, so they did not see that Christ’s mission was an expression of the Father’s will, and that in Him they could find the fellowship with the Father that they had vainly sought for so long.
As Jesus grew up, undoubtedly His deity was veiled. Though His family had never found Him in a sin, they did not understand who He was. But now something different had come. Jesus was now thirty years old, in the public eye, the news of His ministry completely overtaking the country. It was only natural that the crowds should swarm about Him, but in the process Jesus came smack against organized religion, and when He did, the fury of hell broke loose.
