22-JUL-2025 The Cost of Wholeness

Written by: Sean Alan Morris

Texts: Psalm 22:18–27 and Luke 8:26–39

Have you ever tried to make a real change in your life? Something positive, something life-giving, only to find that not everyone is on board or happy for you?

Perhaps you got sober, and found friends drifting away. Maybe you came out, and some members of your family became distant. Maybe you started setting boundaries, and suddenly you were the “problem.”

Change, even good change, often disrupts the stories others have written about us. Sometimes, healing makes us harder to control.

Today’s Gospel tells one of the most dramatic stories of healing in all of scripture. Jesus crosses a lake into Gentile territory and is immediately confronted by a man possessed. This man has no clothes, no home, no peace. He lives among the tombs; a literal and symbolic place of death and abandonment. Chained and eventually abandoned by the community, no longer seen as human.

And Jesus, as he so often does, goes toward the suffering. He sees this man and calls out the pain inside him. The demons name themselves: Legion. They’re many. They’re loud. They’re powerful. But they’re no match for Jesus.

When the people come to see what has happened, the man is transformed. He is sitting calmly, dressed, once again conscious, alert and oriented.

In such a situation, you might expect rejoicing.

But what do they do?

They ask Jesus to leave.

They are afraid. Not of the demons. But of the healing.

This man had a role. He was the outcast. The scapegoat. The example of what happens when someone is too far gone. His suffering propped up the story they told about their safety.

And now? That story is gone. He is whole. And they cannot handle it.

We like stories where the good guy wins, where justice triumphs, where broken things are mended. But we also cling to those who we would make examples of. We tell ourselves their suffering is the result of choices they made, or when things are allowed to vary from the accepted plan.  

When healing requires us to question our own part in someone else’s pain, we flinch. When someone is restored, it confronts us with the reality that we may have been complicit in their suffering. That we ignored them. Avoided them. Defined them by their worst day.

Scapegoating isn’t just something “the world” does. It’s something we do. Not always out of cruelty. Sometimes just out of comfort.

How often do we quietly benefit from someone else being the problem?

How often do we prefer someone to stay broken, because their healing would ask us to change?

And sometimes, healing even disrupts the life of the one who is healed.

There’s a scene in the movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian that skewers this concept squarely: A man who has been begging on the street for years is suddenly healed by Jesus. Rather than rejoice, he complains! He calls Jesus a “bloody do-gooder” for ruining his livelihood. “I’ve been healed!” he shouts. “Now I can’t earn a living!”

As absurd as it sounds, there’s truth there: healing can unsettle our routines, upend our identities, and ask us to live differently. Even when wholeness is good, it demands something from us, and that can be scary.

Psalm 22, which we heard earlier, follows a similar arc.

It begins with anguish and even humiliation:

“They divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”

But then comes the turn:

“I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters. I will praise you in the congregation.”

The psalmist goes from abandoned to restored—from silent suffering to public proclamation.

Like the healed man in Luke, the psalmist doesn’t keep their restoration quiet. They speak. They praise. They testify.

Jesus doesn’t let the man follow him, either. Not physically. Instead, he sends him back into the very community that rejected him.

“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.”

Because healing isn’t just for us. It ripples outward. But not everyone is ready to ride the waves. Not everyone wants the old script rewritten.

So here are the harder questions:

When have you looked away from someone who changed?

When have you resented someone who healed?

When have you wished someone would go back to the way they were, because it made things simpler for you?

Conversely:

Where have you been healed?

And where are you being sent?

Maybe you’re still in the tombs. Still hurting. Still chained.

Maybe you’re freshly healed and unsure what to do next.

Maybe you’re ready to testify, but afraid of how it will be received.

Wherever you are, know this:

God does not just restore. God recommissions.

Sometimes, the truest form of healing is the courage to speak, even when others wish you’d stay quiet.

Psalm 22 promises this:

“The poor shall eat and be satisfied… all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.”

Your restoration is not a threat. It is a beginning.

But it may also be a challenge, to you and to others.

Go home.

Tell your story.

Let the ripple begin.

This sermon is shared freely for personal reflection. If you’d like to use it elsewhere, please reach out to the author through the church office.