Matthew 8:29

They cried out, saying... — St. Mark adds that the demoniac, seeing Jesus from afar, ran and did homage (“worshipped” in the English version) to Him, and (with St. Luke) gives the fuller form of his cry, “What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the Most High God?” It is remarkable that this is the only instance in which that name is addressed to our Lord, though it is used of Him before His birth in Luke 1:32. A probable explanation is, that the name “the Most High God” was frequently used in the formulae of exorcism, and so had become familiar to the demoniacs. So, the damsel with a spirit of divination, in Acts 16:17, speaks of St. Paul and his companions as servants of the Most High God. The question meets us. Was the discernment that led to the confession altogether preternatural, or had the possessed man heard of the fame of Jesus? But if he had only heard, how came he to recognise the Prophet “a great way off?” Possibly the true explanation lies involved in the mystery of the psychological state into which the sufferer had passed under the frightful influences that were working in him.

To torment us before the time. — So the abode of Dives is “a place of torment” (Luke 16:28), and the ministers of judgment are the “tormentors” (Matthew 18:34). The man identifies himself with the demons; looks forward, when the hour of judgment shall come, to condemnation; and claims, in the meantime, to be let alone. Who that has been called to minister to the souls of men in their demoniac state has not often heard language all but identical? The words added by St. Mark are singularly characteristic: “I adjure thee by God.” It is as if the man had listened so often to the formulæ of exorcists that they had become, as it were, his natural speech, and he too will try their effect as an adjuration. The command given to the “unclean spirit” to “come out of the man” had, we find from St. Mark and St. Luke, been given previously, as the man drew near, and was the occasion of this frenzied cry.

At this stage, too, they add, our Lord asked the question, “What is thy name?” The most terrible phenomenon of possession, as of many forms of insanity, was the divided consciousness which appears in this case. Now the demon speaks, and now the man. The question would recall to the man’s mind that he once had a human name, with all its memories of human fellowship. It was a stage, even in spite of the paroxysm that followed, in the process of recovery, in so far as it helped to disentangle him from the confusion between himself and the demons which caused his misery. But, at first, the question seems only to increase the evil: “My name is Legion, for we are many.” The irresistible might, the full array of the Roman legion, with its six thousand soldiers, seemed to the demoniac the one adequate symbol of the wild, uncontrollable impulses of passion and of dread that were sweeping through his soul. It would hardly have seemed possible that the force of literalism could have led any interpreter to infer the actual presence of six thousand demons, each with a personality of His own, and to calculate accordingly the number that must have entered into each of the two thousand swine: and yet this has been done.