Re:Verse passage – Mark 5:1-20 (day three)
“No one was strong enough to subdue him.”
It might be tempting read the above passage and think, “…except Jesus. Jesus was strong enough to subdue him.” But Jesus doesn’t subdue the man – not in the sense of vanquishing him anyway. Even the unclean spirits aren’t presented as opponents in a cage match won by Jesus. Instead, this remark seems to point out that everyone who had tried to intervene in the man’s life approached the circumstance as a power struggle, not as a redemptive moment. Jesus wasn’t interested in shutting him down, but in raising him up. This man was made (by the very Lord who encountered him that day) to laugh and to know beauty and to love and to work and to rest. Jesus knew the man’s true identity – not a weirdo, but a wonder.
