The first step to answer this question is to try and establish what demon possession actually entailed.
The short answer is that people of Jesus’ day understood demons to be the cause of otherwise unexplainable ailments (a belief they had inherited from other cultures). For a more detailed analysis please see the answer to this question: Why do OT and NT teachings on demons appear to differ?
With the benefit of our modern understanding we can see that these are simply different illnesses (physical or mental) the cause of which have now been worked out scientifically. In the case of Legion it seems that he suffered from some kind of schizophrenia.
And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
Mark 5:9
Jesus healed the man of his mental illness and then changed the behaviour of the pigs. This was obviously not a literal transference because mental illness doesn’t work like that. It isn’t like an infection that can be passed on, but importantly to the onlookers it would have appeared like it had been. The ‘demons’ would therefore have been drowned along with the pigs. It appears that Jesus did this to convince everyone, especially the man who was healed, that the demons had really gone.
The interesting outcomes for us surround the spiritual lessons Jesus was demonstrating to us:
- Jesus is Lord, even over the most complex of human conditions, and God has given him the power to heal
- Jesus’ healing is final. The sight of the pigs disappearing under the water told Legion that he had been cured for good
- Jesus’ healing should bring about a response
And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.
Mark 5:20
#1 by Steven Parlette on December 29th, 2009
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I was not focusing on the man, are those demons present anywhere and attacking people in the same way today? If they tasted death these must be the most vicious demons around. This man had a mental illness but was severely oppressed and filled by many foul spirits . Did they not just kill the earthly pigs then be dispersed even quicker to attack someone else or just reside in the body of another? Human or Animal?
#2 by Charles on December 31st, 2009
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Hi Steven, what I was getting at is that the demons here aren’t actually real. People at the time thought that there were real supernatural beings that caused these illnesses. Jesus doesn’t confirm or deny their existence but simply shows that he has power over them – which was more important at that stage than shattering their way of understanding the world.
#3 by Steven on January 7th, 2010
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It’s certainly an odd request from the sick man, and an odd miracle. However a discovery in the Dead Sea Scrolls might shed some light on his thinking. In the Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Book of the Giants’ it was the drowning of the giants (fictional) in the flood which released their souls as demons. So it’s possible that the sick man’s request was a kind of reversal of this. Or that the sick man thought the opposite – that the demons would be trapped in the pigs. But Christ completely destroys both pigs and so-called “demons” in one act.