Pork Belly Futures

Sometimes the Bible just gives me a new insight and tickles me at the same time.  See Mark Chapters 4 and 5.

Jesus was on the Sea of Galilee traveling through a storm  The Apostles were freaking out over the wind and the waves and ticked off that Jesus didn’t seemed bothered by any of it.  My guess is the boat was seriously filling with water and they were bailing furiously.  (Maybe even thinking at least He could turn some of what was sloshing around in the hull into wine and they could at least die drunk.)  So what does he do when they ask “don’t you care?”  He speaks to the wind and the waves and instant calm ensues.  They’re all pretty shocked that even the wind and the waves even obey Jesus.  They’ve seen some pretty incredible things so far and you’d think they’d be used to it, but hey, they are human…and fishermen to boot!  So now I suspect they calmed down and realized “great, now since there’s no wind, we have to row this tub all the way across this huge lake!”  Human nature being what it is, we tend to complain…at least you’ll think Judas probably did.

So they finally get to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the Gerasa territory, and as soon as the bow hits the dirt, this loony guy runs up to them.  He’s known for living in a cemetery of all places and does a lot of screaming and cutting himself.  He creeps out all the locals, but Jesus just turns to him and starts talking to what turns out to be legion of demons possessing the guy. They (I assume in the voice of the man) beg Jesus not to cast them into the pit of darkness.  The funny part to me is that Jesus agrees to their request to send them into a herd of nearby pigs.  I mean, that’s just bad PR.  Now the farmer will have to wade out and drag their bloated bodies in and sell them all at cut rate prices.  I suspect it didn’t make Jesus all that popular with the local shepherds, though the local price of pigs probably went up with the loss of an entire herd of over 2000 animals changing the supply/demand curve.  The folks of the region were said to have been pretty afraid…and probably afraid he’d send something else into the lake like the sheep and the chickens and who knows what else, so they told Jesus to hit the road.

The part that really tickles my thoughts is that pigs were considered really unclean by the Jews.  Perhaps sending demons into pigs made sense to them after all, and once they drowned, the demons still got a one way ticket to Hell anyway.  One thing's for sure, he made an impression on the guy who had all the demons.  He took off telling everyone in all the towns of the area what Jesus had done.

There’s no doubt that all this demonstrated Jesus' divine powers.  Nevertheless, it just reminds me that some things in the Bible that Jesus did are really curious, and I really look forward to asking him about them someday.