The danger of fear

“Don’t be afraid.” It’s the most repeated sentence in Scripture. Not “be good.” Not “love your neighbor.” Just this: Don’t be afraid.

Jesus doesn’t offer those words as mere comfort. He commands it—because he knows how quickly fear can take hold, and how thoroughly it can distort our souls.

Fear can make it hard to see God, hard to hear God’s call.

We just heard the story. Jesus comes ashore in an unfamiliar place. He meets a man tormented by demons, frees him, and sends the demons into a herd of pigs, who rush into the water and drown. The townspeople arrive, and they ask Jesus to leave. But the newly-healed man stays behind to share his testimony with anyone who will listen. Today’s Gospel tells a story of healing, and of conversion, and of the spreading of the Gospel.

But it also tells a story of fear.

The townspeople feared the naked, raving man who lived among the tombs. They kept their children close. They tried to bind him, again and again. Maybe they didn’t know how to help him. Maybe they thought no one could.

But they didn’t see a neighbor in torment. They saw a problem to manage. And so they chained him, as if fear and restraint were the best they could offer. As if safety mattered more than mercy.

And then when the man was healed, they feared that too. They feared Jesus’s power.

Yes, they feared economic loss. The drowned pigs were valuable. But even more, I suspect, the townspeople feared a world upended, a world in which the madman no longer filled his appointed place, a world without a scapegoat ready to blame.

The townspeople’s fear was so great that they asked Jesus to leave. Politely, but firmly. He’d done something good. They knew that. But their fear was stronger than any desire they had to hear what Jesus could teach them. And so they sent him away.

When we hear about the things Jesus did, we like to imagine ourselves walking alongside him, helping him in his ministry. Or perhaps as the central figure of the story, healed and commissioned for a great work ahead.

But more often than we’d like to admit, we’re more like the townspeople in today’s Gospel.

We make peace with chains—at least as long as they bind someone else. We calculate the price of another’s healing in livestock and property values and decide it costs too much. We’re frightened by changes that upend our sense of how the world should work. And all too often, we’re the ones who politely ask Jesus to leave. Because we’re afraid.

The pattern we see in today’s Gospel—fear of the outsider, fear of change, fear of losing the familiar—didn’t end in that lakeside town two thousand years ago. It repeats itself in every generation, in every community, whenever we encounter someone who doesn’t fit our expectations or threatens our sense of how things should be. We create our own versions of the tombs where we expect troublesome people to stay. We forge chains that we hope will keep threats at bay.

It’s a pattern we saw last week here in Manhattan when someone put up posters around City Park. You might not have heard about them, because they didn’t stay up for long. The posters said this: “Help your country and yourself. Report all foreign invaders.” Those words were printed next to an image of Uncle Sam.

We may not all agree on immigration policy, and that’s fine. But using words like “foreign invaders” turns neighbors into enemies and makes fear feel like patriotism. And that is a spiritual issue.

The Bible’s teaching on many contemporary questions is ambiguous. This isn’t one of them. Exodus 12 says, “There shall be one law for the native-born and for the alien who resides among you.” Exodus 23: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy 10: “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Matthew 25: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father…, for I was ... a stranger and you welcomed me.” Hebrews 13: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

And there’s a lot more where those quotations come from.

As I said, we can disagree about policy. But I don’t think the posters that went up last week are about policy. I think they’re about fear—creating it and adding fuel to it.

First, there’s the fear of the stranger. The fear that sharing community with people who are different than we are might somehow hurt us. It’s the sort of fear that dresses itself up in reasonableness, the sort of fear that says, “It’s not about hate. It’s just about safety.” “Foreign invaders” do sound dangerous, after all.

Second is the fear that messages like this seek to create in those who might otherwise speak up for the vulnerable. If the right thing for a patriot to do is to report so-called “foreign invaders,” then anyone who defends them must be a traitor. And traitors ought to be afraid.

You’ve all seen the fearmongering that’s going on. Last week’s posters about “foreign invaders” are just one example of the genre—and they won’t be the last. There’s plenty to fear.

But through it all, Jesus says, “don’t be afraid.” Jesus says, “love your neighbor” and “welcome the stranger.” Jesus even says, “love your enemies.”

Not all fear is wrong. Some fear saves us—alerts us to danger, gets us out of the way of a speeding car.

But there’s another kind of fear. The kind of fear that lingers. The kind of fear that turns caution into suspicion, and suspicion into hate. That kind of fear doesn’t protect us. It poisons us. When we let that kind of fear guide us, we become like the crowd in today’s Gospel. We don’t shout. We don’t curse. We just politely ask Jesus to leave.

The good news, I suppose, is that Jesus doesn’t abandon the fearful townspeople. He leaves a witness. The man once chained and exiled becomes the first evangelist in his city. He goes home and tells his neighbors what God has done for him.

Jesus doesn’t abandon fearful townspeople—or fearful Episcopalians. Grace doesn’t give up on us, even when we ask it to leave, even when fear holds us back from the path of love.

Grace meets us in moments of fear. That’s a good thing to remember in fear-filled times. But God calls us from fear into courage.

In our own times of fear, here’s what I ask of you, what I ask of myself. Every day—practice courage. Practice it in small ways, until it becomes a habit. When fear whispers, try not to listen. Don’t ask Jesus to leave. Ask him this: “Give me courage to follow wherever your love leads.” And then stand up. Take the next step. You yourself might become the witness grace left behind.