Galatians 2:16–20 · Luke 8:26–39 (with Luke 8:22–25)
What Is Your Name?
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
Just before today’s Gospel, in the verses we did not hear this morning, Jesus and His disciples are crossing the lake. A great wind comes down on the water. The boat begins to fill, and the disciples cry out, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” (Luke 8:24).
Jesus rebukes the wind and the raging waves, and there is a calm.
Then the boat reaches the other side, and Jesus steps out onto the shore. Straight away He meets another storm. This time the storm is not on the lake. It is inside a man.
This man had demons. He wore no clothes and lived among the tombs. People had tried to hold him with chains, but like the wind on the lake, nobody could control him. He was alive, yet he spent his days among the dead.
Jesus asks him a simple question. “What is your name?”
It is a gentle and personal question. Perhaps nobody had asked this man his name for many years. But all he can say is “Legion”, the word for a Roman army of thousands. He is so possessed that he no longer knows his own name.
Many of us know something of this, even if not in such a dramatic way. Our worries rise like waves, and old hurts blow through us like the wind. Our phones speak to us all day long. In all that noise, we too can forget our own name, and who we really are.
On the lake, Christ spoke and the storm grew still. On the shore, He does the same. He does not shout at the man or argue with him. He simply sets him free, and the people find him “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind” (Luke 8:35). The calm that settled on the water now settles in a human heart.
Both crowds are afraid. In the boat, the disciples marvel and ask, “Who then is this, that he commands even wind and water, and they obey him?” (Luke 8:25). On the shore, the townspeople are seized with great fear. They have seen a power far beyond their understanding. And it has cost them. Their whole herd of pigs has rushed into the lake and drowned, and with it their livelihood. A healed man is sitting in front of them, but all they can see is what they have lost. So they ask Jesus to leave. The disciples’ fear turns to wonder, and they stay with Him. The townspeople’s fear sends Him away.
The healed man begs to go with Jesus. But Jesus sends him home to “declare how much God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). His neighbours remember the chains, and now they see him calm and at peace. His life becomes his witness.
In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). In Christ we do not disappear. We become fully ourselves. The image of God in us, darkened by sin, begins to shine again, and we find our true name.
The same Lord who stilled the wind and the waves, and gave a lost man back his name, still speaks into the storms within us. And where He speaks, there is a calm.