GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 5:16
Facts are Stubborn
The facts speak for themselves.
The television show Dragnet began as a radio program in 1949, continued as a television program until 2004, and is still available as reruns. Producers made two films using the same title. In the program, Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, and his partners conduct by-the-book investigations in Los Angeles to solve crimes. “Just the facts, ma’am,” is a catchphrase popularly used to evoke the Dragnet program theme. Those who watch the program, however, report that Detective Joe Friday never used that exact phrase. Now that is disappointing.
St. Mark, in his report about Jesus’ confrontation with a man with an unclean spirit, said that Jesus released the spirit, or spirits, who desired to go into or among pigs grazing on a nearby hillside. Whereupon the pigs stampeded into the lake and drowned. Those attending the pigs then ran through the countryside and the city describing the lakeside events. A crowd gathered to see for themselves. “And those who had seen what happened to the demonized man and the pigs explained it to them.” (Mark 5:16) In this instance, the word “explained” (διηγέομαι, diegeomai) is a compound word that one could translate as “described in detail” or “related in full”; in other words, the witnesses explained the event fact by fact.
There appears to have been some time between the man’s deliverance, the pig stampede, and the gathering of the crowd because when the people assembled, the demonized man was in his right mind, clothed, and sitting with others near Jesus. It likely took some time to clean the man, clothe him, and make him presentable. None of the writers mention what Jesus was doing during this time, but if this event fits the pattern, Jesus was teaching the man. There is also no account of the amount of time it took the swineherders to go through the story fact by fact.
Facts are stubborn things that are often described as unvarying characteristics of reality. One can deny them, misinterpret them, or misapply them, but they don’t change—as the people on the seashore in Mark’s story discovered.
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