The Healthy-Mindedness of Jesus

December 7, 1958
Akron

More than nineteen centuries ago in the country of the Gadarenes, a crazed man scurried from among the gravestones, prostrated himself before a stranger named Jesus, and pleaded for help, "There are many of us." In our day, that strange story of events on the eastern shore of the sea of Galilee has the power to stir us to consideration of a prime need in our civilization, - healthy-mindedness.

The need for hospital beds, counseling services and other therapies far exceeds the supply. There are many millions among our population in need of psychiatric services, but such treatment is quite beyond the financial resources of two-thirds of the people, -- And this in the United States, richest country in the world.

When one alludes to the "healthy-mindedness" of Jesus, one cannot by-pass those persons who would exclaim, "Jesus - he was a fanatic whose basic mental balance is very much of an open question!" How can a rootless wanderer, a religious enthusiast who announced himself to be the Messiah, who may have rejected his immediate family, who scorned property rights and criticized religious institutions be acclaimed as healthy-minded?

About fifty years ago, a number of doctors in the then new and controversial field of psychiatry, analyzed the gospels, seeking the motives underlying Jesus' words and acts. Somewhat brashly several of these medical men proclaimed that Jesus was a victim of paranoia. The Nazarene, they asserted, had delusions of both persecution and grandeur, and that his ecstatic experiences were those of a mentally-deranged person.

About this time a man, older than most of his fellow-students was finishing his studies for the medical profession at the University of Paris. He was amused, astounded, and angered at glib assumptions and illogical conclusions of some of his medical brethren. This student was unusual, -- he already possessed two earned doctoral degrees. He was a doctor of theology whose book, "The Quest for the Historical Jesus," is still a landmark in gospel studies. He was a doctor of music, whose knowledge, interpretation and rendering of Bach is still unexcelled. But the medical student was forsaking the quiet halls of study. He was leaving the cultured corridors which echoed majestic organ tones. He was motivated by the conviction that his Christian convictions demanded that he be a medical missionary. For his thesis for the medical degree, in 1913, Albert Schweitzer wrote, "A Psychiatric Study of Jesus." This brief study has recently been re-issued by the Beacon Press.

In refuting the allegations of Jesus' mental disorder, Schweitzer effectively pointed out that no diagnosis of this kind would be justly announced without a thorough case history. There was, and is, no case history of Jesus. Furthermore, no patient can be studied in a vacuum. Even as we live in this environment of our 20th century, so Jesus lived in his. In that time, there was nearly universal belief in spirits, -- evil and good. A supernatural Messiah was expected who would bring judgment on men and nations. A captive people longed for release from persecution, poverty, and pain.

In such a setting, the story of the Gadarene demoniac is the illustration illuminating the conviction that Jesus was a splendid instance of the healthy-mindedness in his day, and a provocative example to our age of susceptibility to sickness of the personality.

The Gadarene demoniac was such a powerful psychotic that fetters could not bind him. He had most of the symptoms which indicated madness. In a day which believed that evil spirits were real beings with the power to invade a person's body and possess him, the nameless Gadarene believed himself possessed by many demons. This old gospel story has folk-lore aspects which have added ornamentation to the historical seed. The sick man remained with the gravestones, weeping and cutting himself on the tombstones in his frenzy. He had many signs which would today indicate serious disturbance. Deeply depressed, anti-social, he tore his garments as torment gripped him.

The society of that day, like our own, produced tensions that were too much for some of its members. A captive people subject to the tyranny of a powerful, occupying power, and victims of economic ill-usage by a dominant landlord class, finding grounds for hope only in the comforts of a visionary Messiah, such a group would find many of their number with insufficient inner resistance to powerful fears and shattering anxieties. Speaking of this age, Harry Emerson Fosdick, in the "Man from Nazareth" commented, "Mental ills flourished alike on the outward wrongs that seemed to have no end and on inward bitterness that could see no hope."

We don't know whether Jesus believed in the reality of evil spirits. Jesus was another child of his age, even as we are children of ours, subject to the beliefs which later ages may call superstitions. If Jesus disbelieved in evil spirits, he seemed not to want to argue as much to humor and help the man.

When the demoniac cried, "My name is legion," (there are many of us,) Jesus instructed the spirits to come out of the man.

While our age believes mental illness to be an attitude, -- a personality deficiency, and, sometimes, a physical defect, the alleged cry of the spirits, "my name is legion," suggests some observations about the disturbances we call mental illness.

"Legion" is from the Latin, "legio," - to gather or to collect. At the time Jesus lived in the time of the Augustan emperors, as many as five or six thousand foot soldiers made up a legion.

Under stress, we find our sense of healthy perspective threatened by many strong forces. We are twisted and torn by many pressures pulling and hauling us about, even as the Roman Legion might buffet captive people.

The Legion is regimented. The Roman soldier was under orders, his initiative throttled, his free movement limited to the care of his weapons and responding to the gruff commands of the leader. When pressures get too much for us we may yearn to "escape" from freedom, as Erich Fromm pointed out.

We may even be regimented in the direction of personality illness in an even more alarming fashion. Last week in Chicago the newspapers reported the fifth Annual Conference of Mental Health of the American Medical incidence of mental illness. Commenting that additional research should be launched to discover more about the susceptibility and resistance of the population to mental illness, he said that "mental disease may be communicable, may be infectious from person to person, even nation to nation." Mental illness, -- the name is legion, and may have contagious power and consequently epidemic.

One more allusion to "Legion." The strong loyalty and obedient discipline of the Roman soldiery was produced by external pressure, not voluntary allegiance produced by inner loyalty and integrity. The mailed fist may produce the obedient legion. But personalities responding only because of external pressure may collapse like egg-shells when there is no inner resistance or self-control.

There are many personality perils to which we may be vulnerable, as well as the unknown psychotic of long ago whom Jesus cured. What were the qualities of the healthy-mindedness of Jesus which were so integrated within his splendid self as to mark him as the Son of Man, -- the whole man of the ages who met the turbulence of his environment with the inward assurance that ever since has strengthened weak spirits.

When reviewing the new edition of Schweitzer's "Psychiatric Study of Jesus," Dr. Paul Pryser of the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas, says, "To me, the internal evidence of Jesus-and-his-biographers shows a good mental health record: love for the neighbor and a positive self-esteem; constructive activity; ministrations to the sick and poor; a looking in the three directions of the past, present, and future; several varieties of love including philia and agape; an ability to show anger when it is useful and necessary to do so; a keen reality sense; and above all a considered non-conformity. What more could one ask for?" (quoted "Pastoral Psychology, Sept. 58")

Now while it is true that the more we look to the sayings of Jesus for pat answers to the specific ethical dilemmas of our time, the more surely he recedes into the shadowy remoteness of his own age, nevertheless the listed categories are universal qualities of healthy-mindedness which confer assurance and inner security to any person in any country. According to physical principles describing the refraction of light, the light-rays of stars are bent as they pass through atmospheric layers of differing intensity; we see the sun on the horizon when it has already set. So it is with the healthy-mindedness of Jesus. The facts of his brief life have dipped below the history's horizon, but the refraction of his way of life illuminates us still.

Think then on these qualities of the healthy-mindedness of Jesus.

He loved his neighbor and esteemed himself. Every teaching of the ancient sages and modern scholars confirms the necessity of the balance between positive conviction of the worth of other persons and positive self-esteem. Whether one labels this quality of life the Golden Rule or not, there can only be personality distortion when either trait is lacking. One who esteems only himself becomes an impossible egoist, -- and is ill. One who hates himself and deliberately cuts himself on the gravestones of self-hate, is also suffering from personality illness. As one reads the fragmentary gospels, there grows the strong conviction that Jesus, who did not hate even his enemies, always reflected the healthy rhythm of an outgoing neighbor who possessed complete inner security. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

His life was one of constructive activity. Of course there is a great deal that we must surmise about the life of Jesus. Most of its details we will never know. But certainly we can be assured that when he suddenly appears by the lakeside recruiting his helpers, that he is strongly conscious of a sense of purpose. Furthermore, he has plans to make the purpose real. "Come with me and I will make you fishers of men." Some of his matchless parables demonstrate better than any journal of events how purpose, pursuit of the ideal and fulfillment were determining motivations in the life of the Galilean. In the parables of the sower, leaven and lump, and the growth of grain to full ear, we sense the interplay of interest and activity in the accomplishment of high purpose.

He ministered to the poor and sick. The healing power of service has saved all of us at one time. When personal fears seem huge, and depression adds thick gloom to our anxieties, is it not true that when we do something for someone else, our personal storms break on us with less damage? Jesus did not serve others in order to feel better. That is no positive motivation for us either, but it is a spiritual law that when any of us serves another's need, acts unselfishly to reduce the weight of another's burden, then an atom of health begins to break up the clusters of our difficulties with ourselves.

Jesus looked in three directions, past, present and future. It is a commonplace [ ] that Jesus had a masterful grasp of the great Jewish culture which nurtured him. He knew history's triumphs and history's sorry days. He was saturated with the ethical imperatives of the prophets and the poetry of the psalms. He looked to the future. The Kingdom of God was coming, "repent." He, [and] many of his countrymen were buoyed up in their troubles by the hope of a better time to come. But neither his appreciation of the past, nor his visions of the future blocked his service in the present. Healing, comfort, forgiveness, comradeship, integrity, sacrifice and meeting human need were demands in the present. If these activities of the present were neglected or violated, the past was but of "antiquarian interest" and the future but idle speculation.

Then, too, there will be no glittering 20 hour week in a future world of atomic wonder and abundance, unless we live in the present and meet honestly and unflinchingly the demands of the present.

The healthy-mindedness of Jesus was also demonstrated by his capacity for several kinds of love. Love is a difficult word in our language. It can run the gamut of meaning from sloppy sentimentality to varieties of aesthetic appreciation. I'm told the New Testament Greek is much more instructive with its distinctions between eros, philia, and agape, -- sensual love, brotherly love, and godly love. Jesus' life did not seem to permit him the love of man or woman. But certainly he knew the joys of his family, he experienced the emotional depth of brotherhood, he exalted in his love for God. These distinctions are needed in our lives too. The closeness of family ties and the obligations of brotherhood are needed universal traits, but the quality of emotion rightfully differs. "Love of God" is a difficult phrase for some, but rightly understood, it is an emotion which embraces both a consciousness of humility in the face of the gigantic, complexity and mystery of creation, and a sense of joy that each of us has the power to open his senses to all this glory.

It is healthy-minded to show anger when necessary and appropriate. If the gospels carry the seeds of accuracy, we can judge that Jesus flashed with anger where people's rights were violated and their sacred ideals trampled. The scourging of the money-changes in the temple reflects an instance of Jesus as an angry man. With all the comforts of our tranquilizing culture, we need the capacity for righteous indignation. An even temper is a pleasing trait, but when anger is needed to call a spade a spade, or an evil an evil, then it is a quality of mental health to express that feeling.

Lastly Dr. Pryser calls a "considered non-conformity" an asset to mental health. The pressures of our age mold us into like images. Our houses, clothes, cars, kitchens show only slight variations from the accepted patterns of culture. Such likenesses may be relatively trivial, really bothersome only to the artistically creative. But conformity to ideas is dangerous to us as persons. To fear to express ourselves, to be afraid of being labeled as holding unpopular opinions, can be corrosive to our inner health. Jesus challenged us all to preserve the health of non-conformity when he asked that most penetrating question, "What shall a man be profited [if] he gain the whole world and lose himself?" Jesus was history's shining example of the non-conformist.

The gospels reveal not a supernatural wizard but an inspired courageous person; not a soothsayer for political decisions, but a model for human character.

When the villagers returned to the graveyard they saw the Gadarene demoniac sitting quietly. "They were afraid." Why? It is perhaps that, (as J.C. Schroeder commented,) in a topsy-turvy frightened world, sanity is more feared than insanity? Perhaps this is why people prefer Jesus as a God to be worshipped, rather than a man to be followed.

Jesus was healthy in mind and spirit. As we have noted, healthy-mindedness is no occult secret, but a way of living with oneself and others in mutual esteem, cooperative service, realistic mental apprehension, love, and honest non-conformity.

Do you recall Gandhi's words:
"It is because there is such a goal, and because there was such a figure as Jesus, that I cannot be pessimistic, but instead I am hopeful and confident of the future, and because his life has this significance and meaning to me, that I do not regard him as belonging to Christianity alone, but rather to all peoples, no matter under what name they worship."