The Power We Can't Control
The people were afraid.
A man they had long since given up on—chained, exiled, left among the tombs—was suddenly well. Clothed. In his right mind. Delivered. Healed. Restored. The demons were gone. And they begged Jesus to leave.
Why?
Because that’s the unsettling truth at the heart of this story: this is a power we can’t control.
We want healing—but on our terms. Predictable, manageable, tidy. We want mercy without surrender, transformation without disruption. But the Gospel offers no such illusion.
The man possessed by demons had no control. He didn’t fix himself. He was simply met—by a power greater than himself. A power that saw him, claimed him, restored him. And when he goes to follow Jesus, Jesus sends him back—to tell the very people who feared his healing that the uncontrollable power they just witnessed is for them.
It’s no different today. Our need for control often keeps us from healing. That’s why the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are what they are:
We admitted we were powerless.
We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us.
We turned our lives over to that Power.
When Soviet officials once asked American AA leaders to adapt the program for an atheistic context by removing those steps, the leaders refused—because these aren’t optional additions. They’re the heart of the whole thing. Healing begins where control ends.1
There’s a moment like that in the pilot episode of Parenthood. Adam and Kristina Braverman are struggling to understand their son Max, who has begun showing signs of autism. In a desperate attempt to keep life normal, Adam tries bribing Max out of his pirate costume. But it doesn’t work. Nothing does.
Eventually, they meet with a child psychologist, who tells them Max has Asperger’s, that there’s no cure, and that they should join him where he is. Adam stares blankly and asks, ‘So… how do we get him out of the pirate costume?”
That night, standing at the window, watching Max play outside in his pirate costume, Adam confesses, “I can deal with anything. I can deal with disease, with illness, with a broken bone. Give me something I can fix. But I don’t know how to deal with this. This is for life.”
In his helplessness, in his exhaustion, when all his strategies fail—that’s when something shifts. Not because Adam figures it out, but because there’s nothing left to figure. The next scene finds him outside, dressed in a pirate costume of his own, joining Max in his world. They laugh. They play. And somehow, grace breaks in—not as a strategy, but as love.2
Grace isn’t what we achieve when we master surrender.
It’s what comes when surrender happens to us.
That’s why the healed man wanted to follow Jesus. When someone refuses to fix or manage you—when they simply join you—you want to stay with them forever.
Sometimes we’re given the grace to love others that way. But when it comes to God, we would do well to remember:
We are Max, not Adam.
The addict, not the savior.
The one who needs healing, not the one who knows how it’s done.
And the good news is this: the One who cannot be controlled has come not to overpower us, but to be with us. To join us where we are. And when we’re ready, to walk us into the world.
The power that unsettles us is the very power that saves us.
The One who disrupts the status quo is the One who makes us whole.
And the call to surrender—frightening though it is—is the beginning of our freedom.
Think of these midweek reflections as a preview of what’s coming on Sunday—not the sermon itself, but a glimpse of where we’re headed. I’ll share the full sermon here after it’s preached.
I read about the Soviets asking American AA leaders to remove references to a higher power from the program in Michael Rogness's article on the lectionary text here.
I'm grateful to David Zahl of Mockingbird Ministries for this wonderful illustration, which appears in his book The Big Relief (pp. 67–69).
So true! God is so gracious 💕
I will be worshipping with you this coming Sunday and I look forward to it!