Help My Unbelief - Mark 9:14-41

How’s your weekend been? Did you have a powerful spiritual experience on Sunday? Then, “Crash!” this morning, Monday morning breaks in. A day of work and duties. Assignments you can’t do and lectures you don’t understand?

I have a policy of sharing in devotions only what is current in my own personal devotions. Currently I’m in Mark ch9. What is going on here? I have often read this passage and felt sorry for the poor father with this demon-possessed son who must have given him so much grief, worry and shame. The need to continuously keep an eye out for little Benjamin or Reuben or Gideon, or what ever his name was in case he threw himself in the fire or drowns himself, must have been a great strain.

I have heard many sermons and ‘sermonettes’ that talk about the descent from the mountaintop. How, after some wonderful spiritual experience the cruel real world hits you in the face like a wet rag. It’s used as an example of how to cry out to God when your faith is lacking. It’s used as an example of the weakness of the faith of the nine disciples who had failed to cast out the demon and the need to pray and fast when dealing with certain difficult types of demons. But I don’t think that that is quite what this story is about.

 But there are no accidents in scripture, especially in the four Gospels. Each story, each parable, each event recorded is significant and the order of their order and place in each book is significant. The order of the stories and places of the stories in the overall scripture text are theological. I believe each miracle has a reason. They aren’t just an avalanche of exciting miracles worked by Jesus to catch people’s attention or to provide a general health service for Galilee.

Before Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ at Caesarea Philippi, there is the miracle in which a blind man has a two stage healing. After the first stage of the healing by Jesus the blind man sees men like trees walking and the second time he sees the men perfectly clearly. This was not because Jesus had somehow failed in his healing, but surely it is a picture of the slowly improving spiritual sight of the disciples as they came to understand who Jesus is.

Then the following week, the three chosen disciples (Peter, James & John) see the fuller glory of the transfigured Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration - where Jesus is supernaturally transformed and takes on a divine, shining glory that is rightfully his and they hear the heavenly voice from the Father, “This is my Son”.

Then we come to our story of this morning where Jesus and the three disciples descend from the mountain of Transfiguration to meet some of Jesus’ opponents as well as the crowd around the boy with a deaf and dumb spirit and the failure of the disciples to cast it out. It was a disappointing and depressing change of scene for all concerned.

So what was going on with this miracle?

The disciples had identified Jesus as the Christ and they had heard the heavenly voice declare him to be “My Son”, but the father of the boy merely called him ‘Teacher’, and says “If you can do anything …?”

The boy having been exorcised fell down as though he were dead (vv26-27), but he was then raised up by Jesus, with Mark using the word for resurrection in the original Greek – Jesus then explains again to his disciples (vv30-32) that he must be delivered into the hands of men, executed and be raised from the dead on 3rd day.

30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, 31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” 32 But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him.

The disciples were deafened to these things by Satan. It’s not just a matter of being physically deaf, but a spiritual deafness with terrifying consequences as shown by the awful state of the deaf demon-possessed boy. It’s a spiritual deafness of unbelief that will throw you into the fire. In the same way the two stage healing of the blind man is a picture of the disciples’ slow increase in spiritual understanding. The unbelief of the father of the child is a picture of the disciples’ unbelief.

So we have two parallel sets of teaching told through the Gospel narrative – one at a lower level about the practical matter of the exorcism of difficult demons which was the level at which the disciples were operating on, as shown by their questions to him in the house privately afterwards. And then we have Jesus dealing with the real issue which is the need to believe that He is the Christ, the Son of God, who will also suffer and be raised to life on 3rd Day. The problem here is of unbelief of the greatest truth in the universe - That is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

We find the same pattern in Isaiah. We have two sets of ideas, or I should better say two levels of revelation, running parallel in the 66 chapters of Isaiah: Firstly there is the appearance of the Creator God, the King of the universe who will judge and rule the nations of the earth and secondly, the Suffering Servant. And it turns out that Isaiah was (perhaps unwittingly) prophesying that they are both the same person. That’s what Isaiah is wrestling with in his prophecy. Indeed he asks the not so rhetorical question: “Who has believed what he has heard from us?” (Is 53:1). I am not sure even Isaiah fully ‘got it’ in his earthly lifetime. Here we have the disciples wrestling with the same problem. It was not obvious until Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem fulfilling the promises of the future Christ and the Suffering Servant. Jesus is both the glorious Son of God who will judge the nations and the One who will suffer the criminal’s death and be raised to life 3rd Day. This is the heart of the gospel … so what do we do with this theological truth? Fortunately Jesus gives us the answer in vv33-37 …