A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Proper 19B and 20B
The text: Mark 9:1-29
Between the first two Passion predictions is a story we rarely associate with the Passion. And this story is one in which we often only focus on its first half.
After Jesus predicts his death, Peter makes like a satanic stumbling block, and Jesus rebukes him, and then takes that very same Peter with him, plus James and John, up a mountain for the Transfiguration. There, they witness the apparitions of Elijah and Moses, Peter puts his foot in his mouth again, and God speaks to them like they did at Jesus’s baptism.
What happens after this moment, however, is just as important for the story as what happened up that mountain. Because Jesus and three disciples come down and find that the rest of the disciples have been asked to exorcise a demon from a boy and they can’t do it.
In chapter six, they could. Suddenly, in chapter nine, they can’t. So what gives?
The Difference
The most obvious difference between the time when they could make things happen without Jesus around in chapter six and this point involves two things: the disciples being changed by that earlier experience and Jesus talking about dying.
Let’s quickly dig into these two things so we can focus on the rest of it.
The Confidence Problem
When Jesus sends his disciples in pairs to be apostles, healing, exorcising demons, and proclaiming the good news, they do and are surprised to find it works. Unfortunately for us, the evangelist doesn’t dig more deeply into it than that.
Perhaps it is fair to make some assumptions about what this does to the disciples—this knowing about the power of Christ and using it for themselves. That this would create a kind of certainty in them, confidence that they could do all things because of it.
I do think that there is one thing we can go on at this point (and something in the very next story, too). Peter thinks he can step out of line to rebuke Jesus in chapter eight. And then, in chapter nine, the disciples argue about which of them is the greatest—after failing to heal this kid!
These aren’t subtle stories, either. They demonstrate that the disciples could heal people when they believed in the power of Jesus and failed to do so when they believed they had the power of Jesus.
The Passion Problem
The other problem, and one that is just as obvious, is that Jesus just predicted his own death. He seems to be changing the plan on them and that has to mess with their heads.
If Jesus has the power to transform the world and heal the people and still be killed, then what are the disciples supposed to do?
And here, I move into a level of pure speculation, but I can’t help but think about how often I hear this very concern asked by people of faith near constantly: What am I supposed to do? The question, on its own, is innocuous. But it bears in it a frustratingly self-indulgent focus on individual action without regard to God’s transforming grace.
Is Peter’s sin, in trying to stop Jesus, that he is blocking the work of God in the world? Is it not the Tempter’s desire to tempt Jesus with power? So is it not our own sin that we think it is all up to us to fix whatever problem is bothering us?
Why it doesn’t work
When Jesus arrives and the disciples have failed, the father of the possessed child complains about the disciples’ ineffectiveness. And in the middle of this, Jesus has a bit of a moment, saying:
“You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?”
before immediately relenting and saying:
“Bring him to me.”
And I can’t help but think this has to do with everyone involved. The disciples and the complaining parent. The situation. The failure and the blame and the confusion and the fear. It is a generational problem.
I don’t think we ought to undersell this response. Especially in light of the disciple’s failure—and the places where Jesus couldn’t do anything. Remember how he couldn’t do anything in his hometown and again, where his critics poisoned the proverbial well? Failure stems from a kind of disbelief that comes from fear and frustration—blaming and refusing our responsibility.
Healing and Moving On
Jesus pushes the point about belief—not with the disciples, but with the father! And then Jesus trains his next rebuke on the demon! Because it, too, is misbehaving!
The disciples struggle to make sense of what has happened, focusing, of course, on their inability to heal the boy. They ask Jesus, when they get the chance, when it is appropriate. And he says something blunt and opaque:
“This kind can come out only through prayer.”
Thanks, man.
I don’t think Jesus is dissing the disciples for a lack of prayer here. It isn’t that they didn’t pray hard enough. In fact, the whole event feels like it is a little tricky. Kind of like the one man Jesus healed in stages.
But I suspect that there is something to their focus and their assumptions. That they couldn’t heal this boy from this demon because of where their attention was and where it wasn’t. It wasn’t on God.
And I also suspect that their focus on the other people—whether they could do it “right”—is a distraction, too. One that draws us from our own relationship with God, our own desiring for the liberating grace of God.
Healing, liberating
A final thought, and it is one, perhaps better suited to later in the week, but it works here, too. It is the simple reminder that the ongoing mission of Jesus is centered on liberation, on freedom. That is what repentance is, what turning from sin and toward God is about. Liberation is what following Jesus offers.
It is what healing offers.
What exorcizing demons offers.
What the grace itself offers.
Liberation, to be freed from the shackles of doubt, oppression, of torture and pain, of frustration and anger and fear. Freedom from empire.
And these stories of confusion, of hierarchies and power, of the inability to free the shackles that bind a child, of fear of Jesus dying and the mission collapsing, even to our own fears: of decline, death, division, devastation: these are what we are being freed from. Not visions we run toward, thinking they offer anything divinely inspired for us. No, these are the things that limit us, prevent us, confine us. And Jesus is trying to save us. Even from ourselves.