April 26, 2020 “Trusting Faith” – Mark 9:14-29

Mark 9:14-29
“Trusting Faith”
April 26, 2020 – Third Sunday in Easter

Monday evening Beth and I watched the latest and last installment of the “Star Wars” saga, “The Rise of Skywalker.” It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. It simply repeated all the old Star Wars themes and plot moves. At the beginning, the young Jedi heroine, Rey, was in training, learning to use “the Force” and connect to her Jedi predecessors. Later we see that training take effect as she draws a light saber and battles with her evil opponents.

The Star Wars films are full of that idea of a great, impersonal spiritual “Force,” which one can learn to use, either for good or for evil. As we continue in these weeks to talk about faith, that’s one popular notion we need to dispel. Faith is not some sort of technique we can learn in order to manipulate the great force which is God. A superficial reading of what Jesus says about it might make us think that we can build up faith like we build up muscles, that Christians actually are like Jedi knights in training, learning to use the force.

Though other Gospels tell this story about the man whose son had a demon and how Jesus healed him, Mark spends more time on it. Instead of focusing on the miracle, like Matthew and Luke, Mark focuses on faith. He wants to give us a very personal window into how faith does and does not work, or better, what it is and what it is not.

Mark’s telling starts out with failed faith. His sparse words in verse 14 paint a picture of a crowd around the disciples as they engage in argument with scribes, interpreters and teachers of Jewish law. Jesus has just come down from the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John. The other nine disciples are in this public dispute.

Verse 15 adds that when the crowd saw Jesus coming, “they were immediately overcome with awe.” They rushed to meet Him. Some wonder if a glow of transfiguration still lingered around the Lord. Or did something else strike them with awe? It is hard to say, but in previous chapters Jesus cured several different illnesses and miraculously fed crowds of both 5,000 and 4,000. Jesus’ reputation was enough to inspire awe.

Jesus immediately got to the bottom of the argument in verse 16 by asking what it was about. Instead of a scribe or disciple answering Him, verses 17 and 18 give us the voice of a person in the crowd at the very heart of the matter. He pours out his whole story to Jesus in a breathless rush: “Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not!” Experiencing what sounds like epilepsy, one poor boy was the heart of the whole affair.

Before we move to what Jesus says next in verse 19, note that we now can guess what the argument between the scribes and the disciples was about. That father brought his son hoping to find Jesus to cast out the demon, but met only the second-string disciples, the ones who sat on the bench during the transfiguration. Over in chapter 6 they had some experience with casting out demons, so they figured they could handle this one. They failed.

Then the established religious authorities moved in to debate about it. The scribes must have told the disciples they were using the wrong exorcism technique. There were Jewish exorcists. Acts chapter 19 tells of itinerant Jewish exorcists, traveling around casting demons out of people. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us they used potions and practices which they attributed to Solomon.

And in one of the apocryphal books Brian has been teaching us about, Tobit chapter 6, the angel Raphael teaches Tobias how to exorcise a demon from the woman he is about to marry by taking a fish’s liver and heart and burning them with incense in the bridal chamber. The smell would drive the demon off (along with any else, we might imagine). To be fair, the angel also tells him that the two of them should stand and pray before going to bed together, “imploring the Lord of heaven that mercy and safety may be granted to you.”

In any case, the disciples and scribes were engaged in a doctrinal and medical dispute about proper exorcism procedure. Faced with an evil affliction and their mutual failure to accomplish anything against it, they fought with each other about how to go about it. I hope that rings some bells for you and me in regard to the evil affliction of our time and our floundering responses to the unseen enemy moving among us, making people sick today.

I don’t want at all to say that good, scientific, established medical understanding and practice is up for dispute in our situation and that what physicians, nurses and health authorities tell us is no better than all the half-baked and idiotic “cures” and phony statistics you can find offered on-line, in Parade magazine, and even suggested by our president. But I do want to say that spending all our emotional energy engaging in and arguing about such matters can distract us from more important considerations for us as Christians. Just as He did then, Jesus wants to step in and refocus our attention.

That’s why you can hear the exasperation in Jesus’ voice in verse 19, when He says, “You faithless [or “unbelieving”] generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me.”

Jesus was not frustrated because neither the disciples nor the scribes had the right technique to get rid of that demon. He was upset by the deeper spiritual affliction from which everyone there suffered, even His disciples. They were faithless, unbelieving. It may sound here like He’s only talking to the crowd, but in Matthew 17 verse 20, at the end of this story, after the disciples asked Jesus why they could not cast out the demon, He told them, “Because of your little faith.” Our Lord was, for that moment, fed up with everyone around Him, because they lacked the basic quality one needs in relation to God, faith.

In contrast to what you might think, those people gathered around that man and his son, and now around Jesus, were probably pretty aware of their need for faith. All sorts of people around us know and will even say you need faith. Rey the Jedi knows she needs to believe in the Force. All sorts of movie and literary characters who find themselves in dire situations will tell each other things like, “You have to have faith,” or “Just believe,” whether it’s faith that there is a cure for a disease her finance is suffering, or belief that his lost child is still alive and will be found. Human beings call each other to faith all the time.

Yet even a moment’s serious reflection about all those invocations of faith and belief reveals that it’s not as easy as most films or novels make it seem. How do you keep faith when the situation seems hopeless? How do you believe when it feels like you have no reason to believe? For us right now, how do we keep believing in medical authority and social distancing when jobs and money are being lost and we have no way to know for sure it makes any difference? How do we get more faith when we need it?

Jesus shows us here in Mark’s account where to find faith. He interacted directly with that possessed boy and his distraught father. As we heard at the end of verse 19, the first step was to bring the boy to Jesus. Likewise, our first step in faith is to bring to Jesus all our worries and concerns and let Him confront them, as painful as it might be. Verse 20 tells us that when the evil spirit in the young man saw Jesus, it did its evil worst, convulsing him and throwing him down to roll on the ground.

That’s the second time but not the last time this text mentions what the spirit did to the boy. Four times, in fact, we’re told about his convulsions and falling down, twice from his father, and twice when it actually happens in the presence of Jesus. This first lesson in faith is that it comes to us right in the middle of our worst fears, in the very heart of all the darkness that can happen to us.

When Jesus speaks then directly to the father in verse 21, He does not begin with a pep talk, a cheery call to just have faith. Instead Jesus asks, “How long has this been happening to him?” Presumably, Jesus, Lord of the universe, already knew the answer, but He let the father go over it all again, naming their fears and troubles, telling how this had happened to his son since childhood, endangering his life by fire and water. Telling his awful, heartbreaking story one more time gave the man the chance to make a first, stumbling, meager approach to faith.

At the end of verse 22, the man addressed Jesus with the sketchiest sort of backhanded plea he could make, “if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” It’s the sort of thing an agnostic prays when he’s in trouble, “Oh God, if you exist, help me!” If you and I are honest, we might want to acknowledge that our own prayers sound like that more often than we might admit. “Oh God, if you are able to, help me get into that college,” “Lord, if you can find me a new job, please show me where to look,” or even “Almighty Creator of the universe, if you have any power over this virus, save us from it.”

You and I, seemingly secure in our belief in an omnipotent God who came to earth as our Savior, clearly displaying power over weather and food supply and illness, might smile at a desperate father’s “if you are able,” but the truth is that “if” is often our own, perhaps unspoken, word to God. “If you can, if you want to, if you’re even listening!” And once we admit it, we might think Jesus would be put off by that word. Our “ifs” seem like they might short-circuit all our prayers, demonstrating just how small or non-existent our faith is.

So we’re not all that surprised at the beginning of verse 23 when Jesus responds like any capable but sarcastic human being might, echoing back the man’s own words, “If you are able!” But had it been you or I, we probably would have gone on with some sort of self-promotion like, “If I’m able? Let me tell you who I am, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos order of all creation, the all-powerful Lord of heaven and earth who walks on water, makes water into wine, and heals anyone He darn pleases! Don’t if me your ifs!” But that’s not how Jesus handled the man’s uncertainty. Rather, the Savior spoke directly to his need. With restraint and gentleness the Good Shepherd calls for him to do exactly what he’s struggling so hard to do, to believe, to have faith. Instead of chastising him for not believing, Jesus offered him the reward for faith: “All things can be done for the one who believes.”

Like so many of us—dare I say like all the rest of us?—that man clearly wanted it. He wanted to believe. So he offered up, “cried out,” one of the great prayers of Scripture, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Sit on that cry, that prayer, for a moment and hear just how different it sounds from so many other prayers we imagine are full of faith. There’s no, “Lord, we claim your promise, knowing you love us, confident of your power, absolutely sure that you hear us, believing with all our hearts that you are going to answer this prayer and give us…” You fill in the blank. Instead, there’s just an honest, helpless, almost hopeless expression of the absence of faith. I believe but I don’t. I’d like to be sure, but I’m not. I hope it’s true, but God help me, I’m so scared. That’s what the boy’s father prayed.

It’s a good prayer. It was an awesome prayer for that moment, because in the next few verses, 25 to 27, Jesus answered it. He rebuked that evil spirit and cast it out. when the spirit’s exit seemed to kill the young man, Jesus reached out, took him by the hand and raised him up, alive and well and sane and whole. The Lord took pity on the man whose faith stood caught in some limbo between belief and unbelief. It was close enough.

Mark tells us all this about Jesus’s conversation with the man, so that we too can learn and let soak into our hearts something about faith which is said more clearly but more abstractly in other places like Ephesians 2:8. Faith is a gift. We can’t work up or train or strengthen our faith on our own. All we can do is admit we are in a place where we have no faith, or almost none, and let God give faith to us.

I said in the last sermon that faith, hope and love are sometimes called the theological virtues. That may give us a wrong idea about them, about faith in particular here. There are some virtues you may actually work on. Virtues are habits, patterns of thinking and behavior. So we are able to do things to develop such good habits. To be more honest, we can work on telling the truth even when it causes us problems. To be more generous, we can give things away even when we don’t feel like it. Eventually, if we make the effort to do it often enough, doing right things takes less effort. It becomes a habit, something we do naturally instead of having to work at it. As they say, we can “fake it till we make it.”

That’s the Star Wars idea of faith in the Force. Those Jedis train at light saber dueling with their eyes closed or wearing a blindfold. They keep at it until their belief in the Force is strong enough that they see through the Force instead of through their eyes. They just have to keep working at it.

But Mark and Jesus are telling us that Christian faith is not like that. You don’t get it by working at it. In a strangely beautiful spiritual paradox, you receive the gift of faith when you start admitting that you do not have it, just like that demoniac boy’s father. It’s because the point of faith, the essence of faith is not some special mental attitude of believing stuff that’s hard to believe. Faith is a personal trust that grows out of relationship with a loving, trustworthy, and all-powerful God.

So Jesus did not send that father off to do spiritual push-ups until his faith was great enough. He invited the man into a conversation so that he could look into the face of Jesus and understand what he needed and then ask for it. As I said last week, part of faith is believing certain facts about Jesus, about ourselves, about the world. But those beliefs become faith when they come to us as part of a personal relationship with the Lord about whom we believe all those things.

That’s why you should not get the wrong idea from Mark’s version of Jesus’ answer to the disciples when they ask in verse 28 why they could not cast out that demon. He tells them in our last verse today, “This kind can come out only through prayer…” Some very good manuscripts of Mark, maybe the best, add the words “and fasting.” Your translation likely leaves the fasting out on the principle that scribes were more likely to add something to, rather than to drop something out of, a sacred text. But I think “fasting” belongs there.

But you might imagine Jesus is just giving His disciples the right answer for the argument they were having with the scribes. To exorcise a certain sort of demon, it’s not enough to just say the divine name or burn some fish guts, you have to pray and fast. Get the technique right and you’ve got it. But that’s not it at all.

Prayer and fasting are not spiritual procedures for harnessing the power of God. They are ways we enter into the sort of relationship where God can give us faith, the kind of faith by which we can ask Him for what we really need and He can answer in love and in power. The gift of faith is given to us as we grow closer to our Lord in friendship and love.

Years ago in graduate school, before I went to seminary, we invited new neighbors in our apartment complex over for dinner. Eric and his wife came to Notre Dame for him to study. I can’t remember his subject. But I do remember his unusual circumstances. He was an older student from Washington who had at a young age been given a couple of salmon fishing licenses for waters off Alaska. When we met he was making so much money each summer fishing season that he could live for the rest of the year on it. He could even move his family to Indiana and pay full tuition at a private university during the school year.

We got to know Eric and his wife and children and had other interactions with them. They were Christians and we became friends. One day as we shared with them my call to be a pastor and plans to go to seminary the next year, Eric made me an amazing offer. He told me how blessed he was to have his fishing boats and all the income they brought him. So he said he would be happy to help us pay for part of the cost of seminary. I thanked him, but declined, confident that we would be O.K.

Two years later, in the middle of our second year of seminary, things got tight. I don’t remember exactly, but I think our old car was breaking down, Beth’s job wasn’t paying all that well, and the tuition help I’d had the year before was over. We had stayed in touch with Eric, so Beth and I talked about it and one day I called him up.

After the usual pleasantries about family, etc., I launched into a very hesitant request, full of ifs like that father’s. “Eric, if you were serious about that offer, if you are still able to help, if you don’t mind my asking…” all that sort of thing you can probably imagine saying yourself in that kind of situation. To my relief he was delighted to be asked. Before too long a check arrived that got us through that year. Thanks be to God for Eric!

The point I want to make with that story is that it was because of our relationship with Eric that I was able to ask him for what we needed and receive it. That friendship was not at all a technique for getting something from him. Before we became friends I had no idea he was someone with that sort of means. But the meals and conversations and ultimately friendship which we shared made that gift possible. That sort of connection and friendship with God is what makes the gift of faith possible.

So yes, if you want the gift of faith that will deal with the evils which come your way in this life, pray and fast. But don’t do those things as training, as some method which will give more strength to your faith. Pray and fast to draw near to God, to become His friend. As the Scripture says, He will then draw near to you and raise you up. Admit your need for faith and, like He stretched out His hand and lifted up that boy, Jesus will lift you up into true faith.

Amen.