Mark 9: 14-29
Mark 9: 14-29
When they came back to the disciples, they saw a large crowd around them, and some scribes arguing with them. Immediately, when the entire crowd saw Him, they were amazed and began running up to greet Him. And He asked them, “What are you discussing with them?” And one of the crowd answered Him, “Teacher, I brought You my son, possessed with a spirit which makes him mute; and whenever it seizes him, it slams him to the ground and he foams at the mouth, and grinds his teeth and stiffens out. I told Your disciples to cast it out, and they could not do it.” And He answered them and said, “O unbelieving generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him to Me!” They brought the boy to Him. When he saw Him, immediately the spirit threw him into a convulsion, and falling to the ground, he began rolling around and foaming at the mouth. And He asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. It has often thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if You can do anything, take pity on us and help us!” And Jesus said to him, “‘If You can?’ All things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the boy’s father cried out and said, “I do believe; help my unbelief.” When Jesus saw that a crowd was rapidly gathering, He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You deaf and mute spirit, I command you, come out of him and do not enter him again.” After crying out and throwing him into terrible convulsions, it came out; and the boy became so much like a corpse that most of them said, “He is dead!” But Jesus took him by the hand and raised him; and he got up. When He came into the house, His disciples began questioning Him privately, “Why could we not drive it out?” And He said to them, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer.”
Introduction – You might have noticed that the passage that was read and the passage I am looking at this morning are slightly different. I wanted you to see a little bit of the advantage we have by having four different renderings of the life of Christ. As you would expect, different observers of the life of Christ saw and highlighted different things. Matthew was focused on the fulfilment of the OT prophecies and his stated purpose was to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, with a focus on the first century Jew. I can’t imagine they saw the long term view of God, where God would preserve the writings of Matthew for literally thousands of years.
The writing of Mark has a different emphasis, but no less inspired by the same God. Mark’s key word is “immediately”. In fact, in these few verses, that word (Immediately) is used THREE times.
I have selected this passage for a principle we all tend to overlook. We moan and complain about it, but the principle is this – not everything is ordinary. It was a first century Heraclitus, a philosopher who is quoted as saying “change is the only constant in life.” We know that things are changing. Just look around, the world’s values have changed so much in our lifetime that we wonder where they will be for our children and grandchildren. What used to be never discussed went from the locker room, to the board room, then found it’s way to the occasional comic, and ended up being made legal by the courts of America. Your world and mine are obviously changing. The family has changed, morals have changed, things we once thought were absolute truths have moved into the realm of trying to accepting and tolerable. And what are the end results? You and I have been left to confront things we have never confronted before. My parents didn’t have to answer the questions that parents are being asked today. My parents always had the fall back answer: Because I said so and the great number two answer, take it to bed. And if the things that confront us are not enough, our faith is mugged and robbed by the attempts of science to explain away the existence of God and the authority of the Bible. Even from a very young age, our youth are taught to question authority. Now in some cases, that is a very valid warning, but when they are told to question the authorities that God has put in place to guide and protect them, then trouble comes riding in like an evil dictator.
So why did I pick this verse? Well, let’s look at the story behind the passage and I’ll get to that. The story of this is fairly well known – it is found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. (Matt 17, Mark 9, Luke 9) Only Matthew and Mark recount the questions from the disciples after this event of the Epileptic Boy, but they all tell how the disciples were asked by a Father to heal his son.
There are two people who you can feel saddened for is this passage.
- The first would be the Father. Most of us know the pain of a child who is troubled and it is hard to imagine how, from the first moment this father heard of the healing ministry of Jesus and His disciples, his heart must have leapt with hope. For some of us, the troubles of our children are superficial, but this Father had watched his son having seizures that effected – I am sure – the entire family. But Dad, dear old Dad, had a hope and prayer that maybe, just maybe Jesus could help. And when Jesus was not available, he brought his son to the disciples. Jesus descended from the Mount of Transfiguration – a remarkable event in and of itself – to find this man at the center of a crowd, failing the pain of disappointment in the disciples of Jesus and publicly accusing the disciples of being a collective group of failures. Their efforts were worthless and their impact – no different than the many healers I am sure this man had already visited. When confronted with this problem, they were ineffective.
- The second group that you might feel saddened for in this passage is for the disciples. None of us like to fail, and most of all, no one likes to fail in public. A little about the time frame for this failure – the disciples would later have a ministry of healing. Luke shows the timelines as well as any of the gospels and this ministry of healing demons happens in Luke 10, but this event happens in Luke 9, so this is before they have actually gone out. But they have no doubt seen Jesus cast out demons and perhaps prior to this they have had some experience at this. But now, in public, they have disappointed both the father of this poor boy and those who were observing this disciples failure as a reflection of Jesus’ ministry.
So what some might consider a major setback in getting the message out that Jesus is the Promised One has quickly become a large crowd of people who are aware of the failure of the disciples. Jesus quickly quiets that discussion by healing the boy after a short discussion with the Father. Notice the cry of the father in verse 22 – “take pity on us and help us!”. You can almost feel the pain of this dad for his son and the point that he was in this together with him in the boy’s anguish. To turn around a phrase from Jeff Foxworthy, who says you might be a cowboy if, well, you might be heartless if you can read this account without some compassion for the Dad and the boy.
Now we come to the portion of the passage I want you to zoom in on like it was the last chocolate in box, and it just happened to be the kind you like. With the caramel, and nuts, and it’s chewy.
The disciples came to Jesus to ask the obvious question. Have you thought about what the obvious question is? Well, if you have read ahead, you can see it. But they were probably all a little surprised that they couldn’t cast out this demon. Had they suspected they couldn’t do it, they would have told the Boy’s father to wait until Jesus returned – they would have told the Boy’s Dad that Jesus will be back, and he’ll take care of this. Few things get the publicity like bad publicity. And in this case, a large crowd was gathered. But they get away after the event and they ask that question. That burning question that just won’t rest. The kind of question you ask privately. The kind of question that is almost too difficult to bring up. “Why could we not drive it out?” The question they asked tells us that they have faced this situation before, at least they that they believe they had faced It before. Why did this spirit defy our ability to cast it out? What was so different about this thing that looked originally like it was a run of the mill problem and instead of success; we were confronted by failure and humiliation? Another way to read this is this: Man, we hate getting whooped and we were thoroughly whipped by that demon in the boy. What happened?
Jesus’ response is what I want to focus on – and yes, I just finished the introduction. So they ask a question and it’s an important question, but Jesus’s answer reveals something we don’t think too deeply about. And Jesus provides a huge insight in the first two words used here. What are the first two words of his answer? Of course this is in English, I have no idea what His first two words in Greek were.
This kind – This kind. Jesus is doing something His disciples did not do – they weren’t able to distinguish between a bad situation and a very bad situation. They couldn’t grasp the concept that not every problem that we face is the same as the one we faced last time – even though on the outside it might have looked the same. The disciples had no spiritual discernment in this situation. They couldn’t or didn’t realize they were confronting something all together more powerful and more evil than anything they had ever confronted before. If you think about this in medical terms, it was truly a misdiagnosis. They couldn’t see that they were confronting something more powerful than their experience.
This is a very real danger in the lives of Christians in our day and age. We are not exhibiting the wisdom of discernment when we are confronted by a greater evil. We have joined the lethargy of the disciples of Jesus’ day, who looked at evil and could not tell when things were very bad. And there are varying degrees of bad. Jesus saw this, and we should seek God’s wisdom, that we might also see this too. We need to be people who can discern when we are in a wrestling match or an all out war against evil. Paul calls out different kinds of evil we wrestle with in Eph 6, where he tells us “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
So why have I brought this up today. Here is the warning I see in this passage, and it’s an important one. What you or I are facing today might look normal or average, but if the disciples could not discern when they were in the presence of a stronger evil power, it is quite possible you can’t either. So when you in the battle, Jesus has given us instructions about how we can come out victorious –
But before we go there, let’s ask ourselves an honest question. Who might have paid the price if Jesus had not intervened in this situation? Who would have truly suffered if Jesus had not provided the healing the disciples could not? It was the boy and his father. The failure might have kept the disciples up at night wondering what happened, but the boy and his father could have spent the rest of their lives struggling with something that the disciples should have been able to free them from. Jesus never said they weren’t capable, but that the power to accomplish this was not within them. When you and I fail in the ministry that God gives us, when we try to face it without God’s power, other will bear the cost of our failure. What is that failure? What is the thing we didn’t do? We failed to first diagnose the evil we were confronting, and second, we failed because we were not spiritual prepared to win that battle.
We have concluded there are different kinds of evil in our world and in order to be effective against evil, we must have spiritual discernment to determine the power of the opposition. And we must rely on God for the power required.