This incident is so familiar it has given rise to phrases in everyday Christian language; we speak of 'mountain-top experiences' and 'going down into the valley' afterwards ... and with good reason. We cannot live our life on a perpetual high. Not even Jesus did. An hour after He has been in heaven, so to speak, He is back on earth, groaning under its frustrations: "O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?"
Beware the mountain-top syndrome! We cannot live up there; no booths, remember? Our pilgrimage will not be a smooth and easy passage; we should be reconciled to incessant problems as an integral element of our life. Trials and difficulties are the norm for even the most sanctified. The New Testament repeatedly says so.
That was the point of the conversation Jesus had with Moses and Elijah. Mark tells us they discussed "the exodus He was to accomplish in Jerusalem" - His passion and the Cross. Jesus might have escaped that day from earth into heaven; instead, He was concerned with the way He must bring heaven down to earth, and it is never less than a troubled and a costly way. As Campbell Morgan put it, "This story is about the perfect King in an imperfect kingdom." (G. Campbell Morgan, 'The Gospel according to Matthew' [Revell] p. 223) We should not look for the kingdom to be perfect; we should look to walk in an imperfect kingdom with the perfect king.
There were two outbursts in this episode, the father's and the Lord's. We focus in on them first, then pull back for an overview of the contrast between the two scenes on the mountain and in the valley.
He really was determined to get somewhere, this man. There is a will to believe in him: "I believe; help Thou my unbelief." He was not deterred by the failure of the disciples. Fresh from that grievous disappointment, He rushed over to Jesus the moment Jesus appeared on his horizon, and burst out with his need, "Lord, have mercy on my son."
We should learn from him that we have to get past the world and past the church to get to Jesus. I learned it while still a teenager. A church dealt harshly with my father, its pastor. The details are unimportant now, but the upshot was that he went to work in a shoe store to pay the rent. I can still remember the bowed and broken figure my Dad cut as I watched him walk back to work down a city Arcade after we had lunched one day. I was an angry young man. I could not believe that Christians could be so unchristian. * I quit going to church. I quit praying. I quit.
And then I was confronted with an engagement to preach that I had agreed to months before with a little Congregational church, and had forgotten. It flung me into a dilemma. It obliged me to sort out whether it was the Church I believed in or Christ. I realised then that it was Christ I had to believe in, not His followers. That was in the providence of God, for it is a lesson any man who is going to be a pastor had better learn early or the church will finish him. (There are churches that have finished their pastors ... there are also pastors who have finished their churches!)
No Christian's bad behaviour is a sufficient reason to cease from being one.
In this story the father's faith was not strong. But even weak faith is faith. Our hand may tremble, yet touch Him; and when our trembling hand does touch Him, even our little faith links us to His renewing power.
Unfaith is like an insulating layer of ceiling bats between us and the power of God. Paul used a phrase that used to give me pause: "The life I live," he said, "I live by ..." what? Faith in the Son of God? That is not what he said. He said, "The life I live, I live by the faith of the Son of God" - His faith, not mine! Our little faith connects us up to His. That is a secret that is all too sadly still a secret.
We are to live by the faith of Son of God. That is what this man learned to do. As we shall see, it was the Lord's faith that healed the boy, not the father's, and not the disciples'.
"If I can ...!" He said (with a snort?); and, "How long must I bear with you?" Was it a petulant outburst, or was it an expression of disappointment and yearning? It depends on the tone of voice in which He said it. I think many so-called difficulties in Scripture would melt away if a little more imagination were brought to an understanding of the tone of voice in which they were said. (Some training in the dramatic arts should be a compulsory element in all pastors' colleges!)
He does not say, "I can't be bothered with you," but "How long must I be?" - because He will be. He will bear and forbear, as He bids us do. We don't have to like it, any more than He did; but we have to do it. "If your brother sin against seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times and says, 'I repent', you shall forgive him." (Luke 17:4) The Lord will not Himself do less than He requires of us. "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive." (Col. 3:12-13) The Lord Himself did have a complaint against His generation, and He voiced it. But He did bear with it, nonetheless.
Whatever complaint He has against us, He will not always hide it! But the marvel - the saving marvel - is that He does not, for that reason, give up on us. Neither should we; and I mean not only that we should not give up on Him, but that we should not give up on each other, for when we do we part company with Him.
We have to ask here, "Whose faith was in question?" The father's, the disciples', or Christ's? I am bold to say that the one whose faith stands to be vindicated or impeached in this episode is the Lord's. Faith was not entirely lacking in either the disciples or the father. The disciples had tried, so there had been some measure of faith in them; and the father did persist, so there was some measure of faith in him. But their faith was deficient. The question at issue was, "Whose faith will be sufficient?" Answer: the One who is seen to have the power to heal. It was the Lord's faith that healed the boy. That is a factor in the vexed question of spiritual healing I almost never hear discussed. We should never forget it.
Had they prayed more, the disciples would have been more in touch with the faith of the Saviour: that is the point about prayer and fasting. You wait on the Lord when you do that: fasting is not a mystic's discipline for working up psychic power, it is a means to heighten fellowship with the Lord.
The disciples had tried ... they had believed at first that they could do it! So the faith in question was not simply a frame of mind that expects success - they had expected success. They had exercised 'possibility thinking' ... and it had not worked! Indeed, according to Jesus, it was precisely their possibility thinking which constituted their fault! They believed they had God's gift at their disposal, so its exercise needed no real communion with Him! But Jesus told them, "Your faith was false because your prayer was lacking." They must be in prayer for faith to have effect. God's power is not exercised by those who are out of fellowship with Him. Possibility thinking says, "I can do it." Faith says, "God can do it."
I enter a plea to replace possibility thinking with faith in the Lord Jesus. To trust in God's power in the sense that we think to have it in our control and at our disposal is tantamount to unbelief; it is really to be trusting, not in God at all but in ourselves. God's power must be ever asked for and received afresh.
The father's faith, like the disciples', was 'as a mustard seed' - but it was enough. It is still enough if only, as we have seen before, it is linked up to Christ's willingness and power.
The phrase about "moving mountains" was an idiom in general use in our Lord's day. The Rabbis used to speak of those exegetes among them who solved really knotty problems of Scripture interpretation as 'pulverisers of mountains.' The way the phrase was used indicated that the difficulties in view were difficulties about what God meant. Paul, himself a rabbi, used it in just that sense in I Cor. 13:2: "If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to remove mountains ..." the second clause being a development of the first.
So the disciples would have understood Jesus to mean, "Nothing (consistent with God's will and your right understanding of it) shall be impossible to you." Jesus will have more to say along this line in ch. 21.
Draw back now and view the whole episode in perspective. See the contrast between the two scenes, the one on Mt Hermon, the other in the valley below.
On Mt Hermon, the setting is one of quiet. There are only four men there to begin with, and three of them fall asleep. Then there is the marvellous radiance that bathed the scene, followed by quiet heavenly conversation between the Son of God and Moses and Elijah. That conversation is about the sure purpose that will take Jesus to the Cross and the Resurrection. And the one voice whose words are recorded is the voice that speaks with absolute authority: the voice of God Himself, "This is My Son, my beloved. Listen to Him."
The scene in the valley is in complete contrast. There is the confusion of noisy dispute, a screaming youth and the frustrated bewilderment of an anguished father.
A boy - in the grip of forces of darkness.
A father - at his wit's end with anxiety.
Scribes - pouring scorn on the disciples.
The disciples - who know where their resources lie, but are lacking Christ in the midst, and so are doing what we so often do then - covering their weakness and defeat with talk.
It is a picture in miniature of our world.
The masses - ignorant and superstitious.
Parents - worried sick about their children, and impotent.
The young - in the grip of harmful forces too strong for them.
The Church - caught napping ... powerless, prayerless.
The enemies of good - scorning our failure.
Then, into this hopeless situation, Christ comes - direct from communion with His Father, bringing light for our darkness, healing for our sickness, and strength for our weakness.
The boy is healed.
The father struggles toward a truer faith.
The crowd praises God.
The critics are silenced.
The Church, with the Lord in the midst again, is seen learning from its failure a fresh humility, and with it a new power. It is a picture to cheer the heart.
But let us be aware what the source of that good cheer is: to have Christ in the midst, to attend upon Him in the kind of prayer that leads to fasting (not as a harsh self-discipline which generates some mystic inner power, but as a preoccupation with Christ which makes you forgetful of lesser things). We get preoccupied with lesser things and forget that good part that Mary remembered, which Jesus said should not be taken away from her under the pressure of waiting on tables: to sit at the Master's feet and let dinner wait ... even if a dozen men go hungry for an hour.
There is a story that at one time in the
Middle Ages, when the Church of Rome had become a political power in
the world, and was wealthy as it had never been wealthy before, one
of its Popes was running the gold coins of its treasury through his
fingers, and observed to a Cardinal standing by, "You see brother,
Peter's successor need no longer say, 'Silver and gold have I
none.'"
"True, your holiness," the Cardinal answered, "but neither can he
say, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk.'"
Which would we rather? Either way, there is a price to be paid.
* In subsequent years, those chiefly responsible were reconciled to my father.
This material is copyright; it may not be quoted, published or reproduced without the author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!