Turning to the Lord

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Mark 9: 14-29) contains on the surface one story: the tale of a boy taken by an evil spirit whose father successfully approaches Jesus to deliver his son. Jesus interrogates the man about the case, hearing its history, questioning the man’s attitudes, and soliciting from him one of the tenderest, most self-aware prayers in all the gospel: I believe; help my unbelief. Finally, Jesus cures the boy who at first appears dead, but then rises up cured of his affliction.

Let’s deal with one obvious issue that comes at the end of the extract: different variants of the gospel offer slightly different solutions to this kind of demon. While the variant used today in our liturgy says This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer, many variants – including the King James Version and the Douai Rheims - say This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. The Latin of St Jerome reads: nisi in oratione et ieiunio – by anything except prayer and fasting - which seems not only logically better – after all, what had the apostles first done to exorcise the boy except pray to God to deliver him? – but also spiritually better: to hijack a saying of St Augustine about hymn singing, those who fast pray twice. They pray with their lips no doubt, but they also pray by offering in their bodies a sacrifice to the Lord through which they confess their total reliance on His power. Thereby, their own conversion to the Lord grows ever deeper, or as C. S. Lewis puts it in Shadowlands: It doesn’t change God; it changes me.

Another issue that arises from the gospel – still not perhaps the most important – is the spectacular nature of this boy’s problems. Naturalistic readings of the passage will simply declare he is an epileptic suffering seizures. There may of course be some truth in that; it is not impossible that he was both possessed and an epileptic. Yet, we must not dismiss the supernatural dimension of his problems, first because without ascribing personal sin as the particular cause for some concrete suffering, natural disorders are part of the disrupted universe, the theatre of our fallen human race; second, because prayer alone was not a sufficient antidote to the problem.

And here is where the story of the boy intertwines with the story of the Church at large. The Apostles had been appointed by the Lord and sent out to work all kinds of miracles. Why did their charisms fail them here? We may find helpful the commentary of Fulton Sheen on this point if we put this scene back in its context just after the Transfiguration of the Lord. The Lord’s three close companions had gone up the mountain with Him and, left to their own devices, they would gladly have stayed on the mountain, wrapped in the joys of contemplation; they are like those members of the Church who love their prayers but perhaps fail to grasp the urgency of the love of neighbour. The apostles who waited for them at the foot of the mountain and who failed to cast out the demon from the boy are like those in the Church who are immersed in activity, so much so that they have no time for the prayer and ascetical disciplines – the inner conversion – that must underpin any active ministry. The juxtaposing of these two incidents – the Transfiguration and the exorcism of the boy by Jesus alone – is an object lesson for every tendency in the Church, the contemplative and the active, to be humble, to turn towards the Lord and yet, in doing so, to turn towards our neighbour. In the cure of the boy, however, it must be said, all of us are transported back to the mountain and glimpse something of the power of the Lord who has visited His people in tenderness.

Still, one last question arises from this near chaotic scene in today’s gospel: how is it that heart speaks to heart? For on the one hand, we hear and we empathise with the distress of the father of the possessed boy, a sorry witness of his lad’s lifelong condition, a man probably traumatised by the harm to which the boy’s condition has led him. The man knows his son’s condition all too well, but he also knows his own. When Jesus lays down the principle that all things are possible for one who believes, the man’s humility shines out of him. The sinful publican of the parable bemoaned his unworthiness in quiet prayer, but this man in the hearing of a crowd of pious Jews prays explicitly: help my unbelief, i.e. help my uncertainties, help the quiet whispers of doubt that arise from my years of distress and disappointment, help me overcome my experience of receiving apparently no answer to my prayers when I cried and cried and cried in the night and God seemed not to hear. What a man and what a heart – not because of his faith which, by his own confession was weak, but by his self-knowledge and humility. If his heart had hitherto grown distant from heaven, still, this father had his feet on the ground, had not revolted in pride. I believe; help my unbelief.

This prayer, moreover, falls on the ears of the incarnate Lord who knew the man already better than himself. We may find it shocking to listen to Jesus’ first reaction to the failure of the disciples to cast out this boy’s demon:  O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? How are we to understand such words? What happened to the Lord who declares Himself meek and humble of heart? Must we approach Him already fearing that we are a burden and a bother to Him? Must we feel the humiliation of realising the extent to which Jesus feels He has acted in vain in our regard?

Yet, it is not the anger of God that we perceive in these words so much as the drama of our own waywardness. Time and again, the disciples do fail in their faith; Peter in particular does so spectacularly several times. Even before He has met the boy’s father, Jesus already knows the pitiable state of his faith. But in all these incidents, Jesus emerges precisely as the only one who can save faithless humanity from the disease of its own infidelity. All He needs is a spark! How long am I to bear with you? is the cry of the Saviour whose incarnate mission is to bear the cross of fallen humanity to the summit of Calvary? How long am I to bear with you? is not said so much to express His own sentiments as to show us the gravity of our own failure in His regard? How long am I to bear with you? does not give us a window into His heart so much as a mirror in which to see our own disfigurement reflected. The beautiful heart of Christ speaks out to our own ugliness, not to chide and abandon us so much as to draw out of us in the person of the possessed boy’s father, that wonderful profession of humility and faith: Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.

This prayer the “yes” of a man wounded by doubt, but already turning through humility. Let our “yes” only echo his and we will have every reason to raise a resounding “thank you” to the Lord.