“Then one of the crowd answered and said, “Teacher, I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit. And wherever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. So I spoke to Your disciples, that they should cast it out, but they could not.”
If God desires to give us everything we need, why then does it seem that our prayers sometimes go unanswered, that healing remains a mystery. Today’s Gospel is instructive in this regard: A despairing father comes before the Lord, beseeching Him on behalf of His mute and demon-possessed son. The father describes a heart-breaking image of the evident pain the demon is causing his son as it seizes him, throws him down, and leaves him still barely alive. Those of us who are parents can feel the fathers anguish at his son’s ailment. The father confesses to Christ that he’d brought his son to Christ’s disciplines but they couldn’t cast the demon out. So, in utter desperation, the father comes to Jesus when all other avenues for his son’s healing have failed.
So how does Christ respond: he heals the son immediately? No, instead He says, “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” Christ confesses the faithlessness He sees around him. He then has the boy brought to Him. The father, meanwhile, pleads with him, saying, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” If? If Christ can do anything? If the Creator of the universe can do anything? If the Creator of all can do anything? The One who brought us to life in the first place?
Christ tests the father’s faith; He pushes him toward greater faith, as is often the case with Christ. He indicates to us here that the father has a part to play in whether or how his child is healed. The Lord says these poignant words, ““If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” And it’s at that point, that the father understands and gives an answer that bespeaks the humility indicative of deeper understanding and faith, saying, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!” And Christ heals the boy of his condition at that very moment, casting out the demon.
Learning to give ourselves, our physical and spiritual needs, to the Lord is indeed a journey of faith, of trust in God. This trust is certainly needed with regard to our material provision but also, certainly, for our spiritual provision also. God works through such persevering prayers.
But how do we come to possess such faith? Jesus Himself gives us the answer: The disciples are bewildered as to why they could not cast out the demon. They come before Him to ask why: Why, Lord, could we not cast him out? And He answers, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Lent is the season of great effort but it is also the season of great potential progress in opening ourselves up to repentance and growth in faith, our communion with the God of the universe who became incarnate to save us. When we fast, we’re more vulnerable, open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit to receive the change and growth we need.
Just as our fasting needs to be prolonged and consistent during the 40 days and Holy Week, so too our prayers need to be strong and consistent as we cry out to the Lord for the change He would work in us, for the healing we need. This act of contrition, humility, patience, perseverance, is precisely the door through which our faith is strengthened as we cooperate with the Lord in His response to our prayers, our pleading. For this reason too, the virtues we need to gain and the vices we need to expunge, are repeatedly prayed through the Prayer of St. Ephraim and in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on Wednesdays in Lent.
The fact is that this cooperation, this humbling of ourselves as we come before the Lord to beseech Him for what we need, opens our hearts to Him, to His gracious work in us, it pushes us to faith, without which no mountains—either physical or spiritual—can be moved.
This is true for all that we need in Christ for our healing and salvation: God can take the stingy person, and with faith, can make him generous; God can take the prideful person, and with faith, can give him a humble heart; God can take the obstinate and self-willed person, and with faith, can make him obedient, implanting in him a teachable spirit; God can take the lustful person, and with faith, give him purity and whole-mindedness; God can take the insecure person, whose identity is grounded in this world and all its affiliations and false identities and, with faith, give him the gift of sonship, the worth of which is beyond compare.
The truth is that fervency and consistency of prayer will increase faith. When we’re put to the test, as this father was, our faith grows. When we don’t immediately receive what we believe we need, we pray more. Don’t give up, but expect that God will work to increase your faith, to push you so that you grow in faith, so that He furthers you in communion with Him and in His ultimate aim: the healing and salvation of our souls. God knows what He’s doing in the soul of each of us to conform us more into His likeness and to make us heirs of His eternal Kingdom, which is His chief aim and why he says to St. Paul, who beseeches him unsuccessfully for physical healing, “my grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
“Everything is in the power of the one who believes” (Mk. 9:23). These are the words of truth, consolation and encouragement the Lord offers us today from His Gospel. St. John of Kronstadt asks of these words, “Do you see what power the Lord gives to faith and to the faithful?” But you have to ask yourself the following question: how much do I really desire Christ and His Kingdom? How much do I believe? Most of the time, we’re like the father in today’s Gospel who says to the God of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, “If you are able to do anything.” Often I hear people say, “well, if nothing else, we can pray.” We’re tempted to think this is the last resort along the lines of “Well, if nothing else works, I might as well try prayer.” “If You can do anything, Lord…” “O faithless generation, how long shall I bear with you?”
The father’s faith didn’t stay in that place of doubt. We hear his heart-felt confession: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” The cry of the heart is enough. The Lord responds to his tearful cries, the faith that begins with a desire for the healing work of the Lord is received as cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives too: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
Brothers and sisters, If we want to see the Lord at work in our lives, giving us healing, hearing the cries of our hearts, then we also need to make use of prayer, fasting and worship to defeat the evil one’s influence over us and find freedom from the passions and this world and our reliance on all that is temporal. The power that Christ gives to the one who believers, the one who desires the faith to believe, is more powerful than the one who tempts us, deceives us, and wars against us. “Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.” Beseech the Lord and know that He loves you and hears you, but that He desires more than anything to bring us to that point when He can hear you cry, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
26 March, 2017/Sunday of St. John Climacus
Gospel: Mark 9:17-31
Epistle: Hebrews 6:13-20
