The Christian message is about faith in God’s power and compassion to touch and restore lives. Surrendering to the will of God is the purpose of genuine faith. Certainly, we must remember it is the power of God that actually performs a miracle, not the faith of human beings. Only God can do the supernatural and impossible. However, we do have a responsibility to use faith in cooperation with God’s power and aligned with his will to be done.
Preceding our passage for today, Jesus, Peter, James, and John are returning from the Mount of Transfiguration. It has been a miraculous time on the mountain with the glory of the Christ, but it is time to descend to the valley of human need. At the base of the mountain they meet up with the other disciples, a crowd, and a desperate father asking for mercy and a healing touch for his demon-possessed son. I can only imagine how awful it was for this father to watch his son suffer for years with such injuries and seizures.
We need to remember the disciples had been given the power in the past to cast out demons (Matt 10:1). In our passage, their failure was brought to the forefront and we can surmise the disciple’s faith was not in appropriating the power of Christ; rather, their failure came from misdirected or vacillating faith. Interestingly, this father does not waiver in his faith. Sure the disciples fail to cast out the demon, but this man’s faith is in Christ not the disciples. So, this father goes to the source of the power—Jesus—and the miraculous happens. At the rebuke of Jesus, the demon leaves and this boy receives a new life.
This passage begs us to look at our faith and where we place our trust. When things take time and the results we pray for are not immediately obvious, where do we find our faith? Is it still in Christ’s power? Or is our faith resting primarily in our natural ability, skills, or plan to get things done in human strength? We can be powerful when we draw on Christ’s powerful anointing, but he must send us. So, we need to rebuke the temptation to do things in our own strength apart from God.
Matthew 17:14-20 Jesus Heals a Demon-Possessed Boy
14 At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, 15 “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. 16 So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”
17 Jesus said, “You faithless and corrupt people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” 18 Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy, and it left him. From that moment the boy was well.
19 Afterward the disciples asked Jesus privately, “Why couldn’t we cast out that demon?”
20 “You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.