At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.” 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.” Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy, and it left him. From that moment the boy was well. Afterward the disciples asked Jesus privately, “Why couldn’t we cast out that demon?” “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. (Matthew 17:14-20)The apostles had some new found power given them by God. And they got to where they were kind of proud of it and of their positions as right hand men to the Messiah. When a man came to them with a boy possessed by a demon, the disciples tried to cast it out themselves. “No need to worry the Rabbi. We’ll take care of it for you. After all, we are his assistants.”
And they were. But in this case, as in a couple of others throughout the gospels, they came up rather short. All of the praying and calling on God, all of the jumping around did nothing. The boy remained stubbornly in the grip of the demon.
Jesus came by and cast the demon out, releasing the boy from his torment. Jesus’ response to the man when he told him that his disciples couldn’t anything about it was rather odd. It was a rebuke for their faithlessness and wondering out loud how long he was going to have to put up with this foolishness.
From what we have read about the apostles, they were probably chagrined. Here was their chance to shine, to show people that God was on their side. People would see their own power and that God really loved them.
But it was ashes. They came up short in front of everyone. And then they also came up short in front of Jesus. Jesus threw the demon out easily.
Why could we not do it, they asked. Jesus’ answer: your faith was in the wrong place. Your faith was in yourselves and not in God, in your own power, not in God’s power. You couldn’t do it because you relied on your own relationship with God rather than God himself.
We forget that it is God that is great, not us. We are only great inasmuch as God allows us to be great. And power we have is from him. As 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 says: We are confident of all this because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.
Anything we can do is from God, not from ourselves. And as long as we remember that, we do well. It is our faith in God that keeps us going, our faith in his ability, not our own, that matters.
It really doesn’t matter how much you believe in yourself. What matters is how much you believe in God and in his power.
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