daily java

Daily Java: 

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. But this kind of demon won’t leave except by prayer and fasting.” (Matthew 17:14-21)

Jesus answered rather sharply to his apostles, roughly aknolwedging their failure in an almost ugly way. Why?

It is a good question and one without a whole lot of an answer. On the one hand, he had tried and tried to teach them the power of faith and their own power through faith over disease and sickness. On the other hand, they could not seem to grasp it. It was not that they couldn’t do it, it was they couldn’t seem to makee that leap to the supernatural.

But was it their fault. Could Jesus really have expected a group of men after only a year or so in service at the level they were serving, to truly understand? Or was he asking too much.

I don’t know. I do know that Jesus was not omnipotent. As a human, he had limitations that God the Father had set on him to enable him to live in a finite body. He didn’t know some things. He didn’t know the time when he would come again, for instance. And if this was withheld, other things had to be also.

So why would he look at the apostles who were really trying to make themselves worthy of him and say this? It had to have hurt. It seems insensitive and I suppose it was to a point.

Jesus could be very insensitive at times. Some of the label he applied to the religious leaders were strong and rather abrasive and you know they had to have hurt, especially in front of people whom they felt respected them.

I guess it may have just been human weakness and tiredness. Jesus was constantly on the go, doing things, helping people. After a while it would get to feeling that everybody just wanted something. They would give nothing and just wanted things.

At that point, Jesus just kind of snaps.

If that is so, it puts a different spin on the idea of sinlessness. It says that even though Jesus was sinless and perfect, at the same time, he was not necessarily perfect in all his actions. There were times when he said things he may have regretted and maybe wished he hadn’t. First of all if he could have that kind of reaction, maybe there is hope for us. And second it puts a different picture on how much is expected of us by the Heavenly Father.

Yes, God wants us to be perfect, but at the same time,his idea of perfection and ours is different. We stand trying desperately trying to be nice and sweet all the time and Jesus wasn’t always nice and sweet. Sometimes he was blunt in his expectations to his followers, blunt to the point of rudeness.

If that is the case, we do not lose our Christianity and Christ-likeness as easily as we think we do sometimes. Nobody was more “Christ-like” than Jesus and he said stuff he probably regretted.

Through his words alone, sometimes Jesus gave us hope.