March 2, 2025

Awesome!

I confess that this morning’s gospel reading is not the sort of passage that I’m usually drawn to. But, as is often the case, when reading this one over again, something jumped up and bit me on the brain. It was this response by Jesus buried in the middle of the text: “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” It’s not entirely clear to whom he was speaking as he said this. There was the man who had spoken up from the crowd and asked Jesus to look at his demon-possessed son, there were the disciples to whom the man had turned earlier, and there was the crowd gathered around. To get a handle Jesus’s exasperation, let’s look at each of these possibilities in turn.

First, the man who approached Jesus to begin with. He was clearly in a state of turmoil. His son was going through repeated convulsions, shrieking and foaming at the mouth. Today, we might conclude that he has some disease that is causing seizures; maybe he was epileptic. But in that day it was understood that he was possessed by a demon. The father was at his wits’ end. He turned to Jesus in desperation, calling out to him from the crowd, asking him to look at the boy. It’s hard to hear the biting words of Jesus in response to this man’s earnest plea, referring to his generation as wicked and perverse. As a trained and experienced pastor, I would have been more empathetic. I might have employed a Rogerian therapeutic response, something like, “You are clearly distressed about your son’s condition.” Or I might have simply been more comforting, “I’m so sorry. You must be in such pain about this.” But even if I said nothing at all, surely it would have been better than calling this distraught father and his whole generation “wicked and perverse”. What might Jesus have been trying to say to this guy? Could it be something as cold and unfeeling as: “Why are you looking to me for a cure? This is your lot in life; live with it!”? Playing with that possibility in my mind, I wonder if there is a degree of – albeit cold – comfort.

I wonder if the wisdom of such a response is the same harsh truth that the Lord spoke to Job and his friends at the end of Job’s book. Job has railed and ranted for thirty-four chapters about life being brutal and the Lord Almighty being unfair, and for thirty-four chapters Job’s friends have put him in his place, taking him to task for not trusting in divine goodness and the fairness of life’s balances. In the last chapter that Lord Almighty has appeared on the scene and, as vehemently as Jesus, rebukes Job’s friends because, in the words of the text, “you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” In other words, divine sanction is given to Job’s words, and he is basically saying that life is, indeed, unfair, and so, by extension, we are simply to do our best to learn to live with that unfairness.

If this is what Jesus has a twist in his knickers about, perhaps there is a deep wisdom to be mined here for all of us. All too many of us, I believe, approach life as if it is a kind of candy-store where all that is required of us is to do the right thing – that is, pony up our nickel at the counter – and we will get all the candy we deserve. We’ve all been around long enough to know, rationally, that it doesn’t work that way, but on a primitive, emotional level we feel that it should. And we can find ourselves either sulking and pouting, or desperately chasing after pipe-dream solutions to insoluble problems instead of letting the Spirit do its work to transform our hearts and minds to find the grace to adjust to a less than optimal reality. I don’t know if that’s what Jesus had in mind, but if he didn’t it’s still a pretty good lesson. The crowd that surrounded him was clearly impressed enough by his healing power that they could not be offended by his harsh words. Scripture says “all were astounded.” Maybe these days, our young people would put it in different words: “Awesome!”

Or, let’s consider the possibility that Jesus was speaking to his disciples when he leveled this scathing chastisement. You might note that just before Jesus went on the attack, the man had disclosed that he had gone to the disciples with the problem but they could do nothing. Could it be that he then turned to his closest followers and shot out the words, “faithless and perverse generation”? Was Jesus admonishing them for not having sufficient faith to heal the boy themselves? That also seems like a shot of pretty tough love. Wouldn’t he have gotten further in teaching them about faith by using a “spoonful of sugar” as Mary Poppins says, to help the medicine go down? Why so severe? I’m not sure I have an answer to that, but it does occur to me that faith-healing is a very tricky thing, and maybe the faith required to do it takes a bit of a jolt to wake up to. I remember watching Oral Roberts on television many years ago and seeing it as not much different than the so-called professional wrestling matches that were aired later in the evening. It all looked pretty hokey and staged to me. But then, I also hadn’t had any experience of such a thing. I have certainly heard many stories of people being healed of diseases when doctors could come up with no explanation for the cure. And it’s clear that modern medical science has hardly begun to grasp the power of the mind – the power of faith – in the healing act.

Dadgie and I knew a man of both powerful intellect and extraordinary spirit who was diagnosed with cancer. It was a form that the doctors had no cure for, and he was given months, or at best, a year to live. His response was to create a Japanese rock garden in his back yard. It was a beautiful, serene place with the ground covered by many thousands of small stones of various colors in a circular pattern. He would spend a certain amount of time each day out in the rock garden picking weeds, twigs, and debris blown by the wind out from between the stones. He said that each unwanted thing removed came with a reverent meditation in which he visualized removing cancer cells from his body. His cancer remained in remission and he lived for many years in this way. Is there some special power in faith to heal bodies? I rather believe there is. And maybe Jesus was just tired of the disciples spending so much time with him and still not figuring that out. At any rate that power is something to think about, something to stir the soul in times of distress, something remarkable, something “Awesome!”

But there’s another possibility – a kind of hybrid of these two. And this is my personal favorite. Maybe Jesus was almost mouthing his scathing condemnation under his breath. And maybe it wasn’t directed at any one or any small group of individuals. Perhaps it was an expression of frustration with everyone. Maybe it was intended for the whole crowd gathered there, and by extension, for you and me. And what is the mark of our participation in a “faithless and perverse generation”? Could it be that we so rarely seize either the transformational power of acceptance or the healing power of faith? They are opposite sides of the same coin, you know. The development of the kind of gentle, pliable heart that takes the hurts and traumas of life with grace is just the flip-side of the capacity to use the power of faith to bring healing to at least some of our wounds – physical, mental, and spiritual. And how does any of us gain the grace of that pliable heart or the power of that healing faith? Here’s my best answer: ask for it. You and I may not be the kind of believers who assume that prayer answers everything, but I tell you that it is a window through which the Spirit blows into our lives if we will open it. In fact, according to the New York Times, a study at Carnegie Mellon revealed that “Mindfulness meditation . . . can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.”

Frederick Buechner, commenting on today’s gospel reading, writes, “I am saying just this: go to him the way the father of the sick boy did and ask him. Pray to him, is what I am saying. In whatever words you have. And if the little voice that is inside all of us as the inheritance of generations of unfaith, if this little voice inside says, ‘But I don’t believe. I don’t believe,” don’t worry too much. Just keep on anyway. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

“Seek,” Buechner continues, “and you will find – this power of God’s love to heal, to give peace and, at last, something like real life, so that little by little, like the boy, you can get up. Yes, get up. But we must seek – like a child at first, like playing a kind of game at first because prayer is so foreign to most of us. It is so hard and it is so easy. And everything depends on it. Seek. Ask. And by God’s grace we will find. In Christ’s name and with his power I can promise you this.”

Buechner has hit on the heart of it. Prayer does not heal every wound, resolve every issue, mend every relationship. But it can, little by little, open that window so that the Spirit that flows among us and through us can begin to remake our hearts, heal our purposes, ease our fears, and even, at times, mend our bodies.
And that is, well, “Awesome!”