Small Faith and a Big God (Mark 9.2-29)

Last week Joe did a wonderful job showing us what kind of Master Jesus is, and what situation we are in. He reminded us that we will all lose our life at some point: it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Either we “lose our lives” now—that is, either we will give ourselves fully over to Christ and the gospel now—or we will lose our lives forever when he returns to reign. If we lose our lives now, we’ll save them forever; if we save our lives now, we’ll lose them forever.

It’s really important to keep that in the back of our minds when we read today’s text, because if I’m honest, trusting the promise that “if you lose your life now, you’ll save it later” is actually quite difficult. It’s a big ask—lose your life now, I promise you that it’ll be worth it. Great, Jesus. But what if you’re wrong? What if you can’t make good on that promise? Like the apostle Paul said later (I’m paraphrasing), if we Christians are wrong about all this, and Jesus is just a man, then we are the most pitiful lot in the world.

What we see today shows us two things: 1) why we can trust that Jesus can make good on his promise; and 2) why trying to live without him is ultimately futile.

So that being said, let’s start reading at v. 2. The message of this first section is abundantly clear, and very simple:

Jesus Is God… (v. 2-13)

2 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus.

If we’ve read this text many times, it’s easy to sort of breeze over the enormity of what happens here. Jesus takes Peter, James and John—the disciples with whom he has the closest relationships, and who will have the greatest responsibilities—up to a mountain, just the four of them.

And there, Jesus is changed.

We can think of a lot of parallels in popular stories. The scene at the end of Beauty and the Beast when the beast is transformed from a beast into a man, with light filling him up and shooting out the ends of his fingers and toes. The wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, who appears to the fellowship after what we thought was his death—no longer Gandalf the Grey, but Gandalf the White: radiant, healthy, and powerful.

But none of our parallels can do justice to what happens here—or rather, every other parallel is just trying to get close to what we see here, whether we realize it or not. It’s a hint of what will come at Jesus’s resurrection. He is physically changed: his clothes become “radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them.” The light and whiteness that is suggested here is reminiscent of the way Moses glowed when he came down from the mountain after having been with God—it is the glory of God, made visible for the disciples to see.

In addition, we have two dead saints who appear there with Jesus: the prophet Elijah and Moses—these two figures who represent the whole of the Old Testament, which are often referred to as “the Law and the Prophets”. And Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus. I would give anything to know what they were talking about, and I hope to ask them one day.

I don’t know how the disciples watching knew who these men were, but they apparently do. However, they don’t quite know what to do with what they’re seeing. There’s a very funny exchange that we see after, in v. 5:

5 And Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 6 For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

This is one of the most purely human interactions in all the gospels, because it’s exactly what a go-getter would do. All this amazingness is going on around them, and Peter’s like, “Good thing we’re here! We can make tents!” Why would they need tents? No idea, and Peter didn’t know either. It’s a stupid thing to say, and Mark tells us that the only reason Peter said it is that he didn’t know what to say; he was terrified, and some people, when they’re terrified, can’t keep quiet.

And almost as if to cut Peter off from this silliness, perhaps the most amazing thing so far happens. V. 7:

7 And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” 8 And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.

There we have it: that’s the point of this whole event. Jesus is transfigured before their eyes, surrounded by the saints, with the vocal approbation of God, to give these men unquestionable confirmation that Jesus is God, the Messiah, the glorious Son of Man of whom Daniel was referring. If they had doubts before, they must doubt no longer.

This man Jesus Christ whom the disciples have been following is both fully God and fully man—never one more than the other, never one to the detriment of the other. So at various times, we can see aspects of his divine nature surfacing, and aspects of his human nature surfacing, sometimes both at the same time.

Jesus is God. Jesus is divine. That is what we see here.

And then, just like that, it’s over. The window into heaven is closed, and now when the disciples look, they see nothing but a mountaintop at night, and Jesus standing there as he was before.

So Jesus, Peter, James and John start coming down off the mountain, and Jesus starts talking to them—and what he says (not for the first time) seems to be at odds with everything they’ve just seen. V. 9:

9 And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

To be clear: the “Son of Man” is Jesus himself. After everything they’ve just seen, Jesus says once again that death is coming for him. He’ll rise, but he’ll have to die first.

This is just incomprehensible—seriously, after what just happened? You’re still talking about death? We see the disciples’ incomprehension in v. 10:

10 So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean.

It seems like they’re thinking about the chronology of these things. They’ve just seen Jesus transfigured, and Moses and Elijah standing there with him, and now he’s talking about rising from the dead… And that brings up another question. V. 11:

11 And they asked him, “Why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?”

This question can seem to come out of left field, but it’s not really random. They’ve just seen Elijah on the mountain. So naturally these men, who are Jews and who grew up being taught the Old Testament, will recall the prophecy that the scribes have repeated to them since their youth. It comes from Malachi chapter 4, verses 5-6. Through Malachi, God says:

5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

That is, God promises that before this “day of the Lord”, before the coming of the kingdom, Elijah will come, and he will unite what was once broken, restore what was once lost—he will unite father and son, mother and daughter, with a singular goal: that of seeing the day of the Lord, seeing the kingdom of God.

For the disciples, that hasn’t happened yet…so if the coming of the kingdom will take place through Christ’s death and resurrection, how could it happen, if Elijah hasn’t come yet, if this prophecy hasn’t been fulfilled?

Jesus’s answer is simple, but all the same it can be confusing. His answer is this: Elijah has come; this prophecy has been fulfilled. V. 12:

12 And he said to them, “Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? 13 But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him.”

So what is he talking about here? Clearly it’s not the appearance of Elijah that just took place on the mountain, because he says in v. 13 that at his appearing “they did to him whatever they pleased,” and no one did anything to Elijah or Moses as they appeared on the mountain. So if that’s not it, what is it?

It’s a little unclear in this text, but if you look at the parallel texts in Matthew 17 and Luke 1, it is very clear that the “Elijah” that Jesus is talking about here is actually John the Baptist, who came (as the angel tells John’s father in Luke 1) “in the spirit and power of Elijah,” to fulfill the prophecy of Malachi 4. So Jesus’s answer is simple: the prophecy in Malachi 4 wasn’t literal, but was promising the coming of someone who would fulfill the same function as Elijah. And this person was John the Baptist. He came to “restore all things”—that is, to get things back on track, to prepare the people for the coming of the Messiah.

So you see, Jesus answers their question quite carefully. Their question was, how could Christ’s death and resurrection take place if Elijah hasn’t come yet? The answer is: he has come: John came, he prepared the people for the coming of the Lord…and look what happened to him. Herod cut his head off. So is it any surprise that the Son of Man, the Messiah, should have to “suffer many things and be treated with contempt”? Of course not—this is exactly the way the prophet Isaiah said it would be in Isaiah 53. It’s no surprise that the promised Elijah figure, come in the person of John the Baptist, was persecuted and killed, because that is what was promised would happen to the Messiah whose way he was preparing.

The whole point of what we see here is that Jesus will have to die, and his death in no way undermines the fact that he is God; in fact, it is through his death (and his resurrection) that his power as God will be fully manifested.

Towards the end of chapter 8, if you remember, Peter made the claim that Jesus is “the Christ”, the promised Savior. Now, he and James and John know that it is true—they’ve seen it.

The question is then, why do we need to know that? What’s the goal Jesus is pulling us into?

He told us in the text we saw last week: whoever loses his life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it. Some people will conveniently overlook the reason for losing our lives. Our goal is not simply to give up everything, but to give up everything for him, for the gospel, for the advancement of the kingdom of God, as we’ve seen since the beginning of this book.

So we know whom we’re following, and we know what our goal is—let’s get to work!

Not so fast.

Often when people—particularly young people, as these disciples are “young” in their faith—become enamored with a lofty goal, they want to get out and do it. They want to get to work, get it done, change the world!

But we can’t. It doesn’t work like that. Because even if Jesus is God…

…We Are Not (v. 14-29)

And that is the point of the second half of our text today. Let’s begin reading at v. 14:

14 And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. 15 And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. 16 And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” 17 And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. 18 And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.”

Put yourselves in the disciples’ shoes for a moment. Think back to chapter 6—Jesus sent out the disciples two by two, and “gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (v. 7). They would travel around, proclaiming that people should repent, healing people and casting out demons. It was something they had at least some experience with. Jesus sent them out with his authority, and they were able to do some of the things he was able to do.

But now, it’s not working. This boy has a demon in him (and Jesus confirms later on that it is a demon and not just an illness like epilepsy), and the disciples can’t cast it out.

We’ll get to the question why that’s the case a little later. For now, it’s important to see what Mark is trying to show us. He’s just described the transfiguration—this incredible account of Jesus’s divinity being made visible for Peter, James and John. In the meantime, he’s not with the other disciples. And the disciples can no longer do what they were able to do before.

They’ve grown in some ways, we can see throughout this gospel. But they haven’t grown past their need for Jesus.

That’s the point (and Daniel Akin’s commentary on this passage is really helpful). What Mark is trying to show us here is that this is always the case: we never grow past our need for Jesus. The father brought his son to Jesus; Jesus isn’t there, so the disciples try to do what they’ve done before—and it doesn’t work.

No matter what they’ve done in the past, no matter what they’ve learned, they still need Jesus. We never grow past our need for Jesus.

The next thing we see is that we never grow past our need for faith. The father has just told Jesus that the disciples weren’t able to cast the demon out of his son. This is how Jesus responds (v. 19):

19 And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?”

It’s kind of surprising to hear Jesus frustrated. And we might find him a bit harsh. But as William Lane says, these “rhetorical questions…express the loneliness and the anguish of the one authentic believer in a world which expresses only unbelief.” It’s Jesus’s human response to human incredulity.

He’s very clear why he’s frustrated. He’s frustrated because the disciples are “faithless”—they lack faith. We might find it surprising that the disciples lack faith, after all they’ve experienced, but isn’t that the way it often goes? No matter what we’ve experienced, how many times we’ve seen God’s faithfulness proven in our lives, when another situation comes along that only he can bring us through, we’re frightened. We wonder if he’ll really be there. We wonder if we can really do what he’s called us to do.

Now compare that to what we see next. V. 20:

20 And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21 And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. 22 And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” 23 And Jesus said to him, “ ‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.”

There it is again—the problem is unbelief. All things are possible for one who believes, Jesus says.

The father of the child responds in the most lucid way possible:

24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

The father knows that he believes, at least in a way—he did bring his son to Jesus, after all. But he also sees himself clearly enough to know that his faith isn’t perfect. That it is lacking. That it’s not strong enough.

So what does he do? He professes the faith in Christ that he has—little though it may be—and then he asks for Jesus to help him regarding the faith he still lacks.

That is the right response. That is a real response. It’s a response that sees oneself clearly, and that sees Jesus clearly. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” So what does Jesus do? V. 25:

25 And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” 26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.

Just as we will never grow beyond our need for Jesus, we will also never grow beyond our need for faith. We will never have “enough” faith. As long as we are limited human beings living in this sinful world, our faith will always be lacking. This man sees that; he sees himself clearly—and asks for help.

Which brings us to the last thing Mark shows us here. We never grow beyond our need for Jesus; we never grow beyond our need for faith; and we never grow beyond our need for prayer. V. 28:

28 And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

To put it really simply, when the disciples came to cast the demon out of this boy, they did it without realizing their faith was lacking; they did it thinking they had everything they needed in themselves.

Now I think it’s important to dispel a very common misconception about what Jesus says here. Some people have read “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer,” and taken upon themselves to drum up a theology of demons and their exorcism that the Bible never teaches. We can’t know exactly what Jesus means by “this kind” of demon, because he doesn’t say. The only thing we know about this demon is what it causes—the physical effects on the child. We’re given nothing else, and we’re given nothing else precisely because Mark’s goal isn’t to help us develop a theology of demons.

He’s trying to help us build a theology of prayer.

Think about this passage from the bottom up. Even the disciples, who have been given Jesus’s authority (as we saw in chapter 6), need to pray. They need to continually ask God for his help to do what he’s called them to do.

And what happens when we pray? We are reminded, every time we pray, that God has what we are lacking; that he is listening to us; that he actually can answer our prayers. To put it another way, prayer builds our faith. It helps us to be more certain of God’s constant presence, and more dependent on his help. (Even the father’s statement—“I believe; help my unbelief!”—is a prayer.) Prayer builds our faith.

And what happens when we have faith? Our minds and hearts are directed to the object of our faith, Jesus Christ. He is the one we need—the Savior who is God made man, transcended before the eyes of the disciples on the mountain, the Messiah promised by the prophets.

Prayer builds faith, and faith brings us to Jesus, who is the God we can never be.

Dependence After the Transfiguration

Now when we think about how to respond to this text, I think it’s important to keep three people in particular in mind—and that would be Peter, James and John.

Think about what they went through that day. They went up on the mountain with Jesus, they saw this incredible vision of his divinity, and could leave with no other conclusion than that Jesus really is the Son of God, the Messiah of whom Isaiah prophesied, the Savior who would usher in the day of the Lord and the kingdom of God.

Then they come down from the mountain, and they see the “failure” of the other disciples to cast out the demon. They see Jesus’s frustration, and his criticism: “O faithless generation!” They hear Jesus say to the father of the boy that all things are possible to one who believes, and they hear the father’s admirable response: “I believe; help my unbelief!” And then they hear Jesus say, “This kind can only be driven out by prayer.”

Given everything they saw before coming down off the mountain, how do you think they must have heard this? When Jesus directs everyone’s attention towards faith and prayer—that the disciples’ problem wasn’t that it was impossible to cast out the demon, but that they lacked faith—Peter, James and John had a clear direction for the future: to do anything for the kingdom of God, you must feed your faith, by continual dependence on God.

But now, this God on whom they must be dependent has a face. It is a face they know well, a face they’ve been looking at for a very long time. This God on whom they must be dependent has the face of Christ, the transfigured Messiah on the mountain, the Son of God to whom God told them to listen.

That is the message of this text: we can do nothing on our own, but if we constantly submit ourselves to dependence on Christ, he can work through us.

The trap into which the other disciples fall is one of the most common. We see what God has given us in the past—talent, or experience, or knowledge—and we come to depend on those things rather than on him. And before too long we realize that our past experience isn’t replicated in the present: what worked before doesn’t work anymore.

So what does it look like to totally depend on God?

It looks like prayer. It looks like the acknowledgement, even before the most mundane spiritual tasks, that we don’t have what we need in ourselves, and that we need God’s help to do anything. Every time we speak to someone about Christ, every time we try to serve others, every time we try to resist temptation, we need to ask for his help. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

But this prayer isn’t the kind of desperate, doubtful prayer we so often pray. At least once a week, Jack comes to me and asks if he can play a video game. And I can see on his face that he knows perfectly well I’m going to say no, because he hasn’t done his homework, or it’s time for bed, or whatever. But he asks anyway, and it’s clear in his voice that he’s not expecting me to say yes.

I don’t mind when Jack does that—but that’s not the kind of prayer we’re called to pray. Every time I preach, this is what happens. During the week, every time I sit down for sermon prep, I pray—I confess my own limitations and I ask God to give me his Spirit, to help me see in the text what he wants me to see and say. And all during the week, I pray. I ask God to prepare my heart, to prepare my mind. And before I come up here, I stand in the back of the room and I pray. I admit to God that I can’t do this: no matter how much I’ve prepared, I’m still ill-equipped, I haven’t thought of everything, I won’t be able to say everything I need to.

So I need his help. I need his help, not in the words I’m going to say, but on the effect it’s going to have on all of you. It’s crazy, the number of times I’ve gotten up here feeling weak and exhausted and scattered, and preached horribly (in my opinion)—and then had people come up to me after saying how they were helped. It’s incredible, because it clearly wasn’t me: that sermon was bad. But God did something between the speaking and the hearing, to do his work in people’s hearts despite my pitiful sermon.

That’s why I pray, and that’s how I pray: I pray knowing that he is God, and that he will do what I can’t. God expects us to be expectant: to come to him knowing that we’re praying to the transfigured Christ on the mountain, the Christ who died to free us from sin and declare us righteous, the Christ who was raised in glory and who now reigns from heaven, the Christ who has all power in heaven and on earth at his disposal! He expects us to come to him with confidence, knowing that even if we can’t do anything on our own, he can do all things.

Brothers and sisters, we are not God…but he is. He is the glorious God who became a man in order to save us and use us for his kingdom and his glory. We can do nothing on our own—but all things are possible to those who believe.

So our prayer should always be the prayer of this boy’s father: Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!

And he will.