The Foot of the Mountain

When Jesus comes down from the mountain, he walks into an argument. A crowd has gathered around the nine disciples who stayed behind, and the teachers of the law are disputing with them. A man explains. His son has a spirit that robs him of speech and throws him into fire and water. He asked the disciples to drive it out, and they could not.

Jesus' response is sharp. He calls this an unbelieving generation and asks how long he must put up with them. It is one of the rare moments in Mark where his frustration shows. Then he turns to the boy.

The healing is not gentle to watch. The spirit convulses the child and leaves him looking so much like a corpse that the crowd says he is dead. Jesus takes him by the hand and lifts him up. Mark uses the same word he will use for the resurrection.

Afterward, indoors, the disciples ask the obvious question. Why could we not do it? Jesus answers that this kind can come out only by prayer. That is the one idea of the passage. The disciples had been given authority over unclean spirits back in chapter six, and they had used it. Somewhere along the way, authority had become technique. They had stopped asking and started performing.

It is easy to do the same. A gift God gave you, a ministry that once worked, a habit of reading or serving that once had life in it, can quietly become something you run on your own steam. Nothing looks different from the outside until the day it fails.

The remedy Jesus names is not more effort. It is prayer, which is the practice of admitting that the power was never yours. The disciples had to fail in public to learn that. Most of us learn it the same way, and the lesson is worth the embarrassment.

If something in your life has stopped working, before you look for a new method, ask whether you have stopped asking.