I Believe; Help My Unbelief!
Mark 9:21-29
Rev. Billy Kristanto
This story is also recorded in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. Despite the similarities among these three Synoptic Gospels, each has its own distinctive profile. In the Gospel of Mark, the miracle is not the climax of the story. Rather, the miracle serves to emphasize the importance of faith. Faith itself should lead to discipleship, because faith is not an end in itself.
This is a very important message for all of us. When we pray to God, we ask God to bless us and grant our desires and wishes. Sometimes God answers these wishes affirmatively, and we receive what we want, so to speak. But that is not the end. The end is to trust in a person, namely Jesus Christ. It is not merely about enjoying God’s blessings, getting what we want, and perhaps being grateful and thankful afterwards. That is not enough. If every wish we had were always answered affirmatively by God, we would become spoiled. Therefore, the emphasis here is not on the miracle, but on trusting and believing in Jesus Christ as a person. It is not only about experiencing good things from God, but about believing in God.
In this story, we see that Jesus took his time. First, Jesus asked this father, “How long has this been happening to him?” What was the purpose of this question? Certainly, Jesus did not ask because he was uninformed. He knows everything. Rather, the question was important because Jesus gave this deeply distressed father space to speak. He allowed the father to express his need, pour out his heart, and voice his frustration. Jesus gave this needy human being space to express his pain, doubt, and even unbelief. Jesus faced him as a whole person, not merely as someone who might be useful, perhaps for church ministry and so on. Jesus received him with all his difficulties, burdens, and weaknesses.
As we read this passage, we can see the father’s struggle. It is not so easy to evoke faith in the human heart. To paraphrase a well-known quotation, it was easier for God to create the whole world, with all its complexity, in just six days than to prepare a human being to be ready for God. The latter takes years, not merely six days. The problem, therefore, was not, as the father supposed, divine inability or unwillingness. Rather, the issue was the father’s faith. In verse 22, the father said, “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us,” as though it depended on divine ability. But in verse 23, Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” The real problem is the absence of human faith. It is not divine unwillingness or inability.
Faith is important and significant, and it cannot be replaced by anything else. Sometimes we may doubt or have difficulty believing in the reality of God. Perhaps we even find it difficult to trust the church because it no longer seems trustworthy. We may experience this kind of doubt, or even unbelief, and sometimes we try to replace faith with something else. We may ask for a logical demonstration so that we can receive and believe in Jesus Christ. Yet no logical demonstration or presentation can replace faith. Sometimes our unwillingness to believe is replaced by this kind of petition. We ask to see the beauty or superiority of Christianity and why it is worthy of being lived out. But the real issue may be that we simply do not want to believe.
The beauty of this story is not that the father’s unbelief is exposed. Rather, the beauty lies in the fact that his condition is also our condition. Even when we speak about faith, it is not about the strength of our faith, but rather the absence of it. Mark clearly described the father as unbelieving. How can the story continue if it concerns human faith, yet the father appears to have no faith? In my previous sermon, I emphasized divine sovereignty, which does not depend on human ability. Therefore, when Jesus said, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes,” there is, on the one hand, an invitation to believe and, on the other hand, an exposure of the father’s inability to believe, as we see in the following verse. The father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” There is no statement more paradoxical than this. It almost sounds like a contradiction.
Being unable to believe is one thing, but being humble enough to acknowledge this inability and come to Jesus is another. The problem is not simply the insufficiency or inadequacy of our faith. After all, who has great faith? I think no one does. The real question is whether we face our weakness humbly before God or whether we, perhaps unconsciously, try to glorify our doubt. We consider ourselves too complex and intelligent to believe in Christianity. We demand a higher theory or a more sophisticated presentation of Christianity. Others may glorify their pain and disappointment. They may say that they are too traumatized to trust the church. The list of difficulties goes on and on. Instead of coming humbly to Jesus and offering these difficulties to him, we glorify them.
But that is not what happens in this story. The father’s statement seems contradictory, yet it is one of the best statements ever to come from a humble human heart: “I believe; help my unbelief!” He asked the Lord for mercy, acknowledging that he had difficulty believing and could not believe in his own strength. This is an expression of one’s inability to believe in God. Perhaps we are too disappointed to believe or too discouraged to open a new relationship. The question, once again, is whether we bring these difficulties humbly before God or glorify them instead.
We learn from this story that true faith never places confidence in oneself. In this story, the disciples also offered little encouragement. This perhaps reflects the condition of the church. The church may also fail to offer encouragement in difficult situations. This is, of course, not an excuse, and we should repent of it. Yet even in this situation, the father was not discouraged by the disciples’ indifference. Instead, he looked to Jesus. This is true faith: looking to Jesus. True faith does not boast in our difficulties or glorify our pain and disappointment, but looks to Jesus.
As the story continued, the process of healing, or even resurrection in a certain sense, took a long time. It did not happen suddenly or immediately, with empirical proof at once. After Jesus rebuked the mute and deaf spirit, the spirit resisted him in verse 26. By the end of the verse, most of the crowd said, “He is dead.” They may have thought that Jesus had come to help, yet the result appeared to be the boy’s death. One point to emphasize here is that God’s work does not always produce an immediate result. Sometimes circumstances appear to become worse before they are rebuilt by God himself.
We are often not ready to follow this process. When God restores our lives, we often expect to see the light becoming brighter and brighter rather than the situation becoming darker. Yet in this story, the boy appeared to be dead before Jesus touched him. Jesus took him by the hand, lifted him up, and he arose. He was almost like one raised from the dead. He was not dead, but in the eyes of the world, he appeared to be dead, and there seemed to be no hope anymore. Isn’t this also precisely the story of Jesus, who died on the cross It appeared that everything was finished and that there was no longer any hope. It seemed to be the end of the so-called Jesus movement.
The world cannot understand this pattern of dying first and then being resurrected. If we are sick and God heals us, we expect to see signs of improvement, not deterioration, and certainly not to appear as though we were dead. But this is often not the way God works. This may not be the divine pattern we expect. Take a look at the example of Moses. Moses had to spend forty years in the wilderness first, seemingly doing nothing, before God could use him. God does not rush, and he does not work according to our timetable or agenda. He has his own agenda.
Finally, when Jesus entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” Here we encounter another motif of inability: the disciples could not cast it out. Jesus gave them a simple answer: pray. Pray humbly. If you have difficulty believing in God, pray. If you think Christianity is unreasonable, pray humbly. If you are too disappointed or discouraged, pray. Do not glorify your pain, but bring it to God in prayer. “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” This does not mean that prayer functions magically. Rather, it points to our dependence upon God. Prayer is an expression of humble dependence upon him. There is spiritual strength in prayer. (T.F.L.)