Receiving the Disappointment of God -
Today we resume our journey through the Gospel of Matthew that
we started back in August after focusing on Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.
Matthew 17:14-20, The Message - At the bottom of
the mountain, they were met by a crowd of waiting people. As they approached, a
man came out of the crowd and fell to his knees begging, “Master, have mercy on
my son. He goes out of his mind and suffers terribly, falling into seizures.
Frequently he is pitched into the fire, other times into the river. I brought
him to your disciples, but they could do nothing for him.”
Jesus said, “What a generation! No sense of God! No focus
to your lives! How many times do I have to go over these things? How much
longer do I have to put up with this? Bring the boy here.” He ordered the
afflicting demon out—and it was out, gone. From that moment on the boy was
well.
When the disciples had Jesus off to themselves, they
asked, “Why couldn’t we throw it out?”
“Because you’re not yet taking God seriously,” said
Jesus. “The simple truth is that if you had a mere kernel of faith, a poppy
seed, say, you would tell this mountain, ‘Move!’ and it would move. There is
nothing you wouldn’t be able to tackle.”
In today’s passage, it’s especially
important to remember what has just happened in the passage leading up to this
one. Jesus and three of His disciples
have just finished witnessing Jesus being transfigured before them up on the
mountain and in addition to that, Moses and Elijah show up to confer with
Jesus. If ever there were a
faith-building event for these disciples, they have just experienced it. They have just seen with their own eyes proof
that Jesus is indeed the Son of God and all of heaven’s power is behind him. Fresh
from that experience, they come down off the mountain and a man brings his son
to Jesus’s disciples to be healed. They
are unable to heal him. Jesus shows some
emotion as he hears this.
“How
much longer do I have to put up with this?,” he asks in exasperation.
Jesus
is disheartened that His disciples haven’t enough faith to perform this
healing. If I’m honest, I feel Jesus’s impatience
personally as if He had directed at me. While
I have not witnessed anything like the transfiguration, I have witnessed many
miracles over the course of my life, some of them in my own family. If anyone should have a mustard seed’s amount
of faith, it is me. But I have to
confess that I have often come up short when my faith was called upon to move
even little molehills, much less mountains.
I hear Jesus’s frustration in this encounter and it hits home in my
heart.
Part of
Jesus’s urgency here concerns Him having knowledge that the others do not have;
His time is growing short. He knows the
time is quickly approaching that he will be hanging on a Roman cross and He
wants His disciples to be ready. It frustrates
Jesus that his cohorts are further along in their faith journey than they
are. Likewise, it often frustrates me
that I am not further along in my faith journey than I am. Perhaps some of you know what I’m talking
about from your own experience.
There’s
part of me that would like to think that God never gets frustrated with me and
my bumbling faith. But the larger part
of me knows that it can’t be true. To
love someone means that you will get frustrated when they aren’t living at the
level you know they could. Loving
parents know just when to express this frustration to kids who need a little
kick in the pants to do better. Jesus is
giving His disciples one of those shoves.
And they will do better as a result.
These men will be the leaders of the movement Jesus starts after Jesus
ascends into heaven. They will perform
much greater miracles than the miracle they failed to perform here. They are no worse for wear after being the
recipients of Jesus’s expressed disappointment; in fact, they will be better
because Jesus didn’t hold back.
Question: When has
another’s disappointment with you been the catalyst for positive personal growth?
Prayer: Lord Jesus, we
long to have even a mustard’s seed amount of faith. Do with us as you know best to move us to that
faith-filled place. Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray
for those who have experienced a discouraging failure recently.
Song: Ain’t No Grave –
Molly Skaggs (Bethel Music)
No comments:
Post a Comment