After the "high" of the transfiguration we immediately come to the "low" of the disciples failure to heal a boy.
In fact there is a sequence of highs and lows. There is John's death, the religious leaders attacks on Jesus, great miracles, the realisation that Jesus is the Messiah, the foretelling of His being handed over to the religious leaders, the transfiguration. In all this Jesus remains the same. He remains Lord of All, He remains calm, He continues in obedience to His Father.
In looking at life we often wish everything would go smoothly. This is not a path to peace. True peace lies in becoming like Jesus, in continuing to walk in faith and obedience whatever happens.
A man's son had frequent seizures and ended up falling into the fire or water, and was suffering greatly. The disciples had failed to heal him.
Jesus issues a rebuke. It seems to be a general rebuke, rather than just directed at the disciples. Jesus rebuked the demon and the boy was healed.
There are a number of lessons to be learnt here. The first is that Jesus expected, or at least hoped, that the people would have had their own faith by now. There seems to be an expectation that they should have believed God would heal the boy. We spend a lot of time on giving excuses for people not being healed. Now we need to be careful, for there are charlatan healers working under the name of being Christians, and there are well meaning, but over-claiming, healers as well. Moreover, people do still get ill (including apostles) and die in the NT. However, even so, it seems clear from the gospels that Jesus would much prefer it if we had a greater level of faith, that we should be able to overcome many more things than we do by faith.
The second lesson is the relationship between the demonic and healing. It is quite clear that in this instance there was a demonic root to the illness. Jesus' solution was not to have an inquest in how to the demon got there, but simply to drive it out.
In private the disciples asked Jesus why they could not drive out the demon. Jesus tells them plainly that it is because of their lack of faith. If they had faith as small as a mustard seed they could move mountains.
Lord, give us more faith.
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