Saturday in the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 9, 2025

Matthew 17, 14-20

A man came up to Jesus, knelt down before him, and said, “Lord, have pity on my son, who is a lunatic and suffers severely; often he falls into fire, and often into water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him.” Jesus said in reply, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you? Bring the boy here to me.” Jesus rebuked him and the demon came out of him, and from that hour the boy was cured. Then the disciples approached Jesus in private and said, “Why could we not drive it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. Amen, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

The events St. Matthew describes here follow his account of the Lord’s Transfiguration.  Overall, Matthew is showing how the Lord Jesus came down from his glory in the heights to the earth where he vanquished the devil.  He does this too in spite of the paucity of faith that he found there.

“Lord, have pity on my son, who is a lunatic and suffers severely; often he falls into fire, and often into water.”  The terrifying violence in this case of possession compares with that of the man possessed by Legion (cf. Mark 5, 1-20).  This reflects the tendency of evil to self-destruction.  Suggestions that they boy was in fact suffering from epilepsy or some other condition are contradicted by the fact of the Lord’s exorcism of the possessing demons.  “Who is a lunatic”.  It was believed at the time that just as overexposure to the sun’s rays caused burns on the skin, overexposure to the Moon’s rays resulted in mental instability and even madness.  The father does not claim — or want to admit — that his son is possessed by demons.  He even speaks of the disciples trying to “cure” the son, not free him from demons.  It is the Lord who makes the diagnosis and performs the salutary action.  

“O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?”  The Lord Jesus convicts the human race of its faithlessness and opposition to God’s love and mercy: if even his Apostles were lacking in faith, then how abysmal was the level of faith in the rest of humanity.  In this cry from the heart, Jesus sums up the complaint of God against his Chosen People, who time and again forsook him — in the very face of his blessings — for the worship of idols which had done nothing for them.  In Isaiah 5, 4, the Lord tells of doing the hard work of preparing the ground for his grape vines and of his care of them, and then of their lack of produce: “What is there that I ought to do more to my vineyard, that I have not done to it? was it that I looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it hath brought forth wild grapes?”  But instead of walking away from his followers, the father and son, and the crowd and going back up the mountain, Jesus says, “Bring the boy here to me.”  

“Jesus rebuked him and the demon came out of him, and from that hour the boy was cured.”  St. Mark gives the rebuke in greater detail: “He threatened the unclean spirit, saying to him: Deaf and dumb spirit, I command thee, go out of him and enter not any more into him” (Mark 9, 24).  While Mark, in his Gospel, focuses on the Lord’s actions in themselves, Matthew records them in such a way as to show the Father validating his Son’s preaching.  Here, Matthew wants his readers to understand that Christ has come down from heaven (signified by the mountain of the Transfiguration) to save us from the power of the devil, and so he tells the story simply and briefly.  Mark’s account almost makes the reader forget about the Transfiguration, but Matthew’s makes it stand out the more.

“Amen, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”  The Lord has compared faith to a mustard seed before, and explained how from it an enormous bush grows, as tall or taller than a man.  He does this in order to show the Apostles that their faith has not grown since the time he has told the parable despite all they have seen and heard.  Later, when they have received the Holy Spirit and they brave all manner of mortal dangers to preach the word of Christ, they will look back at their time with the Lord and marvel at his patience with them.