Saturday in the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 8, 2020

The Feast of St. Dominic

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 in the Gospel reading for today transpire immediately after the Lord and his Apostles Peter, James, and John return from Mount Tabor following the Transfiguration.  The exorcism Jesus performs here serves to validate the events on the mountain and the words heard by the Apostles just as the healing of the leper did when Jesus descended the mountain upon delivering the Sermon on the Mount.  One further descent and validation is to come: following the Last Supper and the inauguration of the Mass, Jesus will come down the Mount of Olives to die on the Cross.  In the healing of the leper, the Lord in sign enters our own sinfulness in order to heal us from our sins.  In the present exorcism, in sign he casts out the evil one who has dominated the human race to that point.  In his Death on the Cross, he will fulfill the signs of the healings and rescue us all, and destroy the power of the devil over all humans.

“He falls into fire, and often into water.”  The Church Father Origen makes an interesting comment on this verse.  Already in the mid third century some were saying that the boy was suffering from some physical ailment, attributable in Origen’s day to an upset of the balance of the four humors.  Origen points out that if so, the Lord would certainly have treated him differently than he did, and then would not have explained to his Apostles that prayer (and fasting) were necessary for casting out an evil spirit of this magnitude.  In the present day, many modernist scholars will echo the notion which Origen so soundly defeated.

“O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you?“. This sounds like a rebuke of the Apostles, who failed to cast out the devil, but the Fathers, such as St. Jerome, are universal in seeing these words as applied to the boy and his father.  What is lacking is not want of power for a successful exorcism, but the faith necessary to be exorcised.  St. Mark, in his more detailed telling of the event, records: “And Jesus saith to him: ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him that believes.’  And immediately the father of the boy crying out, with tears said: ‘I do believe, Lord. Help my unbelief!’ ” (Mark 9, 22-23).  While Jesus does not always require faith on the part of the one he is to heal, he does so on several occasions, such as this one, in which a Jewish child and his father must renounce evil and believe in God’s mercy.

Later, in private, the Apostles ask the Lord how they could have failed: surely they had received power from him to cast out demons and cure diseases (Matthew 10, 1)?  They had exercised previously: “Even the demons were subject to us!” (Luke 10, 17).  Jesus explains, “Because of your little faith.”  That is, they had received the power, but the power required faith to be applied.  With Jesus on Mount Tabor, the faith of the nine remaining Apostles weakened enough that they could not accomplish this work.  Jesus continues, “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.”  We ought to consider the size and purity of our faith, and pray for more, so that we might move the mountain of our world to convert and to become a truly holy mountain.  In this way we could join in the work of St. Dominic, who won back to the True Faith those who had rejected it for a terrible heresy.