Saturday in the Eighteenth Week Of Ordinary Time, August 7, 2021

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.”

When St. Mark recounts this event in Mark 9, 15-28, he adds details that St, Matthew leaves out.  This perhaps results from memory, or simply from the different ways events strike witnesses, with some details more important to one person than to another.  For instance, when Mark, who received his information from St. Peter, tells how the Apostles came to Jesus and asked him why they were unable to drive out the demon, he says that Jesus simply answered them, “This kind can go out by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.”  (Some ancient manuscripts merely say “prayer” alone without “fasting”).  Possibly what actually happened was that Matthew and Mark were both right and he said what they both say he did, only that Mark did not feel the need (perhaps) to give the Lord’s admonition about having faith the size of a mustard seed.  For Mark (perhaps) the Lord had already rebuked the Apostles for their lack of faith and this did not need to be repeated; what seemed to him the key point of the story was the Lord’s insistence on the need for prayer and fasting for certain cases of exorcism.  

Now, what does the Lord mean when he says, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?”  It seems strange because every generation since Adam and Eve had been “faithless and perverse”.  Also, he had come into the world precisely because humanity was “faithless and perverse”.  We should understand “generation” here in terms of “age”, which is in accord with what is conveyed by the Hebrew word dor, which means “generation” in the usual sense, and also “age” in the historical sense.  Thus, the Lord could be speaking of the generation that began with his Incarnation and continues to the present day; or even the whole period of human existence on the earth.  His words “How long will I be with you” do not signal a complaint so much as a warning.  Entering into human history, the Son of God taught the truth about his Father’s love and the need for people to repent in order to know the fullness of that love in heaven.  For three years he traversed up a small piece of territory, continuously preaching and teaching, underlining everything he said through miracles.  Very many of the people to whom he preached had heard him before, and a number of them followed him from one town to the next for varying lengths of time.  The Apostles had spent every day for the past three years, by the time of this exorcism, hearing him, watching him, asking him questions, and yet even their faith had hardly grown — this due not to anything lacking to the Lord, but due to their difficulty in letting go of everything they had thought they had known and believed before.  Jesus is warning them that his time among them is running out, and if they are to survive his Passion and Death with any faith intact, they had better get serious about it now.

“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.”  How does the Lord speak of faith, an invisible thing, and compare it to a “mustard seed”?  Faith is a movement of the intellect and the will and is normally visible only through the actions it makes possible.  A mustard seed is a tiny, innocuous bit of organic material that is hardly noticeable at all.  If a person’s faith was so slight that it hardly impacted his thoughts and actions at all, we might say that it is “the size of a mustard seed”.  And so the Lord is saying that if their faith were as trifling as that, it could still move mountains, and yet their faith, at that point in their lives, despite everything, was not even trifling.

Faith is a gift for which we need to pray, and which we can nourish and fortify and grow through study, prayer, and good works.  Let us set out to become truly faithful people so that we may move the largest and hardest of mountains — human hearts.