Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Just then a man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.’ Jesus answered, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Friday, February 2, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Sometimes Jesus has just had it. I think these little interludes where he grouses about his disciples’ lack of faith, curses a fig tree, insults a woman from another country, or flips over tables in the temple all point to his humanity. People sometimes just hit their limit. Because honestly, I think it’s a little harsh to insult his followers for being unable to cure a boy’s epilepsy when in general, Jesus is the only one who is actually able to remove such illnesses consistently if at all. How many modern illnesses are stubbornly incurable despite incredible advances in medicine and gobs of faith? People with faith the size of a mustard seed or even the size of a mountain still die of cancer, suffer from mental illness, or succumb to addiction.
Maybe this is just a reminder of human powerlessness, even if it seems to be delivered with anger. Yes, Jesus, the worker of healing miracles, was, in fact, fully human. But he was also fully divine, something the rest of us—even the most gifted surgeons—are not. Maybe he was just tired of carrying the burden alone, and frustrated that for all his love of people they could not, nor would they ever be able to do what really needed to be done to heal the world.
At the same time, maybe Jesus is right to be frustrated with us. Not about curing epilepsy, perhaps, but about caring for one another. I mean fully embracing our call to love and service to our neighbors—all our neighbors. We do have the capacity to work together, we do have the tools to communicate, cooperate, and embrace our interdependence. But we don’t. We keep building walls between “in groups” and “out groups” and utterly missing the point of all that he tried to teach us. I mean, I’m pretty frustrated with people about those things, too! Perhaps we ought to focus not on Jesus’ anger at us for what we can’t do, and learn from his frustration with us about what we absolutely can, if we only choose to.
Where am I failing to do what I’m capable of to heed Jesus’ call to love and service?
