When God shows off, it's a good thing

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/022519.cfm
SIR 1:1-10
MK 9:14-29

I explained recently to one of my daughters that God wants to show us that he is up to any challenge. No matter how severe the circumstances he wants to reveal the incredible lengths he will go through to communicate that he loves us. He waits until no solution seem possible, and then he steps in. 

“So, God is a show off?” she said to me, appropriately interpreting the repetitive “Ta da!” of God’s theatric entrance as perhaps just a dramatic appeal to our senses. And to take a shot at my naiveté. “Oh sure, God did that. Right. Keep thinking that Dad.”

I was not crushed, though. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Only God can show off like that. He’s perfectly good, so he’s the only one who can get away with it without being a jerk.”

Not the most insightful thing I’ve ever said. But, there’s a truth there about who God is that we need to think about. God is always with us, but he allows evil to have its way until that very moment, or more correctly that stretch of moments, where he ends evil’s control. If we’re paying attention, his entrance will be very noticeable and exciting. If we’re not paying attention, we won’t see him.

Often, if not always in our memory of things, God waits too long. Someone dies, and God was too late. Another has her reputation damaged, and still another takes cruelty to its worst consequences. Why wait that long, God? Perhaps some things are just too hard for God to fix, we think. Really. Yes, we stupidly surmise that God is weak. My, my. 

Well, look at the data. Humans have experienced wars that give no respite, until time simply wears everyone out. I mean wars of any kind — nations, marriages, corporations, religions, soured friendships, and ornery relatives. They go on until someone dies, or until some other awful thing takes its place. We are burdened by insufferable battles. 

So, is God detained or hindered in some way? Likely, we hamper many of God’s interventions because we don’t pray hard enough, or with enough kinship among believers, and surely because not enough believers even exist. But that’s not the whole story. God doesn’t truly stay away from helping the innocent just because we’re not helping him. It’s more likley God has decided to allow us to exercise evil, even if it’s awful. The more of us avoiding evil, then certainly the more of us who are protected from its consequence. It’s probably better, though, to consider what other things we should be doing than to beat up God for not stopping us from doing bad stuff. 

Those of us who pray know God is there. We can feel him with us, even as things are grim and overwhelming. Maybe especially so. Still, he waits with us, telling us to not be afraid, assuring us that he’s got this, even if all is lost. If God takes days, months, years, decades or eve millennia to answer prayer does that make him wrong? Being in the presence of God, waiting with God, represents the nurturing of a relationship. Giving God a timetable represents our expectations, not his. Aware of God does not mean God serving us. Prayer aligns us with him. We let him know our desires, but we operate upon his goodness to see which of our desires delight him. Irreverence concentrates on ticking off when God finally gets busy with our needs. "Thanks, but it's about time!"

Without that prayerful awareness of God’s presence as we wait with him, which almost all of us do not maintain as much as we should, when the problem is resolved we too often question if God actually got involved at all. Which part of the challenge is where God came along? That’s our mistake. We don’t see him as he is — always present. As our prayer becomes more constant we can most certainly calculate where God eventually will show up, but as time goes by we question our own calculations, thinking maybe our hopes clouded reality. It was just a coincidence that things got fixed.

In essence, the allowance of evil bothers us, so we come back to the delay of God’s intervention, over and over. He waits so long that we even question if his ultimate arrival to eradicate evil was actually him at all. 

Jesus attends to that problem in scripture today in Mark, Chapter 9.

In today’s gospel Jesus arrives upon a scene along with the core team of his apostles — Peter, James and John, who have just experienced the transfiguration where Jesus is revealed as the Son of God — to discover the rest of his disciples have failed to excise a demon from a boy. The demon does not hide, but publicly reveals his awful control over an innocent child through horrid displays of physical abuse. 

The demon is described as mute. That’s odd, but important to the scene. The traditional understanding of being mute in Jesus’ time presumes that a person is also deaf. That applies to this demon. At the end of the story, Jesus, in fact, calls the demon “mute and deaf.” 

The strange disability in the demon (something worth studying — that demons can be damaged) is an important part of the scripture here because of the presence of the scribes. The legal beagles for the Pharisees are chastising Jesus’ disciples for their inability to cure the boy. As in some of the miraculous cures Jesus has been reported doing — blood hemorrhaging stopped, a withered hand repaired, leprosy removed, and the grossest of debilitating sores and bodily damage disappeared — the invasion of a demon, unable to hear or speak, ravaging damage upon a blameless boy, tells us a that no one may be able to help. In fact, this is true. The disciples fail, just like the father's attempts to pray away the demon. Because it is mute, and therefore deaf, it cannot be taken out of the boy through exorcism. Very strange indeed.

Jesus is not with his disciples when the possessed son is brought to them, so they attend to the father’s request on Jesus’ behalf. Presumably, the disciples have already been doing this kind of thing. “Why could we not drive the spirit out?” they ask Jesus later, surprised at their failed attempt. Some suggest that this was their first try. I don’t think so. Assuredly Jesus stepped back and they stepped up. I think it’s probably happened before, and I believe the disciples have been successful before. They are truly perplexed by their failure.

In any case, because scribes are present we know this gathering is not coincidental. The scribes have probably brought the boy and his father to the disciples as a challenge. They believe they’ve found a conundrum that no one can fix. No hocus pocus (as the scribes consider Jesus’ exorcisms) will frighten a deaf and mute demon who cannot hear the cries of exorcism. And as hoped by the scribes, the disciples are impotent.

Now, here comes the “Ta da!” Listen to the description of Jesus’ eventual entrance upon this scene. “Immediately on seeing him, the whole crowd was utterly amazed. They ran up to him and greeted him.” He is truly a show off, but in a good way. The presence of Jesus has tremendous celebrity appeal. His aura isn’t just amazing. It is utterly amazing. 

And yet, Jesus isn’t using this situation for his typical purpose. He’s certainly very much in the “Ta da!” sphere, though. “Mute and deaf spirit, I command you: come out of him and never enter him again!” The boy falls down looking dead. But Jesus took him by the hand, raised him, and he stood up. Jesus spoke and the deaf demon heard him. Jesus transcends every limitation brought to him.

The father pleaded with Jesus. "But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” Jesus said to him, “‘If you can!’ Everything is possible to one who has faith.” Then the boy’s father cried out, “I do believe, help my unbelief!”

What is unique about this scene? Jesus is not forgiving sins. Who sinned here? It’s also not really about repairing a boy’s unfortunate home life, either. The father has prayed heartily for a healing as any good father would. Jesus is adamant that his disciples, and the father himself, must trust in God's power exponentially. Nothing is beyond God's reach. Every desperation and dispicable thing can be overcome.  This miracle is about prayer — holy, serious, expectant, anxious prayer. The importance of intimacy with God is intimated here at the end that helps describe the prayer Jesus says is necessary. 

After the exorcism, Jesus enters “the house.” The house. Jesus hasn’t just been wandering around and runs into his disciple friends at some unknown place. Jesus has walked back to a place where the disciples are apparently staying. They are at a familiar house. A house where outside the scribes brought the heart-wrenched man and his sorely stricken boy.

Inside this house, away now from the scribes who have been once again defeated by Jesus’ unflinching and unfailing kinship with God, the disciples appeal in private to their master. “Why could we not drive the spirit out?” the disciples ask Jesus. He said to them, “This kind can only come out through prayer.” This kind. 

Jesus, of course, took but an instant to repair the boy. He made sure in the presence of all to assess the calamity of the child’s possession — since birth, and in the grip of a mute and deaf demon. The circumstances were dire and heinous. “Come out of him and never enter him again.” The healing is permanent. The demon is soundly defeated. The scribes are certainly awestruck, and probably amazed themselves.

What prayer are we being told about here? Each and every “Ta da” moment by God comes with a teaching. Here maybe is the most important for us. We must conspire with God to eradicate evil. We surely know he will come, but in fact we do play a part in the moment when God intervenes. We are witnesses. We conspire in knowledge, knowing we are rooted in the power of God’s authority, knowing his all pervasive and wise spirit, and knowing the unflinching fierceness of Jesus our King. This collaboration with God follows an unimpeded intimacy with God. There should be no moment without prayer.

“This kind can only come out through prayer.” This demonic concoction of evil, this despicable bastardization of holiness made unholy, will only release its grip when the presence of God is known about, not just hoped for. Prayer presumes God’s power over evil. It is our agreement that God can repair the unrepairable that sets us up to see God’s reparation. He will do it, but it is when we, gathered and complicit, stand with God to make way for him that exclaims his presence. We don’t invoke his spirit. We acclaim it. We point it out. We praise it.

With our prayer, the consequence of God’s interventions upon evil’s grip reveals to everyone “who” was the authority behind evil’s defeat. We call upon God not to get God to act, but to honor him, collaborate with him, and show the broken world that the redemption of everyone and everything is taking place.

“Ta da!”