35-27. The Healing of the Lunatic Child

27. The Healing of the Lunatic Child Mat 17:14-21; Mark 9:14-29; Luk 9:37-42 The old adversaries of our Lord, the Scribes, had taken advantage of his absence on the Mount of Transfiguration, to win a momentary triumph, or at least what seemed such, over those of his disciples whom He had left behind Him. These had undertaken to cast out an evil spirit of a peculiar malignity, and had proved unequal to the” task; “they could not” —weakened as they were by the absence of their Lord; and with Him, of three, the chiefest among themselves—the three in whom, as habitually the nearest to Him, we may suppose his power most mightily resided. It was here again, as it was once before during the absence of Moses with his servant Joshua, on his mount of a fainter transfiguration (Exo 34:29). Then, too, in like manner, the enemy profiting by his absence awhile prevailed against the people (Exod, xxxii.). And now the Scribes were pressing to the uttermost the advantage which they had gained by this miscarriage of the disciples. A great multitude too were gathered round, spectators of the defeat of Christ’s servants; and the strife was at the highest,—the Scribes, no doubt, arguing from the impotence of the servants to the impotence of the Master,^[1] and they denying the conclusion; when suddenly He concerning whom the strife was, appeared, returning from the holy Mount, his face and person yet glistening, as there is reason to suppose, with traces of the glory which had clothed Him there,—and which had not yet disappeared, nor faded into the light of common day. But very different was the impression which that glory made from the impression made by the countenance of Moses. When the multitude saw him, as he came down from his mountain, the skin of his face shining, “they were afraid to come nigh him” (Exo 34:30), for that glory upon his face was a threatening glory, the awful and intolerable brightness of the law. But the glory of God shining in the face of Christ Jesus, though awful too, is also an attractive glory, full of grace and beauty; it draws men to Him, does not drive them from Him; and thus, indeed, “all the people, when they beheld Him, were greatly amazed,” such gleams of brightness arrayed Him still; yet did they not therefore flee from Him, but rather, as the more allured by that brightness, “running to Him, saluted Him”^[2] (cf. 2Co 3:18).

Yet the sights and sounds which greeted Him on his return to our sinful world, how different were they from those which He had just quitted upon the holy Mount! There the highest harmonies of heaven; here some of the wildest and harshest discords of earth.^[3] There He had been receiving from the Father honour and glory (2Pe 1:17); here his disciples, those to whom his work had been intrusted in his absence, had been procuring for Him, as far as in them lay, shame and dishonour. But as when some great captain, suddenly arriving upon a battle-field, where his subordinate lieutenants have well nigh lost the day, and brought all into a hopeless confusion, with his eye measures at once the necessities of the moment, and with no more than his presence causes the tide of victory to turn, and everything to right itself again, so was it now. The Lord arrests the advancing and victorious foe: He addresses Himself to the Scribes; with the words, “What question ye with them?” taking the baffled and hard-pressed disciples under his own protection. What question there is more, henceforth it must be with Him. These, who were so forward to dispute with the servants, do not so readily accept the challenge to contend with the Master. Not they, but “one of the multitude,” the father of the poor child on whom the ineffectual attempt at healing had been made, is the first to speak; “kneeling down to Him, and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son;” and with this declaring the miserable case of his child, and the little help he had obtained from the disciples.

St. Mark paints the whole scene with the hand of a master, and his account of this miracle, compared with those of the other Evangelists, would alone suffice to vindicate for him an original character, and to refute the notion of some, that we have in his Gospel only an epitome, now of the first, and now of the third.^[4]All the symptoms, as put into the father’s mouth, or described by the sacred historians, exactly agree with those of epilepsy;—not that we have here only an epileptic; but this was the ground on which the deeper spiritual evils of this child were superinduced. The fits were sudden and lasted remarkably long; the evil spirit “hardly departeth from him;”—”a dumb spirit” St. Mark calls it, a statement which does not contradict that of St. Luke, “he suddenly crieth out;” this dumbness was only in respect of articulate sounds; he could give no utterance to these. Nor was it a natural defect, as where the string of the tongue has remained unloosed (Mark 8:32), or the needful organs for speech are wanting; nor yet a defect under which he had always laboured; but the consequence of this possession. When the spirit took him in its might, then in these paroxysms of his disorder it tare him, till he foamed ^[5] and gnashed with his teeth: and altogether he pined away like one the very springs of whose life were dried up.^[6] And while these accesses of his disorder might come upon him at any moment and in any place, they often exposed him to the worst accidents: “ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.” In St. Mark the father attributes these fits to the direct agency of the evil spirit: “ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him;” yet such calamities might equally be looked at as the natural consequences of his unhappy condition.^[7] The father concludes his sad tale with an account of the defeated efforts of the nine to aid him; and declares what impotent exorcists they had proved: “I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out, and they could not.” On this the Lord with a sorrowful indignation exclaimed, “0 faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?” We have two applications of these words. Some, as Origen, apply them to the disciples, and to them alone; they suppose that our Lord spake thus, grieved and indignant at the weakness of their faith, and that even so brief a separation from Him should have shorn them of their strength, and left them powerless against the kingdom of darkness; and the after discourse (Mat 17:20) favours such an application. Others, as Chrysostom, and generally the early interpreters, pointedly exclude the disciples from the rebuke; which they consider addressed to the surrounding multitude alone; and certainly the term “generation” suits better for them,—in whom the Lord beholds specimens and representatives of the whole Jewish people, the father himself representing, only too well, the unbelieving temper of the whole generation to which he pertained (Mark 9:22), and therefore sharing largely in the condemnation. This in St. Mark is directly addressed to him, yet the language “shows that the rebuke is not restrained to him, but intended to pass on to many more. And indeed the most satisfactory explanation is one which reconciles both these views; the disciples are not exclusively aimed at, nor chiefly, but rather the multitude and the father: they, however, are included in the rebuke; their unfaithfulness and unbelief had brought them, for the time, back to a level with their nation, and they must share with it all in a common reproach. “How long shall I be with you?” are words not so much of one longing to put off the coil of flesh,^[8] as rather of a master, complaining of the slowness and dulness of his scholars: “Have I abode with you all this time, and have you profited so little by my teaching ?” at the same time He feels that till their task is learned, He cannot leave them, but must abide with them still.^[9] We may compare his words to Philip, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip ?” (John 14:9.) And now, since the help which is done on earth, He must Himself do it, He exclaims, “Bring him unto Me” As the staff in Gehazi’s hand could not arouse the dead child, but the prophet himself must arrive and undertake the work, if it were to be done at all, so is it now (2Ki 4:31). Yet the first bringing of the child to Jesus causes another of the fearful paroxysms of his disorder, so that “he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming” The kingdom of Satan in small and in great is ever stirred into a fiercer activity by the coming near of the kingdom of Christ. Satan has great wrath, when his time is short.^[10] But as the Lord on occasion of another difficult and perilous cure (Mark 5:9) began a conversation with the sufferer Himself, seeking thus to inspire him with confidence, to bring back something of calmness to his soul, so does He now with the representative of the sufferer, the father, being precluded by his actual condition from doing this with himself: “How long is it ago since this came unto him?” The father answers, “Of a child” and, for the stirring of more pity, describes again the miserable perils in which these fits involved his child; at the same time ill content that anything should come before the healing, if a healing were possible, having, also, present to his mind the recent failure of the disciples, he adds, “If Thou, Thou more than those, canst do anything, have compassion on us, and help us” In that “us,” we see how entirely his own life is knit up with his child’s: as the woman of Canaan, pleading for her daughter, had cried, “Have mercy on me” (Mat 15:22). At the same time he reveals by that “if” that he has come with no unquestioning faith in Christ’s power to aid, but is rendering the difficult cure more difficult still by his own doubts and unbelief. Our Lord’s answer is not without its difficulty, especially as it appears in the original, but the sense of it is plainly the following: “That ’if’ of thine, that uncertainty whether this can be done or not, is to be resolved by thee and not by Me. There is a condition without which this thy child cannot be healed; but the fulfilling of the condition lies with no other than thyself. The absence of faith on thy part, and not any overmastering power in this malignant spirit, is that which straitens Me; if this cure is hard, it is thou that renderest it so. Thou hast said, ’If I can do anything:’ but the question is, ’If thou canst believe;’ this is the hinge upon which all must turn”—and then with a pause, and no merely suspended sense, as in our Version,^[11] follow those further words, “All things are possible to him that believeth.” Thus faith is here, as in each other case, set as the condition of healing; on other occasions it is the faith of the person; but here, that being impossible, the father’s is accepted instead; even as the Syrophenician mother’s in the room of her daughter’s (Mat 15:22). Thus the Lord appears, in Olshausen’s words, in some sort a μαιευτὴς πίστεως, helping the birth of faith in that travailing soul; even as at length, though with pain and sore travail, it comes to the birth, so that the father exclaims, “Lord, I believe;” and then, the little spark of faith which has been kindled in his soul revealing to him the abysmal deeps of unbelief which are there, he adds this further: “Help Thou mine unbelief.”^[12] For thus it is ever: only in the light of the actual presence of a grace in the soul does that soul perceive the strength and prevalence of the opposing corruption. Till then it had no measure by which to measure its deficiency. Only he who believes, guesses anything of the unbelief of his heart.

“When now this prime condition of healing is no longer wanting on his part, the Lord, meeting and rewarding even the weak beginnings of his faith, accomplishes the cure. Let us observe, in his address to the foul spirit, the majestic “I charge thee; no longer one whom thou mayest hope to disobey, against whom thou mayest venture to struggle, but I, the Prince of the kingdom of light, charge thee, come out of him.” Nor is this all: he shall “enter no more into him;” bis return is barred; he shall not take advantage of his long possession, presently to come back (Mat 12:45), and reassert his dominion; the cure shall be at once perfect and lasting. He must obey; but he does so most unwillingly; what he can no longer retain he would, if he might, destroy; as Fuller, with a wit which is “in season and out of season,” expresses it, “like an outgoing tenant, that cares not what mischief he does. “^[13] So fearful was this last paroxysm, so entirely had it exhausted all the powers of the child, “that he was as one dead; and many said, He is dead; but Jesus took him by the hand” and life from that touch of the Lord of life flowed into him anew: even as we often elsewhere find a revivifying power to be by the same channel conveyed (Dan 10:8-9; Rev 1:17; Mat 17:6-8).

“Then”—”when He was come into the house,” as we learn from St. Mark—”came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?” Where was the secret of their defeat, seeing that they were not exceeding their commission (Mat 10:8), and had on former occasions found the devils, subject to them (Luk 10:17)? “And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief” because of their lack of that to which, and to which only, all things are possible. They had made but a languid use of the means for stirring up and increasing faith; while yet, though the locks of their strength were shorn, they would “go out as at other times before” against their enemies, being certain to be foiled whenever they encountered an enemy of peculiar malignity. And such they encountered here; for the phrase “this kind” marks that there are orders of evil spirits, that as there is a hierarchy of heaven, so is there an inverted hierarchy of hell. The same is intimated in the mention of the unclean spirit going and taking seven other spirits more wicked than himself (Mat 12:45); and at Ephes. 6:12, there is probably a climax, mounting up from one degree of spiritual power and malignity to another. “This kind,” He declares, “goeth not out but by prayer and fasting” The faith which shall be effectual against this must be a faith exercised in prayer, that has not relaxed itself by an habitual compliance with the demands of the lower nature, but has often girt itself up to an austerer rule, to rigour and self-denial. But as the secret of all weakness is in unbelief, so of all strength in faith: “For verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” The image reappears with some modifications, Luk 17:6; and St. Paul probably alludes to these words of his Lord, 1Co 13:2. Many explain “faith as a grain of mustard-seed” to mean lively faith, with allusion to the keen and biting powers of that grain.^[14] But it certainly is not on this side that the comparison should be urged; rather, it is the smallest faith, with a tacit contrast between a grain of mustard-seed, a very small thing (Mat 13:31-32), and a mountain, a very great. That smallest shall be effectual to work on this largest. The least spiritual power, which is really such, shall be strong to overthrow the mightiest powers which are merely of this world.

Footnotes

[1] Calvin: Scribæ victores insultant, nec modo subsannant discipulos, sed proterviunt adversus Christum, quasi, in illorum personâ exinanita esset ejus virtus.

[2] Bengel with his usual beauty: Tangebantur a gloria, etiamsi nescirent quid in monte actum esset; cf. Marc. x. 32; Luc. xix. 11; nec non Exo 4:14. Occultam cum Deo conversationem facile sentias majorem hominum erga te proclivitatem inseqúi. This is more likely than that it was the mere salutation, as Theophylact proposes, of one that had been absent for awhile; though he too was aware of the right explanation: τινὲς δὲ ϕασὶν ὅτι ἡ ὄψις αὐτοῦ ὡραιοτέρα γινομένη ἀπὸ τοῦ ϕωτὸς τῆς μεταμορϕώσεως‚ ἐϕείλκετο τοὺς ὄχλους πρὸς τὸ ἀσπάζεσθαι.

[3] These mighty and wondrous contrasts have been embodied by Christian Art. In them lies the idea of Raphael’s great picture of the Transfiguration, and its two parts, which so mightily sustain one another.

[4] Even Augustine falls in with this view (De Cons. Evang. i. 2): Divus Marcus eum [Matthæum] subsequutus tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur.

[5] Lucian (Philopseudes, 16) has ironical allusions, as I must needs think, to this and other cures of demoniacs by our Lord: Πάντες ἴσασιν τὸν Σύρον τὸν ἐκ τῆς Παλαιστίνης‚ τὸν ἐπὶ τούτεν σοϕιστὴν‚ ὅσους παραλαβὼν καταπίπτοντας πρὸς τὴν σελήνην καὶ τὼ ὀϕθαλμὼ διαστρέϕοντας καὶ ἀϕροῦ πιμπλαμένους τὸ στόμα ὅμως ἀνίστησι καὶ ἀποπέμπει ἀρτίους ἐπὶ μισθῷ μεγάλῳ ἀπαλλάξας τῶν δεινῶν. There is much of interest in the passage, besides what I have quoted.

[6] If indeed the word here used (ξηραίνεται) has not reference to the stiffness and starkness, the unnatural rigescence of the limbs, in the accesses of the disorder; cf. 2Ki 13:4, LXX. Such would not indeed be its first, but might well be its secondary, meaning, since that which is dried up loses its pliability, and the father is describing not the general pining away of his son, but his symptoms when the paroxysm took him. The σεληνιαζόμενοι (in other Greek σεληνιακοί‚ σεληνόβλητοι are mentioned once besides in the N. T. Mat 4:24), where they are distinguished from the δαιμονιζόμενοι. The distinction, however, whatever it was, in the popular language would continually disappear; and the father here saying of his son σεληνιάζεται does but express the fact, or rather the consequence, of his possession. Of course the word originally, like μανία (from μήνη) and lunatieus, arose from the wide-spread belief, not altogether unfounded, of the evil influence of the moon Psa 121:6) on the human frame (see Creuzer, Symbolik, vol. ii. p. 571).

[7] These extracts will abundantly justify what was said above of the symptoms of this child’s case being those of; one taken with epilepsy. Cælius Aurelianus (Morb. Chron. i. 4): Alii [epileptici] publicis in locis cadendo fœdantur, adjunctis etiam externis periculis loci causa præcipites dati, aut in flumina vel mare cadentes. And Paulus Ægineta, the last of the great physicians of the old world, describing epilepsy (iii. 13), might almost seem to have borrowed his account from this history: Morbus comitialis est convulsio totius corporis cum principalium actionum laesione,.... fit liaec affectio maxime pueris, postea vevo etiam in adolescentibus et in vigore cousistentibus. Instante vero jam symptomate collaptio ipsis derepente contigit et convulsio, et quandoque nihil significans exclamatio (ἐξαίϕνης κράζει, Luk 9:39). Praecipuum vero ipsorum signum eat oris spuma (μετὰ ἀϕροῦ) Luk 9:39).

[8] Jerome (Comm. in Matt, in loc.): Non quod tædio superatus sit, et mansuetus ac mitis;... sed quod in similitudinem medici si ægrotum videat contra sua præcepta se gerere dicat: Usquequo accedam ad domum tuam, quousque artis peidam injuriam; me aliud jubente et te aliud perpetrante?

[9] Bengel: Festinabat ad Patrem: nec tamen abitum se facere posse sciebat, priusquam discipulos ad fidem perduxisset. Molesta erat tarditas eorum.

[10] Calvin: Quo propior affulget Christi gratia, et efficacius agit, eo irnpotentius furit Satan.

[11] The words, I imagine, should be pointed thus: τὸ‚ εἰ δύνασαι πιστεῦσαι πάντα δυνατὰ τῷ πιστεύοντι and Bengel enters rightly into the construction of the first clause, explaining it thus: Hoc, si potes credere, res est; hoc agitur. Calvin: Tu me rogas ut subveniam quoad potero; atqui inexhaustum virtutis fontem in me reperies, si modo afferas satis amplam fidei mensuram.

[12] Augustine, Serin, xliii. 6, 7.

[13] Gregory the Great (Moral, xxxii. 19): Ecce eum non discerpserat cum tenebat, exiens discerpsit: quia nimirum tune pejus cogitationes mentis dilaniat, cum jam egressui divinâ virtute compulsus appropinquat. Et quern mutus possederat, cum clamoribus deserebat: quia plerumque cum possidet, minora tentamenta irrogat: cum vero de corde pellitur, acriori infestatione perturbat. Cf. Hom. xii. in Ezek.; and H. de Sto. Victore: Dum puer ad Dominum accedit, eliditur: quia conversi ad Dominum plerumque a daemonio gravius pulsantur, ut vel ad vitia reducantur, vel de suâ expulsione se vindicet diabolus.

[14] Augustine (Serm. ccxlvi.): Modicum videtur granum sinapis; nihil contemtibilius adspectu, nihil fortius gustu. Quod quid est aliud, nisi maximus ardor et intima vis fidei in Ecclesia?