The Word He Handed Back

Coming down off the mountain, where Peter, James and John had just seen him shining with God’s own glory (Mark 9:2–8), Jesus walks into an argument. A crowd has gathered; the scribes are disputing with the nine disciples he left behind; and on the ground beside them lies a boy whom a spirit has been throwing into fire and into water since he was small. Religious men are debating within earshot of a suffering none of them can touch.

The boy’s father reaches him and lays out the years, and then: “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us” (Mark 9:22). He has wanted help all along; the if is aimed at Christ, and underneath it lies a worse fear — that the power might be there and the willingness might not. He says it out loud anyway, and to the wrong face for such a fear: a doubt about whether Jesus is willing cannot live long in front of a man walking down the mountain toward a cross.

Jesus will not let the word stand. “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23). He is asking this father to believe — but not for a quantity of believing, as though faith itself were the power. He takes the father’s if and turns it around: it had hung on Christ’s ability, where it never belonged. The question now is whether this father will trust him.

And the father does something better than pretending. “Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:24). Both things in one breath. Jesus had spoken of the one who believes; this man says I believe — and then names in himself the very faithlessness Jesus had just charged against the whole generation (Mark 9:19). His faith is real, and it matters. But it is a hand held open, not a payment handed over. He asks for the one thing he lacks, because the faith God requires is the faith God gives — his shortfall arrives in front of Jesus as one more thing needing to be healed.

Then Christ answers, and at first the answer looks like the opposite of help. “And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose” (Mark 9:26–27). Lifted up; arose. The verbs are ordinary, but Mark has laid them over a boy the crowd had just pronounced dead, and he used them once before, of a dead girl Jesus took by the hand (Mark 5:41–42). Four verses later he tells the disciples the rest: they will kill the Son of Man, “and when he is killed, after three days he will rise” (Mark 9:31).

That is where the father’s half-finished prayer was safe all along. The hand that lifted the boy would itself be opened and nailed; the child who only looked dead was raised by the One who would truly be dead. The cry never had to be strong. It only had to be aimed at him.

So we may come as we are, with the if in the wrong place and the sentence unfinished. The resurrection guarantees the lifting; it does not schedule it. Not every lost thing is handed back when we ask, and some are not handed back here. But the hand that holds the boy holds the prayer, and nothing laid in those hands is mislaid. He takes the word out of our hands and finishes the sentence himself.