Yesterday was the mountain, dazzling clothes, Moses and Elijah, and a voice from a cloud. Today is a desperate father, a convulsing boy, and disciples who could not manage a healing that should have been within their reach. Luke places these scenes back to back on purpose, glory and helplessness with no transition to soften the fall.
The father says of his son, 38"he is my only child." It is the third time in three episodes that this word appears in Luke. The widow of Nain's dead son was her only son. Jairus's dying daughter was his only child. Now this father has one son, and he is being torn apart by a spirit that seizes him, convulses him, and makes him foam at the mouth. Luke lets the griefs accumulate, one after another, and lets us see that Jesus meets every one of them.
This father had already tried the disciples. 40"I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not." These are the twelve who, only a chapter earlier, were sent out with authority over all demons and returned successful. Something has failed between that mission and this moment, and Jesus' response shows visible frustration. 41"O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you and bear with you?" It is aimed at the crowd and the father, and at least in part at the very disciples who had come down from a mountain of glory and could not do the ordinary work they had been equipped for.
Jesus does what they could not. 42"Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy, and gave him back to his father." Luke used the same phrase when the widow of Nain's son was raised, handed back to the one who had lost him. 43"all were astonished at the majesty of God." A father who arrived begging leaves with his only child whole.
In the middle of that public astonishment, while everyone else is still marveling, Jesus turns to his disciples with words meant to cut through the noise: let these words sink into your ears, because the Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men. The same crowd celebrating a display of God's power is about to watch that power hand itself over to betrayal and death. Jesus wants this to sink in precisely now, at the height of public acclaim, before the disciples mistake today's glory for the whole story.
They cannot hear it. 45"they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, so that they might not perceive it." Luke says plainly that the understanding was withheld, for reasons the text does not fully explain. The veiling shows up again in this Gospel, and each time the fog lifts on the far side of the resurrection, when the risen Christ opens their eyes at a table in Emmaus. And their response to the confusion is fear. 45"they were afraid to ask him about this saying." A generation Jesus has just called faithless stands too afraid to ask the one question that might have helped.
Where has fear kept you from asking the question you most need answered? Ask it anyway. He has never been offended by a disciple's honest confusion.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a Son who meets us in the gap between our mountaintop moments and our ordinary failures, restoring what we could not restore ourselves. Let your hard words about what following you costs sink into our ears too, even in seasons when everything around us looks like triumph. Where fear has kept us from asking what we most need to know, give us courage to ask. In Jesus' name, amen.