1st Reading : Ecclesiasticus 48.1-10
Gospel : Matthew 17.9-23
You faithless and perverse generation (Matt 17.17)
Many of us have come this evening to listen to Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, after evensong, as they speak of the role of harmony, wholeness and hope in the modern world. That being so, it is perhaps a touch ironic that our Gospel reading should feature Jesus, fresh from the dazzling vision of Moses and Elijah at his side on the Mount of Transfiguration, being brought down to earth with a bump as his disciples complain that the real world is not like that shimmering vision. They had laid their hands on an epileptic, and nothing had happened. He was not cured. And now Jesus reacts with impatience to their failure: You faithless lot! How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him here to me. He rebukes the demon, the boy is instantly cured, and the disciples are told that their failure is down to a lack of faith. They didn’t really believe they could do it. My sympathy is with the disciples in this – I expect they said the right words, and wanted the healing to happen, but it just didn’t work, perhaps because, deep down, they didn’t believe that it would.
What more could they have done? At that stage of their discipleship, perhaps there was nothing more they could have done. Jesus could heal the boy because the Spirit of God was dwelling in him, fully and completely. But the momentous events which would release the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, to dwell in the hearts of his disciples had not yet occurred. It was questionable whether the great prophet Elijah had reappeared as a first step, as the Scriptures seemed to imply. In his humanity Jesus probably didn’t know for certain whether his cousin John the Baptist could be held to have fulfilled that prophecy or not. John was after all a prophetic figure, not unlike Elijah, but he had been put to death. Could that be right? Yes, it could, and not least because John’s martyrdom foreshadowed the fate which Jesus could now foresee for himself. The Son of Man – the expression Jesus used to speak of himself – is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised.
As our first reading reminded us, the prophet Elijah was a towering figure, the archetypal figure of prophecy who bravely confronted Ahab and Jezebel, denouncing the worship of Baal which they had encouraged and sponsored, calling down fire from heaven, and being taken up at last by a whirlwind into heaven. It was Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets who had promised that Elijah would return before the great and terrible day of the Lord to turn the hearts
of parents to their children, and the children to their parents, so that God would not come and strike the land with a curse (Malachi 3.5).
Jesus’ words about Elijah coming or having come already are ambiguous, but by the time they were recorded in Matthew’s gospel, the puzzled disciples had come to understand that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist. With the foreshortened vision of the prophets, the disciples – and the gospel writer – probably believed that the end of the world was imminent. That has turned out not to be the case, or not yet, but we do believe that the critical moment in the moral history of the world occurred at Golgotha, the place of a skull, the wretched place where Jesus was crucified. God could use the sacrifice of Jesus’ life to turn the world upside down, paying in his own human death the cost of our sinful behaviour, which cannot now cut us off from eternal life, because death could have no hold over the source of all life, and the bonds of his love give us life in him.
If it all sounds too good to be true, we should take comfort in the thought that it takes only the tiniest grain of faith to move a mountain. The salvation which was wrought for us on the cross of Calvary not only defeated the forces of evil at large in the world, but gave life and strength to the forces of good, which triumphed in Him for ever on that dark day. And we believe that what God did in Jesus is the ultimate source of that harmony and wholeness and hope about which we look forward to hearing more from Rupert and Mark.