Pretty small potatoes compared with all the rest that’s going on in the 9th chapter of Luke – the story about Jesus rebuking the unclean spirit from a child and giving the child back to the parent.
After all, that 9th chapter is chuck full of big and dramatic helpings of potatoes compared to this six and a half-verse narrative (vv. 37 – 43a) seemingly about a distressed parent and a disturbed child: Jesus commissioning the disciples, King Herod beginning his plot against Jesus, the feeding of the five thousand, Peter’s declaration about Jesus’ messiah-ship, Jesus’ foretelling his death and resurrection and declaring that whoever wants to save life has to lose it, the Transfiguration, the puzzlement of the disciples when Jesus tells them of his forthcoming betrayal, Jesus’ teaching about welcoming children in his name being the same as welcoming him, and a Samaritan village refusing to receive Jesus.
All of those big potato items in that single chapter of Luke’s Gospel! And, oh yeah, that small potato story about the concerned parent and the child with convulsions.
It all happened, according to Luke, on the day following the momentous occasion of the Transfiguration, during which Jesus kept company with Moses and Elijah on the top of a mountain and a divine voice again declared that Jesus was God’s own chosen Child, the chosen Child to whom everyone should listen.
Not surprisingly, a huge crowd found their way to Jesus when he came down from the mountain, everyone clamoring for his attention.
The parent in the story is just one among many, evidently, who wants Jesus’ focus. The parent shouts out, probably also wildly waving his arms and hands: “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, my only child.”
That must have caught Jesus’ attention, given the fact that he’d heard similar words about himself just the day before, from a voice that had the ring of divinity, a voice that seemed to be saying that the divine will for God’s community and God’s world rested on this chosen Child.
Jesus must have recognized that there was more at stake than just the health and well being of this child, since this was the parent’s only child. On this child, that is, rested the status and future of this immediate as well as extended family. A demon-filled child would be treated as unclean and, therefore, ostracized by the whole community, prohibited from marrying and producing offspring, which in turn would eventually mean the loss of whatever land and possessions the family currently held. This parent, Jesus recognized, was desperate.
So Jesus invites the parent to describe the child’s condition, which is portrayed as follows: “All of a sudden, without warning, a spirit seizes the child and, all at once the child shrieks and goes into convulsions, foaming at the mouth; the spirit mauls the child unrelentingly.”
The parent adds: “I’ve already asked your disciples to cast out the demon, but they couldn’t do it.”
These were the same disciples that Jesus had commissioned with power and authority at the beginning of the 9th chapter to take control of the demons and to cure diseases and to bring good news. And for a while at least that’s exactly what the disciples did. But evidently that power and authority had dissipated. Jesus looks to them and says, “You faithless and perverse generation” – and then mindful of what awaits him soon in Jerusalem he asks them: “How much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”
Turning to the parent, Jesus beckons the child, even while the demon possesses the child again, causing the child to fall to the ground in convulsions.
Seeing this only child writhing on the ground, Jesus rebukes the unclean spirit, heals the child, and, Luke writes, gives the child back to the parent.
Actually, of course, Jesus is giving that child back to the family, immediate and extended, giving that once devil possessed child back to the community, giving this only and chosen child back to God, now with the freedom to choose to do God’s will.
Luke closes the story by reporting that everyone in that huge crowd was “astounded at the greatness of God.”
The multiple themes included in this small potatoes story turn out to be related to virtually every other part of 9th chapter of Luke. But prominent among them has to be the inability of the disciples to do what Jesus has commissioned and given them the power and authority to do: to cast out demons and cure diseases and convey the good news about the reign of God.
I assume the same commission applies to disciples of Jesus today. So the question, of course, is whether we also are a part of “faithless and perverse generation” and whether, in exasperation, Jesus would still be asking us how much longer does he still have to be with us and bear with us in our impotence, our ineffectiveness, our inability and seeming unwillingness to make something of the authority granted to us by him.
There certainly is no dearth of bodies possessed by demons and unclean spirits, no shortage of bodies in need of healing, no scarcity of bodies waiting to hear some good news.
Not just individual human bodies, but social bodies, economic bodies, and political bodies that are possessed, literally possessed, by demons and unclean spirits. Figuratively, those social, economic, and political bodies, like the child, are convulsing, writhing on the ground, foaming at the mouth.
If anything, we disciples of Jesus today have far greater power and authority than those first disciples, insofar as we find ourselves in democracies in which, supposedly, we the people rule. Why, then, do we not claim not our individual and collective power, our political and social and economic power, but even more the power that God grants us?
Perhaps its because we have lost that sense of purpose of giving back life and freedom and wholeness to demon possessed individuals, and demon possess institutions, and demon possessed social, economic, and political systems.
If that’s the case, then, whether its small potatoes or those that come in large portions, we need to start using our God-given capacities for giving back on all sorts of fronts.
It just could be that, through us, many in that huge crowd will be “astounded at the greatness of God.”
