Deepen our faithfulness to you
As I was reading this week’s Collect, for The Second Sunday after Trinity, I immediately thought of those words from St Mark’s Gospel, “I believe, help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Jesus’ disciples had tried unsuccessfully to heal a boy with a spirit that put him in harms way and prevented him speaking. When the boys father spoke to Jesus he was told that, “All things can be done for the one who believes”. To which the father immediately responded with, “I believe, help my unbelief!”
You can almost imagine the disciples responding in a similar way when Jesus tells them later, after they asked him why they couldn’t cast the spirit out, “This kind can come out only through prayer.” (Read the full account in Mark 9:14-29.) Presumably prayer was always a part of what happened during the healing process; so perhaps Jesus was hinting about a specially focussed kind of prayer requiring even more spiritual effort. This incident happened soon after the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13), following it immediately in Mark’s Gospel. Perhaps we’re to assume that Jesus’ time on the mountain was, for him, a time of particularly intense prayer, giving him on his return particularly heightened power.
It seems to me, though, that there was a considerable amount of belief being shown that particular day. The boys father believed enough in all that he’d heard about what was happening around this charismatic figure of Jesus to bring his ill son to him. He believed in Jesus’ friends enough to let them try to heal his son when he found them before finding Jesus himself. The disciples believed enough to try. All of this would have shown already a tremendous amount of faith. But it appears, not quite enough.
This prompts a couple of thoughts in my mind:
- I can remember all too well the pain I felt when some well-meaning friends told me that I wasn’t healed from my particular health issues because I didn’t believe enough. They equated, as did I at the time, “healing” with “cure”. I believe, now, that healing can mean cure, but doesn’t necessarily have to. And I believe, too, that I have received quite a lot of healing in my life in the last few years, despite the fact that I’m certainly not cured.
- We often suppose that someone’s early years as a Christian pilgrim are the most difficult, and that as we mature and grow in faith things will get easier. But the opposite often turns out to be the case. And just as we’re learning to walk alongside Jesus, we’re given harder tasks, demanding more courage and spiritual energy.
We will, throughout our Christian pilgrimage, experience challenges to our faith and beliefs. Through those challenges there is huge potential for growth. 
When they come our way, let us join in prayer with the father in this story, “I believe, help my unbelief!” Let us pray that our faith in God, and his Son Jesus Christ, will be deepened and encouraged to grow. And then let us take the next step on our own pilgrimages of faith.
Faithful Creator,
whose mercy never fails:
deepen our faithfulness to you
and to your living Word,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Additional Collect for The Second Sunday after Trinity
is Copyright © The Archbishops Council
About Paul Sibley
Andrew Gosden (now 19) has been missing from his Doncaster home since 14 September 2007. The search continues.
Georgiana on 
Paul, a wise observation, that as we go on further in our walk, our faith is challenged with greater aspects to life. To keep faith energized and current to our situations can be hard work. How we long for the early days when we had that first love of conversion and the youth of faith that like a small child, knew not of the bigger things to come! To capture the joy and fruit of faith is something the Holy Sprit encourages us to do even though it may prove elusive at times! Blessings!
Thank you Steve. I wonder, sometimes, if I would’ve had the courage to make those first steps on this wonderful pilgrimage if I’d known, then, where the journey would lead. Perhaps it’s just as well that we’re only granted a vision of the area immediately around us, and not the whole journey.
My trip to Bolivia this year has been like that. I’ve been really challenged and often frustrated by some of the things we’ve faced since moving here. I think maybe the past 18 years of my walk with Christ have prepared me for it. Not that being a follower of Jesus has ever been easy (or was ever meant to!) but God is so kind and wise, as He gives us just what we need to grow and prepares us for the next challenge (and, thankfully, the next bit of strengthening… the Bible does say we go from glory to glory… I think the spaces between “glory”s in that phrase is where all the hard stuff is, the path that leads from one time of refreshing to the next!
Thanks for those thoughts Tom. I hadn’t thought of that phrase like that before; but I’m sure you’re right, and much of the hard work of discipleship comes within that space of being transformed from one degree of glory to another. I think I’m probably in one of those spaces myself now. Things are having to change, and it’s quite exciting wondering about where they’ll go — hard work, but nevertheless exciting. It’s the letting go of the old things before picking up new that is scary. But we have to let go to free ourselves to pick up again.
“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
(2 Corinthians 3:18)
I do hope and pray that your next “glory” is all that you’d want it to be. The journey can be scary, but as you say, God is so kind and wise, we can rest assured that we’ll be led the right way if we’re listening and prepared.