When [Jesus and his disciples] came to the crowd a man approached, knelt before him and said, "Lord, have pity on my son who is an epileptic and is in a wretched state. He has often fallen into the fire and at other times into the water. I bought him to your disciples but they could not heal him."
Jesus replied, "You, faithless and evil people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring him here to me." And Jesus commanded the evil spirit to leave the boy, and the boy was immediately healed.
The disciples then gathered around Jesus and asked him privately. "Why couldn't we drive the spirit?" Jesus said to them, "Because you have little faith. I say to your: if only you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could tell that mountain to move from here to here, and the mountain would obey. Nothing would be impossible to you."
The Word in other words
Thelma is her name, a woman in her forties, married, with two children: a girl and a boy. The boy is a school dropout and a drug user. The girl, the older one, is a third-year student at a local college in Talamban, Cebu City, getting good grades in her studies. However, attending college has always been am uphill climb for the girl, financially. Thelma is employed as a helper in a home for the aged run by the Camillian nuns in Talamban. And her husband? Unemployed. Once, when Thelma turned to him to find a way to support the family, his curt reply was, "Tell Joy to quit school."
But for Thelma, Joy, their daughter was the only hope for them ever to come out of their misery. And so, against all odds, she decided to let Joy continue her schooling She approached individuals and agencies for help. She was about to go to a lending agency when a nurse frequenting a home for the aged suggested that she get counsel from a certain priest in the neighborhood whose counsel the nurse also sought at one time. And so, eventually Thelma found herself face to face with the counselor priest.
Thelma (having told her problem in all its details): Father, I don't know what to do anymore. At night, I stay up awake, trying to figure out what I should do. I reached the point when I told myself, "Bahala na, I will go to the lending institution.' You see, Father, my daughter cannot take the semi-final examination this week if she cannot come up with the needed amount for her tuition fee. These past days, I was not feeling well and so could not report for work, and so a deduction was made on my salary at the latest payday. After providing for our barest needs as a family, what is left of my salary is not even enough to pay for my daughter's tuition fee.
Counselor: I see that your burden is truly heavy; tat you feel depressed is understandable. But you don't have to be carrying your load all by your lonely self. This is what I miss in the way you respond to your problem: You don't go to God for help! Yes, we have a God who is bigger than any of our problems. He is our Father in heaven who loves us so much that He would not want us to get crushed under our loads. All we need to do is call on Him. Nothing is impossible to Him. Believe in Him, trust in Him. Go also to Mary our Mother. At the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee, when the wine had run out, she turned to her Son and said, "They have no win." And Jesus worked his very first recorded miracle: changing water into wine. It would be so easy for Mama Mary to tell Jesus, "Thelma has no money for her daughter's tuition fee."
Thelma was all ears to the counselor, weeping. Then wiping away her tears, she admitted that she had not called on God or the Blessed Mother, "But, hopefully, from now on it's going to be different," she said.
What a world of difference faith makes when it comes alive in the person who has it! Just compare Thelma's way of going about her problems with the father's way of handling his in our gospel today. Thelma worried about her problems in the extreme, spending sleepless nights over them. On the other hand, the father in our gospel had recourse to the disciples of Jesus believing that they could heal his son who was a lunatic. And when they could not, he did not give up but approached Jesus, the best healer of all, and, kneeling down before him, pleaded with him to heal his boy. Seeing his faith, Jesus healed the boy right there and then. In that sense, the father's faith was such that he was able to move his "mountain"- by the power of Jesus, the Son of God.
- Fr. Dong Alpuerto, SVD (USC, Talamban Cebu City)
