In this story we encounter a calamity that human strength has failed to overcome. This often happens to us. What are we to do? “Bring him to Me,” says the Saviour. The Lord shows us the way when it seems that we have exhausted every means and that nothing else can help. The disciples ask why they themselves were unable to cast out the demons. “Because you have little faith,” or “no faith,” as some manuscripts say.

This answer makes us reflect on what our own faith is and how its measure is to be taken—whether it is small or great. Recalling the Saviour's following words, “I tell you, if you had faith even the size of a mustard seed, and if you said to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ it would move,” and seeing that nothing moves at our words, we are often inclined to belittle our faith. But we must not forget the distinctive language of Jesus, full of symbols, hyperbole, and vivid poetic images. In rabbinic literature, teachers capable of interpreting the most difficult passages of Scripture were called “movers of mountains.” When we say that faith works miracles, we must also understand the “miracles” themselves in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel, not the spirit of our sinful desires.

The question of paying the tax has several aspects. On the one hand, there is the purely historical and legal aspect, for which modern exegesis offers several interpretations: it may have been the Temple tax established by the Law of Moses, or it may have been a Roman tax, as many Fathers of the Church believed. On the other hand, it is also a spiritual question. We have a firm conception of justice, of what is right and what is not, but we must consider this from an eschatological perspective. Here, within earthly reality, people's concrete needs are more important.

The Lord also shows us how to find the means to meet those needs: earn them through our own labour. A miracle certainly took place here, but Peter was a fisherman; he had to go and cast his line—that is, do his ordinary work—and only then did the miracle happen.

Many of us remember the once-popular attempts by certain “scholars,” who searched everywhere for traces of visitors from outer space, to interpret Ezekiel's vision in the spirit of their theories. They were very eager to see alien mechanisms in the prophetic images. They even went so far as to “reconstruct” them on the model of modern technology. All this merely reveals the limitations of pseudo-rational thinking, which, when confronted with something new and incomprehensible, seeks to reduce it to elements already familiar. After all, for some reason it became possible to see “space technology” in the Bible only after people themselves had acquired similar devices.

Ezekiel, however, encountered a reality that surpassed his ideas, and it is not even so important to us whether what he describes happened to him while awake or whether he contemplated it with his inner sight in a prophetic vision. What matters more is that his contact with this reality was genuine. Human language simply has no means of describing it precisely, and yet Ezekiel finds the words needed to express the grandeur of an encounter with what surpasses his imagination.