NOTES for Mar 9:17-31
In the story of the healing of the epileptic boy, the word "unbelief" is heard twice, so that it becomes a troubling refrain, simply the dominant note of the story. Jesus seems to address these words to everyone, not specifically to the boy's father, but still he is the main person on whom the whole weight of these words falls. And the father humbly acknowledges unbelief in himself, though just think how hard that must have been for him. For us, words about unbelief sound like something ordinary. We have already lived through the postmodern era with Hermann Hesse's words that faith and doubt condition one another like inhaling and exhaling, but then "unbelief" sounded frightening.
The risen Christ "rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart" (Mark 16:14). The Lord Himself equates unbelief with hardness of heart. And it is even worse than hardness of heart, because the apostle Paul asks: "What agreement has Christ with Belial? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever?" (2 Cor 6:15), that is, the faithful and the unfaithful differ as much as Christ and the devil. We must understand this and feel it in order to understand what the boy's father experienced, and what the disciples experienced, since these words were addressed to them too. For we have become used to an educated tolerance of belief, and in recent years in our country people have even begun to respect atheists in a special way, as those who have not joined the majority, the crowd, the mass.
But "if we are faithless, He remains faithful" (2 Tim 2:13). Therefore the healing takes place. These words draw attention to themselves: "And He said to them: this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer." It is unclear what else they could have tried to use to drive it out. After all, Christ did not teach them medicine or magic, and everyone who heard these words understood that they had tried to drive it out by prayer. But He very simply, and in a way that allowed no objection, made them understand that not every prayer can be called prayer.