Year 5, Day 156: Mark 9

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Discipleship Focus: Authority, Power

• Authority: Our calling.  This comes from God as king.  Because He calls us as His representatives, He gives us authority to go and do His will.
• Power: This is the natural outcome when we truly get our authority from the king.  When our authority is from God, we are equipped with His power to accomplish His will.  We act on His behalf in a world that He desperately loves.

Once more we see that authority and power run together.  And this is such a good topic to cover on a chapter that immediately follows Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ and the Peter’s rebuke of Jesus’ teaching that He will die.

In this chapter we have two examples of misguided authority and a lack of power.  In the transfiguration, Peter gets all caught up in the moment and flustered.  He wants the moment to last forever.  So he suggests building three tents so that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah can just hang out here forever.  We can’t fault Peter for wanting the moment to last any more than we can fault him for wanting to protect Jesus and thus rebuking His teaching that He will die.  But in the end, it is misguided love.  Peter’s human love for Jesus interferes with God’s love for humanity.  The Father needs Jesus to move on after the transfiguration happened.  Peter’s authority in making his suggestion about the tents comes from himself, not the Father.  Thus he is powerless to do anything about it.

In the following stray we have a man with a demon-possessed son.  The disciples are powerless against it.  Jesus comes in, takes over, and the boy is freed from the possession.  Jesus has power and authority in this situation as well!

The greater question – and the very question that stumps Jesus’ disciples – is why they were powerless.  Jesus’ reply is simple yet multi-layered.  This kind of demon only comes out through prayer.

So what could this mean?  Well, Jesus could be saying that their technique was wrong.  Rather than commanding the spirit out, they should have prayed it out.  More deeply, I believe what Jesus is saying is that their preparation was wrong.  They weren’t prepared to handle the spiritual battle and thus the demon won.  But that leads us to what I think is the deepest explanation.  After all, what is prayer besides communication with the Father?  I believe Jesus is telling the disciples that their authority is not yet coming from the Father and therefore their power was lacking.  As our relationship with the Father grows – as our communication with Him improves and we learn to listen better – our power and authority will grow.

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