Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
This Kind Goes Out by Prayer
Matthew 17:14-21
14 When they came to the multitude, a man came to him, kneeling down to him and saying, · WEB
At the foot of the mountain a father is waiting whom the nine could not help, and the failure is explained in one word.
When they came to the multitude, a man came to him, kneeling down to him Matthew 17:14.
The descent from the mountain lands immediately in a crowd and a failure. The contrast is not accidental — light on a summit, and at the bottom nine disciples who have been unable to do what they were commissioned to do Matthew 10:1.
The scene is told at length in the earlier account Mark 9:1–29, with the father's own honest prayer about his unbelief. Matthew keeps it short and keeps the father's two sentences: "Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is epileptic and suffers grievously; for he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, and they could not cure him" Matthew 17:15–16.
The boy's condition is described by what it does to him. The father has watched his child pulled out of a fire and out of water, which tells you what his nights are like, and the last thing he says is that he tried the disciples first.
"Faithless and perverse generation! How long will I be with you? How long will I bear with you?" Matthew 17:17. The exclamation is the only weary sentence he speaks in the Gospel, and its target is a generation rather than the father, who is not rebuked at any point. "Bring him here to me" follows in the same breath, and the cure takes one verse.
"Why weren't we able to cast it out?" Matthew 17:19. The question is asked privately, and it is the right question. The answer is one word: "Because of your unbelief" Matthew 17:20.
That needs care, because it is not a rule that failure always means someone did not believe hard enough. It is a diagnosis of these men on this day, delivered by the one person able to make it. What they had was authority given to them and success behind them, and somewhere between the commissioning and this crowd the thing had become a procedure.
"If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move" Matthew 17:20. The measure is the smallest seed a farmer handled Matthew 13:31–32, which is the encouragement hidden inside the rebuke — the deficiency was not of quantity. A very small live thing outperforms a large dead one.
"But this kind doesn't go out except by prayer and fasting" Matthew 17:21. And the remedy named is not more effort but dependence. Prayer and fasting are what a person does when they have stopped relying on their own competence, which is exactly what nine men with a track record had quietly begun to do.
settled What this mark means