Today, the Sunday before the beginning of Lent, is traditionally Transfiguration Sunday on the liturgical calendar – an opportunity to remember the story of Jesus transfigured on the mountain, revealing his divine glory to Peter, James, and John and conversing with Moses and Elijah, two of the towering figures of Israel’s story. It’s a reminder of who Jesus is—fully human and fully divine—before the difficult journey he will undertake toward the cross. The Lenten journey invites us to join him on the way and this week, as we begin Lent with Ash Wednesday, we will begin walking with Jesus toward Holy Week and the cross. Indeed, our next series is all about that last week, when Jesus will confront the powers all the way to Calvary.
But as powerful as that Transfiguration text is, I find myself always being drawn to what happens when Jesus comes down the mountain and joins the nine other disciples who were left behind. They didn’t see the vision of Jesus’ glory (even though they had seen him still the wind and the waves, which we talked about last week). Instead, Jesus comes to the bottom of the hill to find them in an argument with some scribes—who were the equivalent of religious lawyers—and what they are arguing about is really what we’ve been talking about throughout this series: what shall we say about the presence of evil and innocent suffering and where is God in the midst of it?
Mark doesn’t tell us about the substance of the argument that the disciples were having with the scribes, but we do know what caused it—the case of a young man possessed by an evil spirit that debilitated him and threatened his life. Here is a case of innocent suffering and a father who is desperate to help his son. The disciples couldn’t cast out the evil spirit, even though in chapter 3 Mark tells us that Jesus had given them authority to do so (3:15). The scribes no doubt mocked their inability to deal with the evil and innocent suffering, much like those philosophers and new atheists we talked about at the beginning of this series—people who see the problem of evil as an impossible chess match that you just can’t win.
That’s when Jesus shows up. Mark says that the whole crowd who saw him “were immediately overcome with awe” which in the Greek is connected to a response to divine revelation. Mark doesn’t detail it for us, but we might assume that when Jesus came down the mountain after the Transfiguration he was still glowing from the glory, the evidence of his power and divinity still reflecting from him, and yet despite this display of power, the response of everyone in the crowd: the scribes, the disciples, and even the father himself—is a practical atheism; a “faithless generation” Jesus calls them. Even though Jesus is among them, reflecting the divine glory, they still don’t believe that Jesus has the power to defeat the most stubborn and destructive of evils.
Throughout this series we’ve been talking about faith as the Christian response to evil and suffering. We looked at the story of Job as a man who despite his intense suffering still held on to his faith in God. We looked at the parable of the wheat and the weeds, remembering that despite the presence of the weeds in the present world we can still have faith that God will one day separate out the evil and get rid of it. Then we talked about the cross and how God deals with evil and suffering not by drawing divine weapons but by Jesus’ suffering, taking on the evil and exhausting it and then ultimately heralding the defeat of evil and death through his resurrection and the promise of a new creation. Last week we were reminded that the whole Bible is the story of how God deals with evil and chaos and we looked forward to that new creation where chaos and evil and death are no more. Throughout Scripture we learn that the best response we can give to the problem of evil is the response of faith in God’s ability to deal with it.
But the other thing we learn is that faith is not a quick fix. Faith doesn’t come easy and it rarely comes all at once. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. Ultimately, dealing with evil and suffering is not a problem that we solve but a journey that we walk together with Christ—the one who himself walked the long road through the suffering of the cross. As our reading from Hebrews says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is about taking steps without always knowing where the road leads in the short term.
Despite the arguments, the disciples’ inability to help, the long years of watching his son deteriorate, the father still wants to believe that Jesus can help him—even if his faith at the moment is very weak. “If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us,” he says to Jesus. Jesus chides his weak faith, “If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes.”
But the man knows he isn’t there yet. He knows he is part of the “faithless generation” and in one of the most honest statements in the whole Bible, the man states where he is in his faith but also where he is not, at least not yet. Mark says that in response to Jesus the man “cried out” the pain of his situation:
“I believe,” he cries to Jesus, “help my unbelief!”
That’s not a platitude you’d find on a get well card. It’s not an aphorism you hear quoted at hospital bedsides or funeral homes. And yet, I would offer that there is no better and more honest prayer that we can pray when confronted with crushing evil and intense suffering in our lives. The problem of theodicy doesn’t leave us with only a choice between practical atheism and blind leap of faith—no, it invites us to turn to Jesus with even the little faith we may have and take just one step forward on a long journey toward Christ-like faith. It’s ok to recognize that we’re not all the way there yet. And so we pray, “Jesus, I believe; please help my unbelief!”
Mark tells us that Jesus healed the man’s son and implies that the evil spirit’s departure left the young man “like a corpse.” Jesus took him by the hand and raised him up, demonstrating again his power over both evil and death—another foreshadowing of the victory of the new creation to come.
But the disciples, watching all of this, can’t quite figure it out. “Why could we not cast it out?” they ask Jesus. Why couldn’t we deal with the evil? Why didn’t we have the power to do so? We might expect Jesus to once again chide them for their own lack of faith, but instead, Jesus simply says to them, “This kind of (evil) can come out only through prayer.” It’s not a technique, in other words, nor is it a quick fix—rather, dealing with evil is the long-haul process of engaging in a life of prayer, walking step by step in faith and faithful relationship to God, the day by day chipping away of unbelief and focusing on the promises of God for us and the whole creation.
One of the ways the early Christians answered the problem of evil is contained in a Latin phrase that many believed was coined by the early Christian bishop and theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo. Augustine’s solution?: solvitur ambulando: “It is solved by walking.”
Actually, the origin of that phrase is much earlier than Augustine, coming from a debate between the ancient philosophers Zeno and Diogenes. Zeno, who was famous for his paradoxes, once claimed that all motion is just an illusion—that every object that appears to be moving is actually always at rest, just in a different time and place. Diogenes humored his friend for a moment and then responded by simply getting up and walking across the room saying only, solvitur ambulando – it is a problem solved by walking!
Interestingly, much of the world thinks about the problem of evil from Zeno’s perspective—that it’s an illusion, a static problem with no possibility of movement toward wholeness and healing. As we said at the beginning of this series, many people believe that even talking about theodicy is a waste of time. You can’t solve it, so why bother?
But what we’ve learned over the last six weeks is that God isn’t inviting us to simply sit by idly and philosophize and theorize about evil. Instead, God invites us to solve the problem by getting up and walking through it by faith, just like Jesus did. We will not always have the answers, but we can have enough faith to keep moving: solvitur ambulando.
Saint Anselm, another early Christian writer, called this “faith seeking understanding.” He didn’t mean we were on a journey from faith to understanding, as though the goal was to replace faith with having all the answers. Many people, including a lot of Christians, try to live this way, believing that the goal of faith is absolute certainty and knowledge. The very definition of faith, however, implies that there is a certain amount of uncertainty—the conviction of things “not seen” and without all the evidence at hand.
And yet, while we don’t get all the way to understanding, the journey of faith does help us to see more and more what God is up to; things we would have missed otherwise. To walk with God in faith is to be drawn, step-by-step, into understanding the ways and promises of God.
Over my nearly 20 years as an ordained pastor, I have walked with many people through some of the most difficult suffering I could never have imagined—people dealing with painful illnesses and terminal diagnoses, people waiting desperately for organ transplants, a family whose teenage son was senselessly murdered in a car jacking, people losing loved ones suddenly to accident or illness. We pastors tend to spend a lot of our time with people in pain.
It took me a long time to understand what it means to walk through that kind of pain. When I was in seminary, I had to do a clinical pastoral rotation at a hospital for a semester. I dreaded this assignment because hospitals always reminded me of my mom’s death from cancer. But it was required for graduation, so I went dutifully to Christ hospital in Cincinnati where I met with the head chaplain, who interviewed me and asked me how I felt about hospitals. I told him my story. He told me, “Well, then, I guess I should assign you to the oncology floor.”
I hated him for it. One day a week for a whole semester, I walked that floor and as I met with people I found myself frustrated by my lack of vocabulary to talk with them about their condition. I felt like I had to say something profound, something to help them feel better, something to “fix” their situation. I visited with people for two weeks in a row and then, when I came back, I learned they had passed away. I stood by while people took their last breaths. I sat in rooms with recently deceased bodies and helped the family call relatives. And through it all, I was completely helpless. My whole life I had believed that God would always supply the quick fix, the miracle, the instant healing.
But as the semester went on, I began to learn that standing in the face of suffering isn’t about the fix—it’s about the willingness to walk beside someone. I soon realized that I didn’t have to say much of anything, just listen, just be with someone. I found moments of grace as those patients taught me what real faith was about—the steady faith that trusts God despite the circumstances. The head chaplain knew that I needed to find faith in places that couldn’t be fixed—places where suffering, evil, and death can only be faced with faith.
Over the years since, one of the things I have noticed is that people who tend to do better, who move more steadily toward health or are even able to face death with dignity and faith, are those who do not rely on the quick fix but who understand that healing and wholeness are a marathon and not a sprint. Oh, they pray for healing and hope for the miracle, but what they really pray for is simply for God to be present each day—to remember, day-by-day, that God is with them. To remind themselves, step-by-step, that God has not put them in this situation, but that God will walk beside them through suffering—suffering that God in Christ experienced for himself. I have witnessed powerful healing and even glorious death in those who realized that whatever it is they are facing is solved not by platitudes or pious prayers, but by walking each day in whatever faith they have.
I have also been with people who were victims of great injustice or had evil done to them—but they chose not to wallow in bitterness and revenge. Instead, they walked the Jesus way—the way of forgiveness and reconciliation. They chose not to continue the cycle of evil, but chose to forgive.
This is the way evil gets defeated little by little—when the faithful people of God continue to keep moving despite the tough road ahead. Evil gets defeated by walking the Jesus road of prayer and forgiveness. We know where that road ends—in resurrection, new creation, the defeat of evil and death—but in the meantime we continue to confront the problem of evil by walking.
How do we keep walking? Well, we know we need to daily engage God in prayer and reading his word—it’s the discipline that keeps us always listening to God and reminds us again and again of what God is up to in the world. But we also need each other to hold us up when the journey becomes difficult. God does not want us to walk alone, but gives us the church, the Body of Christ, to walk alongside us. The church is an outpost of the kingdom of God in the midst of a world occupied by evil, sin, suffering and death. We respond by helping those who are afflicted, by offering forgiveness to those who are broken, by speaking God’s truth as we confront the evil powers of the world.
Who do you know who is need of a partner to walk beside them on the journey of faith? You know, I’m proud that we are a church that takes our role of confronting evil and suffering seriously. Our Stephen Ministers walk beside people who are struggling in a host of ways, and there are many others who do so as well. I visit people in the hospital who are thankful for prayer shawls and visits, people who are homebound who receive phone calls and cards. We are doing a lot and we can certainly do more. The evil in this world can only come out through prayer and through the commitment of the faithful people of God who believe in God’s future—people who keep walking knowing that Jesus is able, and that all things can be done for those who believe.
So, what shall we say about evil, suffering, and death? Solvitur Ambulando. Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief. Help us to see you glory and know that you are able. Amen.
