Luke 9:41-43

a. The Answer.

The severe exclamation of Jesus: Faithless and perverse generation, etc., has been applied to the disciples (Meyer); to the scribes (Calvin); to the father (Chrysostom, Grotius, Neander, De Wette); to the people (Olshausen). The father in Mark acknowledges his unbelief; the scribes were completely under the power of this disposition; the people had been shaken by their influence; lastly, the disciples so in Matthew Jesus expressly tells them when the scene was over had been defeated in this case by their want of faith. All these various explanations, therefore, may be maintained. And the expression, γενέα, generation, the contemporary race, is sufficiently wide to comprehend all the persons present. After enjoying fellowship with celestial beings, Jesus suddenly finds Himself in the midst of a world where unbelief prevails in all its various degrees. It is therefore the contrast, not between one man and another, but between this entire humanity alienated from God, in the midst of which He finds Himself, and the inhabitants of heaven whom He has just left, which wrings from Him this mournful exclamation. Διεστραμμένη, perverse, an expression borrowed from Deuteronomy 32:5.

The twice repeated question, how long...? is also explained by the contrast to the preceding scene. It is not an expression of impatience. The scene of the transfiguration has just proved, that if Jesus is still upon the earth, it is by His own free will. The term suffer you implies as much. But He feels Himself a stranger in the midst of this unbelief, and He cannot suppress a sigh for the time when His filial and fraternal heart will be no longer chilled at every moment by exhibitions of feeling opposed to His most cherished aspirations. The holy enjoyment of the night before has, as it were, made Him home-sick. Πρὸς ὑμᾶς, amongst you, in Luke and Mark, expresses a more active relation than μεθ᾿ ὑμῶν, with you, in Matthew.

The command: Bring thy son hither, has something abrupt in it. Jesus seems anxious to shake off the painful feeling which possesses Him; comp. a similar expression, John 11:34.

There is a kind of gradation in the three narratives. Matthew, without mentioning the preceding attack, merely relates the cure; the essential thing for him is the conversation of Jesus with His disciples which followed. In Luke, the narrative of the cure is preceded by a description of the attack. Lastly, Mark, in describing the attack, relates the remarkable conversation which Jesus had with the father of the child. This conversation, which bears the highest marks of authenticity, neither allows us to admit that Mark drew his account from either of the others, or that they had his narrative, or a narrative anything like his, in their possession; how could Luke especially have voluntarily omitted such details?

We shall not analyze here the dialogue in Mark in which Jesus suddenly changes the question, whether He has power to heal, into another, whether His questioner has power to believe; after which, the latter, terrified at the responsibility thrown upon him by this turn being given to the question, invokes with anguish the power of Jesus to help his faith, which appears to him no better than unbelief. Nothing more profound or exquisite has come from the pen of any evangelist. It is the very photography of the human and paternal heart. And we are to suppose that the other evangelists had this masterpiece of Mark's before their eyes, and mutilated it!

We find these two incidents in Luke mentioned also in the raising of the widow of Nain's son: an only son (Luke 9:38): and He gave him to his father (Luke 9:42). “They belong to Luke's manner,” says the critic. But ought not the original and characteristic details with which our Gospel is full to inspire a little more confidence in his narratives?

The conversation which followed this miracle, and which Luke omits, is one of the passages in which the unbelief of the apostles is most severely blamed. This omission does not prove, at any rate, that the sacred writer was animated with that feeling of ill-will towards the Twelve which criticism imputes to him.