Help My Unbelief (9:14–29)
Jesus comes down the mountain with Peter, James, and John and finds the rest of his disciples surrounded by a crowd. Among the crowd are scribes arguing with the disciples (9:14). Someone in the crowd explains why: he had brought his son, who has a spirit that renders him mute and throws him into convulsions, and the disciples could not cast it out (9:17–18). Jesus first rebukes them:
“O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me” (9:19).
The rebuke is not only of the scribes or the crowd, but of the disciples too. Earlier in this Gospel, Jesus sent the Twelve out two by two with authority over unclean spirits, and they used it: “they cast out many demons” (6:7, 13). That authority has not been revoked, and so their failure is not a lack of commission but a lapse in the very thing they were once able to do.
The father, questioned about how long the boy has suffered, answers “from childhood.” He then adds: “if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us” (9:22). Jesus repeats the phrase back to him with evident force:
“‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes” (9:23).
The father’s answer is the center of the passage:
“I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24).
He does not resolve the tension before speaking. He states both halves in the same breath and addresses them to Jesus rather than to himself. Jesus does not ask him to settle the matter first. He rebukes the spirit at once, and though the boy goes rigid and looks dead to the onlookers, Jesus takes him by the hand and raises him up (9:25–27).
Afterward, the disciples ask privately why they could not do it, and Jesus tells them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer” (9:28–29). Prayer is precisely what the father offered without knowing he was offering it. His cry was an admission of insufficiency, not a confident request, addressed to the only one who could supply what was missing.
We tend to treat our doubts as disqualifying, as something to resolve in private before we bring a need to God at all. We wait for the feeling of certainty that the mountain gave Peter, James, and John, and we stay quiet at the foot of the mountain because we assume doubt or unbelief has no standing by which to ask for God’s help. The father in this story had no such reservation. He named his unbelief out loud, to Jesus, in the same sentence that also named his faith, and that was enough for Jesus.
Jesus doesn’t demand that we have this all figured out before we come to him. If you’re struggling with doubt or what feels like unbelief, say to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” and that will be enough for him.
Cast into Gehenna (9:42–48)
There is a ravine on the southern edge of Jerusalem called the Valley of the Son of Hinnom. In Hebrew, it is gê ben-hinnōm (גֵּי בֶן־הִנֹּם), often shortened to gê-hinnōm, and carried into Greek as γέεννα. It is a place on the map. Under Ahaz and Manasseh, it was a site of child sacrifice, and Josiah defiled it precisely to end that horror (2 Kgs 23:10). But its lasting meaning was fixed by Jeremiah, who announced what God would do to a people who would not repent:
“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when it will no more be called Topheth, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter; for they will bury in Topheth, because there is no room elsewhere” (Jer 7:32).
Jeremiah’s threat is concrete and historical. The bodies of Judah would be cast into that valley because judgment was coming, and the slaughter would be too great for the ordinary graves. This warning sits in the same chapter as his temple sermon, the very text Jesus takes up when he enters the temple and pronounces its end (Mark 11:17).
So when Jesus warns of being thrown into γέεννα, he is not referring to a metaphysical underworld. He is alluding to Jeremiah’s words (just as he does in the cleaning of the temple) and warning of the same judgment. The parallel he draws makes this plain: the alternative to losing a hand is not afterlife in hell but being cast into the sea with a millstone, a death in this world (9:42). And the description of the place is lifted straight from the prophet who saw Jerusalem’s enemies lying dead outside the walls:
“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched” (Isa 66:24).
Jesus stands where Jeremiah and Isaiah stood. He warns his own generation that the judgment prophesied for a faithless people is coming again, and within a generation, Roman armies would make the warning literal. Josephus wrote of AD 70:
The latter at the outset ordered the bodies to be buried at the public expense, finding the stench intolerable; afterwards, when incapable of continuing this, they flung them from the ramparts into the ravines. When Titus, going his rounds, beheld these valleys choked with dead and the thick matter oozing from under the clammy carcases, he groaned and, raising his hands to heaven, called God to witness that this was not his doing. Such was the situation within the city (Jewish War 5.518-519).
I’ve heard several people say that Jesus spoke more about hell than any other topic (with the implication that we should talk about it too). Not only is that obviously not the case, but I’m not even sure Jesus talked about hell at all. Gehenna is not hell. It’s a place on the map just outside Jerusalem.
Elijah Does Come First (Mar. 2, 2026)
Mark’s Gospel begins with a subtle literary technique. The evangelist states, “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,” then quietly quotes Malachi first: “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way” (Mark 1:2; cf. Mal 3:1). The Elijah question is subtly embedded from the Gospel’s opening line — evident to those with ears to hear, unseen to others.
Now, in Mark 9, as they come down from the mountain where Moses and Elijah had appeared beside their transfigured Lord, the disciples pressed Jesus with a question that had long troubled the scribes: why did they teach that Elijah must come first?
The question was significant. Malachi closes the Old Testament with a promise and a warning. Elijah would return before the great and dreadful day of the Lord to turn the hearts of the people — and if he did not, God would curse the land (Mal 4:5–6). In other words, Elijah was the one who would prevent judgment, acting as the forerunner preparing the people before the decisive moment arrived.
Jesus does not dispute the tradition. He affirms it:
“Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him” (Mark 9:12–13).
The answer is both a confirmation and a devastating redefinition. Yes, Elijah came. But instead of being welcomed as the great restorer, he was rejected and killed. John stepped into the role Malachi announced, and the people’s response was not repentance but violence.
This matters a lot. If Malachi’s Elijah came to prevent destruction and was himself destroyed, then judgment was not avoided — it was confirmed. Israel’s fate was sealed. Israel’s God (in the person of Jesus) would return to his city and his temple and declare their judgment.
Not surprisingly, the forerunner’s rejection foreshadowed the response that would greet the one he announced. The pattern is older than John: God sends His messengers, and they are rejected (Jer 7:25–26; 2 Chr 36:15–16).
But woven into Jesus’s answer about John is a haunting question about himself:
“How is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things?” (Mark 9:12).
The answer is obvious. The suffering of the forerunner and the suffering of the Messiah belong to the same script. The story of Jesus will go the same way as the story of John, and Israel’s rejection of its God, which started at Mount Sinai with the golden calf, would be complete.