Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 8:41-56
What does it mean to have faith? What do we want from religion? What can we hope for from God? These are the kinds of questions that we tend
to overlook because they threaten to take us out of our comfort zones. Many people do not want to think about “the
big questions” too much because they can easily make us uncomfortable and
require us to change what we believe and how we live. They call us into
question.
In today’s gospel
reading, the faith of Jairus and his wife was put to the ultimate test when
Jesus Christ said of their daughter, “Do not fear; only believe, and she
shall be well…[and] Do not weep; for
she is not dead but sleeping.” We do not
know exactly what Jairus had believed about the Lord other than that he knelt
before Him and asked Him to come to his house, where his daughter was
dying. It was one thing to believe that
this rabbi had the spiritual power to heal the sick, but probably something
quite different to trust that He could raise the dead.
The
gospel passage does not quote any of Jairus’ words. It does not tell us explicitly how he and his
wife responded to the Lord’s challenge
to believe that she would be returned to life and health. These events probably rocked them to the
depths of their souls. Perhaps they
could not find the words to respond to what was going on in that moment. But they had enough faith to go into their
house with the One Who had promised to save their daughter if they believed and
did not fear. Even though the mourning
and weeping had already begun, they offered Him the faith of which they were
capable at that moment. Their trust enabled
them to receive a miracle well beyond all reasonable expectations.
The same is true of the woman
who had been bleeding for twelve years. She had spent all her money paying physicians
who could not help her. Her malady was medically incurable at that time, and
also made her ritually and socially unclean.
The passage does not tell us just what she believed about Christ, but only
that she reached out and touched the hem of His garment in a crowd so large
that she hoped she could do so without drawing attention to herself. She must have had some level of faith that even
that small gesture would open her to receive healing through Him. That is what happened, but when the Lord announced
that someone had touched Him, she knew that her secret was out. That is when she “came trembling, and
falling down before Him declared in the presence of all the people why she had
touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed.” When she openly confessed what Christ had done
for her, He said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
Both the bleeding woman
and Jairus faced circumstances so dark that they could not reasonably expect to
be delivered from them. In the usual
course of events, incurable chronic disease and death cannot be overcome. That these challenges were so profound is
reflected by the fact that these characters speak so little in this passage.
They did not use words to state clearly what they believed about Christ. The woman did not say anything until after
she had been healed, which came through the only gesture of faith that she had
the strength to make: secretly touching
the hem of the Savior’s garment. And
once she was healed, she spoke only after she had been found out. Though Jairus had asked Christ to come to his
house where his daughter was dying, our gospel passage does not record him
asking for her to be raised after her death. He and his wife probably struggled in stunned
silence to believe that the Lord could fulfill such an astounding promise.
It is often difficult,
if not impossible, to put into words our deepest fears, hopes, and loves. There are so many dimensions of life that are
too profound for precise definitions. All
the more is that the case for God, the infinitely holy “I AM” Who is beyond our
knowledge and control. Orthodox theology
teaches that we are completely ignorant of God’s essence, but know God as He
has revealed Himself to us in His divine energies. While we may use words to make true
statements about God, genuine spiritual knowledge requires participation in His
life. That participation requires faith
in the sense of opening and offering ourselves to Him from the depths of our
souls. That kind of participation transforms us into “partakers of the divine
nature” by grace as we become more like God in holiness.
In our epistle reading,
Saint Paul described this fulfillment of the human person as becoming “a new
creation.” He opposed the Judaizers who
wanted Gentile converts to be circumcised in obedience to the Old Testament law
before becoming Christians. As a former
Pharisee and expert in Judaism, he knew that such practices do not conquer
death or release people from bondage to sin.
But through His Cross, the Savior has done precisely that and made it
possible for us to participate personally in His eternal life. Not a matter of legal observance or having certain
ideas or feelings about God, the healing of our souls comes through faith. That is how we pursue the journey to become
more fully human in God’s image and likeness.
We may be tempted to
think that faith is something we have already mastered, for hopefully we
believe the words we say in the Nicene Creed and in the prayers and worship of the
Church. At some level, we have entrusted ourselves to
Christ. But the
goal of becoming “a new creation” is not one that we may ever say we have
accomplished or completed. To become
like God in holiness is an eternal, infinite journey. It requires, as St. Paul writes, to embrace a
crucifixion of oneself in relation to the world. That means dying to the corrupting effects of
sin in order to enter more fully into the new life of the risen Lord. Not much spiritual insight is required to see
that we all have a long way to go on that journey.
Jairus and the bleeding
woman remind us by their examples that we need a faith much deeper than words,
ideas, or feelings. To become “a new
creation” in Christ, we must reach out to Him as best we can for the healing of
our chronic and seemingly incurable diseases of soul and body. Even when all seems lost for us or our loved
ones, we must struggle to obey the command:
“Do not fear; only believe.”
We will probably lack the works to describe
how the Lord is present and what He is doing in our darkest moments. Faith does not require complete rational
comprehension; if it did, we would not call it faith. At the end of the day, faith is about uniting
ourselves to Christ in His great Self-Offering on the cross. He did not conquer sin and death with ideas
or words, but by offering up Himself purely out of love. If we are becoming “a new creation” in Him,
then our lives must be characterized by sacrificial, trusting obedience from
the depths of our souls, especially when despair seems to make much more sense
than hope in the world as we know it. The
clearer our spiritual vision becomes, the more we will see that faith requires
something much deeper than knowing the right words or following the rules. It requires the humble trust of those who desperately
want health instead of sickness, who want life instead of death. The Lord accepted the secret touch of the
bleeding woman and the stunned obedience of Jairus. And He will accept our faith also, if we
simply do what we can to entrust our lives to Him from the depths of our souls
and leave the rest in His hands.
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