Entrusting Ourselves to Christ with Truly Humble Faith: Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost and Seventh Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Galatians 2:16-20; Luke 8:41-56

            It is worth asking what we want to achieve by practicing our faith.  Why do we come to church, pray, fast, give to the needy, forgive our enemies, confess our sins, and otherwise struggle to reorient our lives toward God?  Perhaps we do these things because we want to put God in our debt so that He will do our will.  Maybe we want to become socially respectable, making ourselves look virtuous in our own eyes and in those of our neighbors.  It could also be the case that we want to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors, especially those we do not like, presenting ourselves as more pious and moral than we think they are.  Of course, these are all distortions of true Christian faith, but the real test of our faith is not simply in what we generally want from religion, but especially in how we relate to the Lord when we face deep challenges that break our hearts and threaten to lead us into despair.   

             In today’s gospel reading, Jairus and his wife were put to the ultimate test when the Lord 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.”  Jairus was an upstanding Jewish man who was responsible for the good order of a synagogue.  He was surely respected by his neighbors and thought to be righteous, but we have no idea what Jairus had thought about Christ other than that he knelt before Him and asked Him to come to his house, where his daughter was dying.  After she had died, whatever faith he had was surely stretched to the breaking point.   

             We also do not really know how Jairus and his wife responded to the Lord’s challenge to believe that their daughter would return to life and health.  Nonetheless, they had enough faith to go into their house with the Messiah Who had promised to save their daughter if they believed and did not fear.  Mourning and weeping had already begun, and others laughed at the Savior for saying, “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”   In the midst of their despair, Jairus and his wife somehow found the strength to trust in Christ’s promise, which enabled them to receive a miracle well beyond all expectations.

             Something similar occurred with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.  She had impoverished herself by spending all her money on physicians who could not heal her. There was no medical cure for her condition, which also made her ritually unclean.  She was isolated, poor, and miserable.  Her religious and social standing were completely different from that of Jairus, who was at the center of the Jewish community, for she was very much on the margins.  All that we know about her attitude toward Christ is that she reached out and touched the hem of His garment in the midst of a large crowd.  She probably did not want to draw attention to herself by asking for healing and or to risk rejection from Him, for anyone who touched her would have been considered unclean also.     

             When the woman reached out for the Lord’s garment, she was healed immediately, but Christ knew that someone had touched Him; her secret was out.  Instead of running away in fear or becoming defensive or angry, the woman then “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.”  Then the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”      

             As different as Jairus and this woman are, they have in common that they were both at the end of their rope and tempted to fall into despair.  It did not matter that one was an admired example of religious piety and that the other was an outcast.  Questions of how observant they were of the Jewish law or of what people thought about them had become irrelevant, for they knew no way out of the tragic circumstances they faced.  To their credit, they did not look for scapegoats to blame for their grave problems; neither did they do anything self-destructive.  Instead, they humbly offered the deepest pains of their lives to Christ for healing beyond what they could expect or even understand.  They entrusted their brokenness to the Lord without reservation and, thus, opened themselves to the healing of the human person that He has brought to the world. 

            The woman did not say anything at all until after her healing, which came through the only gesture of faith that she had the strength to make:  reaching out to touch the hem of the Savior’s garment in the middle of a crowd.  She was healed instantly, but spoke only after she had been found out.  She did so with fear and trembling, falling down before the Lord and stating publicly why she had reached out for healing.  That was likely the most difficult and embarrassing moment of her life.  In response, the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”  The Savior did not relate to her as a bundle of impurity, but simply as a beloved child of God who had opened her heart to Him as best she could.   

            The pain felt by Jairus and his wife was in no way lessened by their respectable position among the Jews.    Jairus had asked Christ to come to his house where his daughter was dying, but he and his wife surely struggled to believe that the Lord could actually raise her from the dead.  After He did so, “her parents were amazed; but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.” Their faith, however weak and imperfect, was all that the Savior needed to work an extraordinary miracle.  

 The Lord showed mercy throughout His earthly ministry to suffering people who offered their personal brokenness to Him for healing, regardless of where they stood in the religious and social pecking orders of the day.  He praised the spiritual understanding of a Gentile woman and cast a demon out of her daughter. (Mk 7:24-30) He said that no one in Israel had greater faith than the Roman centurion whose servant He healed. (Lk 7: 1-10) He restored the broken life of St. Photini, the Samaritan woman, by disregarding the prejudices of the time through His shocking conversation with her.  (Jn 4:1-42) The Savior did not treat them according to their social standing or level of religious observance, but according to His love for all the living icons of God.    

           Contrary to those who thought that obeying the Old Testament law would heal their souls, St. Paul taught that we are “not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 2:16) Only our risen Lord has delivered us from the corrosive fear of death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  Even the strictest obedience to religious law could not resurrect Jairus’ daughter or anyone else; neither could it stop the chronic bleeding of the woman or deliver us from slavery to our self-centered desires.  It is only by opening our souls to Christ in brutally honest faith, no matter how weak or imperfect, that we may become participants in his restoration and fulfillment of the human person as a living icon of God.

 We must learn to see that we stand before Him just as did Jairus and the woman with grave, ongoing challenges that no level of religious observance, in and of itself, has the power of heal.  We must die to the pride that would make us think that we will become worthy of God’s favor if we will only accomplish this or that. The point of all our spiritual disciplines is not to attempt to put God in our debt, to achieve any earthly goal, or to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors in any way.    It is, instead, to help us gain the humility to have the faith necessary to entrust our deepest pains and fears to the One Who has conquered even death and Hades.  Acquiring that kind of faith is not easy and surely not a matter of simply going through the motions of religious practice.  It is, instead, a matter of allowing our illusions of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness to be destroyed as we come to see clearly where we stand before the Lord as those with broken hearts who often totter on the brink of despair.  He graciously accepts faith even the size of a mustard seed, such as that of an outcast woman who secretly touches the hem of His garment or of parents who can barely believe that death will not have the last word on their daughter.  If we can acquire the humility to entrust ourselves so fully to Christ, then His words will apply to us also: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”