Have you ever had someone telling you that if only you had enough faith, your prayers would be answered? When we’re struggling with something, and especially if we struggle for a long time, there is likely to be a good Christian to show up and give us this type of advice: You need to pray harder, you need to really believe in God’s power…and maybe, if we are honest, we have to acknowledge that at some point we have been this “good Christian” to somebody who was struggling. But we know this type of advice does very little to help, right? It only adds guilt to the pain, and even sometimes, desperation. Not only we are going through difficult times, but maybe it’s our fault, and maybe it’s because God has forgotten us.
So what do the Scriptures have to say about this idea that if we really have faith, then God is going to make everything all right for us? Well, we have a strange passage in our Gospel today, don’t we? We have been used to see Jesus praise people’s faith and even sometimes make a connection between their health and their faith. It’s actually what has just happened in our previous chapter when the hemorrhaging woman touches Jesus’s garment and Jesus tells her: “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mark 5:34). And now today, we seem to have the counter example or maybe the exception that proves the rule. Our passage seems to say: If people don’t have faith, then they cannot be healed. Jesus is back in his hometown and Mark tells us that: “Jesus could do no deed of power there (…) and he was amazed at their unbelief“.
So I guess that’s one way we could understand Mark’s Gospel, and that’s probably what happens with the people showing up in our lives telling us that if only we had a little more faith, things would go better for us.
But what is it that’s really going on? As for me, I doubt very much that the people in the Gospel today just need a little more faith in Jesus. If anything, what Mark is telling us is that those people are downright hostile, and that’s another story. Jesus comes back in his hometown, and he goes to the synagogue to teach and at the beginning people are amazed at his wisdom, but then, as it often happens when crowd sees someone brighter than they are, they start resenting him, being jealous and scornful. Jesus’s wisdom is amazing but it also makes them feel less because he was one of them, and now he is teaching them. It may not be obvious to us but when the people say: Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” they are trying to belittle him. What they mean is: He is only a craftsman, not a scholar, not a rabbi, who does he think he is and we don’t know for sure who is his father, or at least if he wasn’t conceived out of wedlock, there have been rumors.
So you see the problem is not so much lack of faith, of course they lack faith. But it’s much bigger than that: This is rejection and hostility. And so of course it hinders Jesus’s power. It does not make Jesus’s power less, but the people are not able to benefit from it. Have you ever tried to help a friend, a child, who does not want to be helped? Someone with addictions, or a mental disease like schizophrenia or depression. You can’t help them because it’s part of their disease to refuse to be helped, to acknowledge they need help. It does not say anything about you as a mother, or as a friend, it’s about them. They don’t let you in and so you cannot help them. I don’t think there is a need to see it’s any different with what Jesus experienced. And if there is a disease whose first symptom is to refuse to be helped, certainly sin is one of them. Actually Jesus identified sin as that thing that makes you say you have no sin (John 9:41) [and therefore you think you have no need to be saved] Some people were hostile to Jesus and he could not help them, some people had “faith”. I doubt most of them suspected Jesus was the son of God but because of their openness and of their willingness to confess there was something was wrong with them, Jesus could help them.
So instead of torturing ourselves (or others) by saying we should or they should “have more faith” to be worthy of God’s help, maybe there are a few questions we could ask that could lead us in the right direction.
1. Do we have any hostility towards God?
And by this, I don’t mean we don’t have faith or we don’t love God. I don’t believe there is anyone here who does not love God. But isn’t it the truth that we have resistances? We love Jesus but some of his teaching is hard to hear and there are passages of the Gospel we’d probably rather skip. We talked about that in Bible study, we said that we don’t like to think that God can be angry with us, because it means we have done something wrong! In Mark’s Gospel, it does not really say what Jesus taught about, only that he preached repentance (and that’s what he sends his disciples to do in this passage) and my guess is that this is why Jesus’s people were so upset with him: How could he say we need to repent, does he think he is so perfect perhaps? A blue collar, and maybe even a bastard!
We can love God and still have resistances to God and the way God wants us to be. Sometimes our diseases, physical and mental, are due to a lack of forgiveness, or to a resistance to acknowledge our pain or trauma, because we want to be strong, or because we want to be in control. We never rest because we don’t love ourselves enough to give ourselves what we need, we are at war within ourselves because we don’t live up to our own expectations and so on.
So instead of telling ourselves, “Why don’t I have more faith?”, maybe a better question would be: How is it that I don’t allow God to touch me / In which ways do I display a lack of openness and therefore hinder God’s power to bring God’s healing (physical and spiritual)?
2nd question we can ask: Is it really about us personally?
What the passage of the Gospel shows us today is that Jesus’s power is hindered because of the hostile people and therefore Jesus cannot do much because of the overall climate. He could not do much for them and he was also prevented to help other people in the area.
It’s true for us as well. When we live in a culture that rejects God, then we also suffer from the consequences of this culture. As Christians we are not protected from the violence in our society, for example. It isn’t about us personally, because we have done something wrong. If our culture rejects God, then it’s harder for us to see God at work, even if we have faith. It’s like when we get cancer. We can get cancer because we have smoked a lot, but also because there is widespread pollution we have nothing to do with. So we need to be aware for ourselves as well as for others that if there is something wrong in someone’s life, it’s not necessarily because they don’t have enough faith personally, maybe it’s the consequence of the wrongdoing of others. We live in a society that more often than not closes its door to God.
3rd question we can ask: Is there something more going on?
More mysteriously, sometimes God does not heal or answers prayer not because of our lack of faith but maybe because we already have faith and therefore we don’t need signs but we need to be led in deeper understanding.
I think that the reading we had from Paul’s letter today is almost worth framing so we don’t forget! Paul had great revelations (the person “caught up in the third heaven” is himself), but he also had great sufferings (he was imprisoned more than once) and he also had sufferings he could not talk about (“a thorn in a flesh” he was embarrassed about) and God did not answer Paul’s prayers! We can assume that it was not because Paul did not have enough faith. The way Paul understands it is that God enabled sufferings in his life so he does not become too elated. It seems that Paul had a lot of self awareness, because boasting certainly this must have been a temptation for him, he did so much for the church and he knew so much about God. Yet he had to suffer like the rest of humankind and also (but that’s another part of his teaching) Paul knew he had to suffer in association with Christ.
In short…We see in the Gospel today that Jesus wanted people’s well being but more than anything he wanted those who were the closest to him to be healthy spiritually, to be dependent on God and humble and follow his own example. Jesus sends the Apostles with no bag, no money and no change of clothes. They don’t gain any privilege, rather they are sent to help others. So next time we see someone struggling, instead of questioning their faith, maybe should take it as a test to ours: How can we manifest our faith by going to them?