Punctum Saliens

[ I am working on an essay about Faith and will post it in several sections on my blog. I'm interested in any constructive criticisms you may have that will improve this piece. I will make the final essay available to anyone interested when it is completed. ]

Faith is one of the cornerstones of Christianity but what it means to have faith is open to interpretation. To the one extreme are those who take every precaution this world affords — life, health, disability, and dental insurance; retirement plans; consulting weather forecasts; etc. — and seem to leave little in the hands of faith. To the other extreme are those who avoid all medical care and rely totally and solely on God for healing. So, what is faith? What does it mean to “have” faith? Is there even an objective answer to these questions or is faith completely subjective? To shed some light on the matter of faith, I will look at the miracles which Jesus performed and attempt to find some common threads linking those which Jesus specifically attributes to faith. After establishing what Jesus constitutes as faith, I will look at how faith is portrayed elsewhere in the New Testament and what faith may mean for us today.

Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 relates the story of the centurion who asks Jesus to heal his servant. The two accounts differ somewhat but the essential pieces of the story are that Jesus was asked to heal the servant and the centurion would not let Jesus come into his house but insisted that Jesus had the authority to perform the healing from afar. Being in the Roman army, the centurion claims that he knows something about and appreciates the power that comes with authority. This seems to be what constitutes his faith. It may also have something to do with the fact that the centurion attributed such authority to Jesus but it is not clear whether this was because he knew or believed Jesus to be the Son of God or because he simply recognized a man who possessed authority. In either case, the key seems to be the fact that the centurion knew that Jesus was able to heal his servant and acted on that knowledge by essentially telling Jesus that he had the authority (i.e. the power). The centurion further emphasized Jesus’ authority by not allowing Jesus to physically touch his servant but forced him to delegate, so to speak.

Matthew 8:23-27, Mark 4:36-41, and Luke 8:22-25 contain an example of a lack of faith with some similarities to the centurion story. This is the story of Jesus calming the storm after falling asleep in the boat with the disciples. The disciples had to wake him up to ask him to save them. Jesus calls them “timid” and “men of little faith.” But the reasoning is a bit confused in this story. If the disciples doubted Jesus’ power, his ability to save them, why did they bother asking him? Would they not have called out to some other god or attempt to save themselves? It seems that what the disciples doubted was Jesus’ desire to save them, hence is love for them, because they asked, “Do you not care that we perish?” This story comes after Jesus’ sermon in Matthew but before a similar discourse in Luke where he tells us to not be anxious for our everyday needs such as food, clothing, and by extension, not drowning in a stormy sea. Adding Jesus’ statements there to the equation, it seems that the disciples should have expected to be saved. Jesus, in his sermons, said, “And all these things shall be added to you.” The centurion told Jesus that he could heal the servant with the expectation that it would be done and this is what the disciples did not do.

So, faith, according to Jesus’ working definition, contains an aspect of expectation of the desired result.

Part II