A mentor of mine used to say, “faith is the opposite of certainty.” It took me a little while to get my around the meaning of this. I guess what he was saying is that there are some things we can never be certain about, things for which there is no indisputable truth, like for example the notion of eternal life, but through faith we do believe in those things. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes it this way, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1 NRSV)
We explored this territory in recent weeks through our series of ‘faith based conversations’. First, we discussed how we might describe God in the twenty-first century. This was in response to the idea that the traditional Christian image of God, as described in the creeds of the church, was perhaps no longer relevant to people living in the twenty-first century. Our discussion revealed that people definitely believed in God, but that the image of God they did believe in was different to the traditional image they had grown up with and/or had been taught to believe in.
This led us quite naturally into our second conversation in the series, which was focussed on the ‘Jesus of history’. A question arose as a consequence of our discussion regarding the image or description of God, suggesting that perhaps Jesus was not the incarnation of God in the world, but was still a revelation of God. This question, or possibility, did not diminish the significance of Jesus in the eyes of those involved in our discussion.
Likewise in the third of our conversations, the ‘sayings of Jesus’, we discussed the possibility that perhaps less than 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels were the original and authentic words of Jesus, with the remainder being the creative work of the gospel writers. Our group were unanimous in their agreement that even if certain sayings in the gospels didn’t originate with Jesus, that doesn’t undermine the message within those sayings, or the truth those sayings point to.
For example, in the gospel reading for this coming Sunday, the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, there is a good argument to suggest that the stories of ‘a girl restored to life and a woman healed’ were created by the gospel writer to suit the occasion or the context of the particular sequence of the gospel narrative in which they appear. If that is true, it doesn’t lessen the significance of the truth those stories both point to, which is of course, the importance of faith, and of trusting in the power of God that is revealed in Jesus.
The woman suffering from chronic menstruation is healed because of her strong belief that she can be healed just by touching the hem of the cloak Jesus is wearing. Jesus is not even an active participant in the woman’s healing. She is healed because she believes in the power that Jesus possesses. Jesus acknowledges this when he says to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5:34 NRSV)
Similarly Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, whose daughter is gravely ill, believes completely that Jesus can make her well. He falls at the feet of Jesus and begs him saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” (Mark 5:22-23 NRSV) And even though Jesus takes the dead girl by the hand and tells her to get up, which she then does, it is actually the faith that Jairus has in in the power of Jesus that enables the girl to be restored to life.
I believe that our faith is informed by our own personal experience of God, and not just by what we may have been taught about God and Jesus at school or church. Perhaps what the author of the Gospel of Mark is describing through these stories are experiences of God that people had through their acquaintance with Jesus?
