Day: October 24, 2021

“O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”

Mark alone records this phrase in his Gospel (Mk. 9.24). It arises in the context of the healing of a boy who has what we might call epilepsy and his father’s request to Jesus, “if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus reacts to the conditional, “if you can” with a certain asperity. “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” That is the occasion for this response, “O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” which leads to Jesus rebuking the unclean spirit and thus healing the child.

The story and the phrase go to the issue of faith and to the struggle of faith in all of us. Ours is the culture of little faith. “O ye of little faith” ((Mt. 6.30), Jesus says to us about our fears and worries, our anxieties and our over-carefulness, our being too full of cares about the world. We are caught in the ambiguities and confusions of competing certainties and uncertainties in contemporary culture and especially with respect to faith. What do we believe and how strong are we in our faith? This text, I suggest, speaks to today’s Epistle and Gospel. Paul in this powerful passage from Ephesians bids us “put on the whole armour of God” and “above all, taking the shield of faith.” The Gospel story of the certain nobleman who seeks the healing of his son sick at Capernaum illustrates what “taking the shield of faith” really means.

He has asked that Jesus “come down and heal his son” who is “at the point of death.” Jesus simply says to him, “go thy way,  thy son liveth.” The wonder and the miracle is not simply the healing, a healing at a distance by way of the power of the divine word, but that “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and went his way.” He further learns as he returns that his son was healed “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” In other words, he had faith in the word of Jesus but not according to his own demand that Jesus come down. He does not let his own assumptions get in the way of God. He has faith in the word of Jesus, an insight into what truly abides, in what is truly substantial (υποστασις), as Hebrews defines faith.

This Gospel story of a miracle of healing was, we are told, “the second sign that Jesus did.” The first sign or miracle in John’s Gospel is, most significantly, the story of the turning of the water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. What makes that story so significant is that it signals the true meaning of all of the Gospel miracles, namely, that God seeks our social joys as found in our communion with God and with one another.

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