“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.
The purpose of the miracles goes beyond simply the healing of our physical infirmities. The miracles teach us about our fellowship with God as the true end and meaning of our lives in fellowship with one another. In that sense, the miracles are entirely about our lives in faith. In Mark’s Gospel, the boy is understood to have a dumb spirit which dashes him down, such that he foams and grinds his teeth in convulsions, what we would probably diagnose as an epilectic seizure. His healing is a healing of his spirit by Jesus casting out what he calls a “dumb and deaf spirit.” For as Paul rightly notes “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” but against far deeper forms of evil, “spiritual wickedness in high places,” to be sure, but equally spiritual wickedness in ourselves, not the least of which is our denial of faith, our disbelief about the power and goodness of God.
But faith is not blind nor mindless. It is really the whole attitude and orientation of our lives to God and with God and in fellowship with one another. Faith, as Hebrews beautifully puts it, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This challenges the limited reason of technocratic culture in its crass materialism and naive empiricism. Faith is our openness to what is substantial and eternal, to what underlies and abides, to what gives meaning to the world and our lives, to what is, properly speaking, metaphysical and unseen; in short, the invisible principles of things visible. Faith in this sense is precisely our awareness of what is greater than us upon which all things depend for their being and knowing. Note that in today’s Gospel story, the healing happens sight unseen. In a way, the healing belongs to the resonance of God’s word alive in us about what transcends time and space and which cannot be reduced to the limits of the finite world.
At the risk of seeming flippant, Jesus does not have to make house-calls. The power and wisdom of God cannot be constrained to the finite. The miracles open us out to what God seeks for our humanity. “The evidence of things not seen” means an argument (ελεγχος), a way of reasoning about the larger dimensions of reality. There is more though not less to reality than the evidence of the senses. We deny the agency of our thinking when we forget this.
Our unbelief is our false confidence and over-investment in ourselves which can only result in more fear and judgement. We put our faith in what is provisional, arbitrary, and uncertain by definition only to find ourselves constrained by the overreach of authorities. We render ourselves passive. Faith, however, is an activity of the soul, a form of knowing that seeks a deeper knowing. Fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding is the counter to the passivity that enslaves us to our fears.
“O Lord, I believe, help my unbelief” belongs to that seeking from within the conditions of our current dilemmas. It recognises the struggle yet remains open to God. We may have to go along in order to get along in the never-ending confusions about COVID-19, accepting rules and regulations even if we realize how questionable, arbitrary, limited, mistaken, and even prejudicial, they may be. Such is an awareness of the limitations of the finite and, especially, of human authority. But “taking the shield of faith” in God, in what is eternally substantial and real, and holding to the argument of faith in things not seen which alone makes intelligible the world of things merely seen, gives us strength and hope and compels us to care and compassion. For above all it frees us from ourselves in our fears and worries. Faith frees us to God and that makes all the difference.
The image of the shield of faith recalls us to the Christian thought-world, to its essential imaginary, its way of forming and guiding our lives. The shield image has its cultural counterpart in the famous shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad which depicts the thought-world of the ancient Greeks. The shield depicts the city at war and the city at peace; it is as if the shield embraces both and thus transcends these opposites. It is in that sense a reflective image about our thinking. The shield of faith likewise calls us to a reflection about our communion in God and with one another. It awakens us to God who is, as Luther brilliantly puts it, ein’ feste Burg, a mighty fortress in whom we find our truth and freedom from all and every evil. His hymn (# 405) is a timely meditation upon God and his Word for our times. It draws upon Paul’s images in Ephesians and helps to awaken us to the power and wisdom of God. It challenges our little faith and so belongs to our prayer.
“O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 21, 2021