E3 Church Services

The fifth and sixth chapters of the Gospel of Mark contain a very interesting sequence of stories. In the first, Jesus shows himself to be a Messiah who is willing to get dirty – really dirty. Read the story yourself, but note how Jesus makes absolutely no effort to maintain the Jewish purity rituals he would have been taught as a child. Jesus lands his boat in a gentile land, and disembarks either in or very near a graveyard. Upon landing, he is immediately greeted by a naked, bleeding, demon possessed gentile who lives among the graves adjacent to a herd of pigs. For a Jew, it doesn’t get any more unclean than that! But Jesus doesn’t retreat from all that impurity – he touches and heals perhaps the most ritually unclean person he ever met.

The ritual purity theme continues through the next two stories where Jesus heals a woman with a bleeding disorder and raises a 12-year-old girl from the dead. Once again Jesus doesn’t shy away from ritual impurity. Jesus, it seems, is willing to embrace any person regardless of their filth. Jesus is never concerned about being contaminated by someone else’s sin. It would appear, in fact, that he intends to infect others with his holiness.

You can’t get away from the purity theme in Mark chapter five, but what really strikes me is the role of faith in the healing process. We all know that healing comes from God. Healing is an evidence of the Kingdom of God come. Now, this is not to say that a lack of healing is necessarily evidence of its absence – though it might be. Jesus possessed the power to heal any and all persons in need – yet he didn’t heal them all. He healed those with the faith to receive God’s power.

Jairus demonstrated great faith when he threw himself at Jesus’ feet and begged the mysterious rabbi to heal his ailing daughter. Being president of his synagogue, he was a big fish in his little pond, and seeking the help of this controversial would-be messiah put him at odds with the Pharisees, Sadducees and eventually Rome. Faith always requires risk and it always requires action. Jairus’ faith served as the conduit for God’s healing power.

Sandwiched between the two-halves of the story of Jairus and his daughter, we find the story of the woman with the bleeding disorder. Like Jairus, the woman demonstrated great faith in seeking Jesus’ healing power. Though the press of the crowd might have provided some level of anonymity, she risked swift and terrible retribution for daring to touch the garment of this wandering holy-man. In doing so, she – in her perpetually unclean condition – risked making her healer ritually (and socially) unclean as well. I suspect Jesus called her out for this very reason: not to chastise her, which he obviously did not, but to absolve her of any wrong doing if anyone would later accuse her of defiling him. Being always unclean, the woman’s condition would have been well known in her village, and by pronouncing her healed, Jesus rewards her faith with social healing as well as physical. “Your faith has healed you,” Jesus said. Her faith had healed her.

But isn’t God the one who heals? Isn’t God the one with the power to overcome physical, spiritual, emotional and social dysfunction through divine intervention? Well, yes. So, how can Jesus say, “Your faith has healed you”? Faith, it would seem is the conduit through which God’s power flows. Without God’s power, healing is impossible, but apparently, God’s power can only be accessed through faith. Think of it this way… God’s power is like electricity, and your faith is like a lamp. The lamp won’t work without electricity, but neither can electricity illuminate the room without the lamp (actually, it can, but the room will likely burn down in the process – see the OT for negative examples of this metaphor!). Both must be present and connected or the room will remain dark.

The symbiotic relationship of faith and power is important for many reasons. It explains why people of faith don’t always get what they pray for (the biblical examples of this are too numerous to mention, but if you’re inclined to blame a person’s lack of faith for God’s failure to grant a persons’ request, I give you Gethsemane). It also explains why we so seldom access God’s power. Sometimes, God doesn’t make his power available to us, and there’s nothing we can do about that. But at other times, Jesus suggests that our lack of faith is to blame. And this is the point of Mark 5 and 6. After the raising of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus returned to Nazareth where he only able to perform a few miracles because of the people’s lack of faith.

The Spirit of God comes and goes in ways we cannot fully understand or predict. We cannot make God show up and reveal his power whenever we like – despite the claims of some. What we can do, is access the power when it comes, but we can only access God’s power through faith. Faith requires risk and it requires action, but it is born in the space between what we know and what we don’t. The faith displayed in Mark chapter 5 was nurtured in the absence of opportunity. It was cultivated before Jesus showed up and made God’s power accessible. Faith precedes opportunity, or the opportunity is lost.

If we want to access God’s power, we have to cultivate faith in the absence of opportunity. We must strive to nurture trust in God’s character even when God can’t be found. We have to train in advance of the race. Do you believe God? Do you trust in his character? Do you make a point of remembering, memorializing where he has shown up in the past? Doing so will help sustain you until he shows himself again. Doing so will keep the lamp ready for when the power returns. Faith is the conduit through which God’s power flows. Keep the conduit clear and wait for the power. God will show himself (though he might do so in ways you neither want nor anticipate – see Jairus in Mark 5). Be ready. Have faith.