Faith in Jesus
Mark 10:46-52[1]
We live in a world in which I think faith is something that can be
difficult for many of us. To be sure, there are those among us who have the
ability to maintain their faith no matter what this world throws at them. But
there are others who may have a more difficult time with faith. There may be a
number of reasons for this. Some of us are simply skeptical by nature. When we
see or hear something, we tend to question it. Others of us may have
experienced too much of the selfishness and dishonesty that can reside in the
human heart. That can make it difficult to place our faith in anyone or
anything. Still others may simply not know how to choose from all the competing
voices out there.
But most of us have someone in whom or something in which we place
our faith. We may have friends or family we trust so much that we will tell
them our deepest, darkest secrets. Many of us share our lives with another
human being—something that’s not always easy or fun to do! We take the risk of
faith in those relationships because we are made for companionship. Others
among us may have ideas that we believe in. These ideas represent the best of
what it means to be human, and they give meaning and purpose to the way we
spend our days. Most of us put our faith in something or someone. Without
faith, life can be pretty bleak.
In our Gospel lesson for today, we find one of the encounters in
which Jesus heals a person who is suffering. The interesting thing about these
healings is that when Jesus heals someone, usually with just a simple word, he
insists that it is their own faith
that does it! He says to them, “your faith has made you well.” But the way he puts
it could also be translated, “your faith has saved you.” The faith that healed
them and the faith that saved them was one and the same. I think to some
extent, the reason their faith did “double duty” was because it was faith in
Jesus,
Not everybody put their faith in Jesus, to be sure. The religious
leaders of his day whose self-serving hypocrisy he exposed didn’t. They saw him
for the threat to their position that he was. And the wealthy aristocrats who
were gobbling up all the land into vast estates and enriching themselves at the
expense of the common people didn’t put their faith in Jesus. They heard him
calling them out for their unbridled greed and the injustice it fostered. The
Roman occupation force didn’t put their faith in Jesus. To them he was a mere
man who could easily be crushed by the iron rule of Roman military might.
But the common people flocked to him. I wonder what it was about Jesus
that inspired their faith: a faith that had a healing and saving quality to it.
I wonder what this poor, blind beggar’s faith was in. Perhaps he had faith that “Many are the
afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all” (Ps.
34:19). In that sense, perhaps his faith in Jesus was really faith in God. Did he know enough to understand
that Jesus was the one uniquely chosen by God to bring salvation to Israel, and
through them to all the families of the earth? I doubt it. Did he have the
faith that in Jesus God had definitively entered our experience and had done
all that needed to be done to really and truly redeem us all? I doubt that
too.
So what called forth this man’s faith in Jesus? Well, for one
thing, Jesus didn’t rebuke him and try to silence him like others did. It seems
that Jesus was well known for being “approachable.” So I think he must have put
his faith in Jesus’ reputation for compassion and mercy. I think Jesus’ vision
of the “kingdom of God” must have been a part of it. Jesus proclaimed that
vision in his message of the nearness of God, which meant that the wrongs would
be righted, those who suffered would be comforted, and the oppressed would find
justice. There is a built-in appeal in that message, especially for someone
like this poor blind man. To him, Jesus represented his one chance for new life. I think anyone who puts their faith in
Jesus to that extent cannot help but experience healing and salvation!
I wonder whether there may have been more to it. For one thing,
it’s my impression that most truly “holy” men and women have a certain
spiritual presence to them. When you are with them, you sense the presence of
God in a way you don’t sense at other times. I think Jesus’ own faith in God
must have translated to people experiencing this kind of presence in him. When
you read the Gospels for indications of Jesus’ own faith, you find someone who
was absolutely committed to God’s will and God’s way, one who when people came
to exalt him pointed them back to God, one who so entrusted himself to God that
he was willing to lay down even his very life. I think Jesus’ own faith in God
inspired the faith of the blind man, and it continues to inspire our faith
today.
Like many who
have gone before us, we place our faith in Jesus because of his message of a
world in which God would bring true justice, peace and freedom. We place our
faith in Jesus because he embodied that message through the mercy and compassion
he extended to the least and the last and the left out. But I think even more
so we put our faith in Jesus because his very presence puts us in touch with
the love and the hope and the joy and the life that is at the heart of all
things. We place our faith in Jesus because through him we experience the one
thing that is truly necessary—a genuine encounter with God. Though our world
that can feel very joyless and hopeless, like the blind man on the road to
Jericho we recognize our chance for new life that consists of hope and joy through
faith in Jesus.
[1] ©2018 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan
Brehm on 10/28/2018 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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