The cost of faith

I don’t think we talk about Jesus’s miracles enough. Don’t get me wrong, I empathize with the impulse to downplay the supernatural—it’s hard to teach what we can barely comprehend, let alone understand. I’m still a little afraid of believing all the way too. Because if I believe miracles are true, it changes everything.

Faith changes everything.

Jesus’s miracles were an invitation to more abundant life, but most people were too incredulous by this wizard or magician or whatever he was to see the offer at all. The invitation was to dream—to want and ask for more out of this life—to dare to believe we are more than physical bodies, more than our mental chatter, more than the stories we’ve written about ourselves, and more than the stories others write about us.

Doesn’t that sound freeing? To let go of old stories, old patterns, old ways of believing we’re meant to live in this world? What a joyful life that would be. It’s there! It’s set right out before us and yet we so often revert right back to our old ways of living. Why? It’s always fear. Deep down, we’re so afraid of this kind of change.

Think of the faith required to trust in the impossible. Faith makes us into trapeze artists swinging from rung to rung, soaring freely through the sky as we fly towards the next rung—we can only reach it by letting go of the last. Faith dares us to believe there is more joy to experience ahead, but we must let go of the old to move into the new.

Faith costs everything.

Luke chapter 8 tells multiple stories of this life-changing healing, and they’re beautifully woven together as an image of faith in what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven. In one of those stories, a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years pressed her way through a crowd, setting her sights on Jesus—her final hope for living any semblance of a “normal” life. In those 12 years of bleeding, we know from the laws of the Torah that she would have been isolated from community because of her condition. She had spent the last 12 years unwaveringly unclean, and anyone she touched would be contaminated by her impurity. Understandably, Luke tells us she’d spent all of her money trying to find anyone to heal her, but no one could help. This unnamed woman had nothing left to lose, and she dared to dream of a life as a part of society.

In the age of a global pandemic, it doesn’t require much imagination to empathize with her: living indefinitely isolated, untouched by family, feared by community, only ever interacted with as “unclean.” Imagine it’s just you, though, and others are afraid to be near you, to touch you. Imagine it had only to do with your physical body and some inexplicable dysfunction. Imagine the shame of believing for 12 years there is something horribly, terribly wrong with you that makes you unfit to eat, work, worship or even laugh with your family and friends. Imagine the fear that this was somehow a punishment that you deserve. Imagine the pain, the longing—imagine the way this woman sees herself.

Shame is a deep-seated belief that deep down, there is something wrong with me—something that makes me unworthy of love and connection. This woman lived in a culture that told her with no uncertainty that she was, in fact, not worthy of being around those whose bodies did not pose a threat to the purity of the others. In her community it was more important that the others stay clean than that she stay human, and she would likely have been required to live apart from them. Culturally and individually, we can trust that she was living under the weight of thick layers of shame.

This is the point (and it always happens eventually) when the rules are elevated above their intended purpose. These laws were intended for the well-being of all of Israel’s people, to keep them safe and guide them to a life of union with God. But instead of pointing their keepers to the God who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and full of steadfast love[1], the laws became the object of worship themselves. Teachers of the Law became moral authorities, maintaining systems of power and order, rather than shepherds and guides among God’s people. They taught that if people just got it right, they would be free. They chose certainty over faith.

Jesus’s own ministry rubbed against this when Pharisees continually tried to trap him in their arguments—in one story they approached him to ask his perspective on divorce. The Pharisees were caught in a common disagreement between two rabbinical schools of thought, trying to determine who of them was right: those who believed divorce was only lawful in specific circumstances, or those who believed a man could divorce his wife for any reason—and they wanted Jesus to weigh in. Jesus’s reply was pointed directly to their hearts, when he said “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts.”[2] The law, Jesus taught, is a safety net. It’s a response to your inability to soften your heart to Love. The law only exists because of your human weaknesses and fears. The law cannot make you righteous—or right.

Jesus doesn’t seem to find picking apart the nuances and allowances of the laws a worthwhile or enlightening exercise. But the Pharisees, instead of softening their hearts to receive the life-changing, miraculous Love of God in their personal experience, guarded their vulnerabilities with an armor of “rightness,” morality, and power, attempting to see themselves as invulnerable. The leaders of Israel had made themselves gods.

There is no way that the rest of their people would be unaffected by this elevation of themselves. That’s because when a person or a society ignore their own fragility and imperfections as humans, they cannot tolerate the imperfections of others. When someone has attempted to make themselves impenetrable to the pain of life, they fear anyone who reminds them of it. To them the weaknesses of vulnerable, sick, and poor people are disgusting. These self-made gods were the men who would enforce and oversee the ostracization of the vulnerable from their society, holding tight to the illusion of security.

Where faith brings possibility, fear divides.

And just to zoom out here: we all do this. The Pharisees are no more uniquely capable of this selfish use of power than you or I. Everyone who participates in the systems that diminish the most vulnerable are fighting hard not to be the ones on the bottom.

Our unnamed woman is suddenly a lot more brave than we give her credit for. She was not allowed in a crowd like this, but she believed that healing could come—that if she could just make it to Jesus, she’d be healed, and she could belong again. She could be accepted. She made her way from her place among the hidden and forgotten, bore the shame of a society who could not tolerate their own vulnerability—knowing there would be consequences if she were caught violating the law—and carried it right into a space where she had been rejected.

Since she had to hide her presence and her identity, she couldn’t ask for what she needed, she would just have to try to sneak in a little touch—but touching the teacher?! When she was unclean?! How could she…unless she believed that he was a different kind of teacher. How could she defile him…unless she believed that she couldn’t, in fact, make him unclean? She had to believe, deep in her spirit, that she was truly, fully accepted, and that her life was meant to reflect that.

And it worked.

She snuck in, touched his robe, and instantly healed.

Jesus’s response, of course, was not to let her sneak away after she pulled this off. He called her forward, and there, in front of the crowd, she had to explain what she’d done. Ashamed, realizing she’d been caught and she would have to face the consequences, she crumbled to the ground and told her story.

And Jesus calls her Daughter. She is beloved. She is a part of a family once again. She’s accepted.

She belongs.

And here, over 2000 years later, humans are still fighting to put regulations around our faith communities and our belief systems. Demanding that we have the way to God figured out because we know and follow the law (whatever our law may be), we really believe we’ve escaped our own vulnerabilities. We stand strong in our rightness, condemning those who remind us that nothing in this life can shield us from pain and death.

How many Sunday morning services have poor people among their number? How many churches have created a space where a homeless or chronically ill person would consider themselves among their number?

How many people have left communities because they were unwelcome to participate as they are? How many people have come to the Church hoping to find the acceptance that an unclean woman could find in a healing encounter with Jesus, discovering instead that they were isolated from community because of their gender or sexuality?

The burden has been on the outsiders long enough. No one should have to muscle through their own shame to press through a community who has rejected them, just to get to Jesus.

Faith communities can stay comfortable by condemning and keeping at arms’ length those who remind them of their own humanity, but at what cost? Faith. The cost is faith. The cost is Jesus. To cling to old ways of understanding, we sacrifice the possibility of the healing Love of Christ.

Take care, siblings, that you don’t find yourself defending a law at the expense of the acceptance and inclusion of others. If we choose to be right instead of compassionate, we have stopped following Jesus. And if we have stopped following Jesus, surely, we have forgotten our own healing that changes everything.

Let go of old stories, old things that used to fit you—remember your own healing, and see that it changes the way you see the world around you! Faith will open your eyes to what is possible, and Jesus will meet you there. But be prepared, it will cost you everything.

[1] This is a common description of God throughout the Hebrew Bible: Psalm 103:8, Nehemiah 9:31, Exodus 34:6, Numbers 14:18

[2] Matthew 19:8