What's Faith Got to Do with It?

How faith “enables” God to work miracles

As a child in church, I would puzzle over a curious and recurring phenomenon in the Gospels. Jesus would remark on faith, or the lack of it, as somehow conditioning his performance of signs and wonders

When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”

“Yes, Lord,” they replied.

Then he touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith let it be done to you”; and their sight was restored.  (Matthew 9:28–30).

What is this, I have long wondered, about “according to your faith”? Can’t Jesus do as he pleases?  He stills the storm and raises the dead without anyone nearby apparently believing he can do it.

So how does faith complete the circuit, so to speak? How does lack of faith impede the effectiveness of the magic?

Ah, the magic. There’s the problem.

Faith is not a currency one accumulates and then cashes in for swell prizes. Faith is not a power one acquires and then uses to command one’s personal genie to grant one’s wishes.

Faith and Results

Consider the story of the woman with a hemorrhage:

A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years/ She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.

When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”

“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.

He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (Mark 5:24–34)

Compare this brave woman with the folks in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth:

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith. (Mark 6:1–6)

Jesus worked wonders to point to the Kingdom of Heaven and to illustrate its character. To see where such signs point requires proper interpretive context, both cognitive and volitional. To understand Jesus’s signs, Jesus’ audience has to know enough right things and has to want enough right things for the miracle to land on them correctly.

Only thus will they draw the correct conclusions from what they witness. Having faith is therefore key to the proper interpretation and reception of Jesus’ signs.

Think of the Pharaoh of Moses’ time witnessing Yhwh’s wonders in ancient Egypt. He could recognize easily enough that he and his gods were up against Moses and his God. Instead of drawing the appropriate conclusion from the wonders he witnessed, however—namely, that Yhwh was supreme and that prudence dictated compliance—he merely hated Moses, hated Moses’ people, and hated Moses’ God. A whole country full of signs and wonders just hardened his heart.

The bleeding woman, by contrast, had done everything she was supposed to do to seek healing from Yhwh. She had made full use of the medicine of the time, yet only got worse—and impoverished.

In desperation, she came to the wonderworker of whom she had heard and believed that Yhwh was working through him. In fact, she believed that Yhwh had filled him with such power that she need only touch his clothes to be healed.

The woman’s faith compelled her to go to Jesus in hope. God was there. And God is good. Just make the slightest contact with God, and all will be well.

Frankly, this was magical thinking. The New Testament contains only a couple of instances of God accommodating his work to the default magical mindset of the ancient world: Peter’s shadow or Paul’s handkerchiefs bringing healing (Acts 5:14–16; 19:11–12). Spiritual power suffusing objects (that is, talismans) is certainly not any sort of normal and normative apostolic practice, as it was not for the Lord himself. (Beware modern-day “healers” who trade in “anointed” handkerchiefs, Bibles, and other supposedly blessed technologies….)

Still, when Jesus was teaching Nicodemus about faith, he reminded the eminent rabbi of the extraordinary incident of miraculous healing while Israel was following Moses toward the Promised Land (Numbers 21:4–8; cf. John 3:14). Afflicted by venomous snakes in punishment for their grumbling unbelief, the repentant Israelites yet could be healed merely by looking at a bronze serpent Moses held high on a staff.

Their faith by itself wouldn’t heal them, of course. But faithful obedience would position them—inwardly and outwardly—to be healed by God’s grace.

The faithful woman coming to Jesus had a heart aimed, not at a “healing power” in some abstract sense, but at Yhwh’s capable compassion. This is the very posture of faith. She was not selfishly hoping to manipulate God, but merely begging for contact with even the very periphery of God’s gracious attention.

“Your faith has healed you,” Jesus told her. Your faith got you here. Your faith impelled you to push through a crowd, despite your marginalized state of ritual impurity. Your faith prompted you to do the right thing: reach out to God.

In Nazareth, however, Jesus wasn’t gently touched. Jesus ran into a wall.

Unbelief and Results

The Nazarenes listened to Jesus read Scripture and preach, and they were amazed—but not in a good way. (Remember, “amazement” is not necessarily a positive reaction.)

Jesus’ home folk seemed to take for granted what everyone else thought about them, too: “Can any good thing come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46), Nathanael famously quipped.

This guy can’t be anyone special. He’s worked here. His family’s here. We ourselves aren’t much—and he’s one of us, so he can’t be much, either. And we resent him pretending otherwise, not least because any excellence on his part would challenge our contented mediocrity.

The Nazarenes did observe what he was doing, or at least what he had been reputed to do: “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing?”

They drew, however, exactly the wrong conclusion: they were offended. In the Jewish way of seeing the world, strange powers come from either one or the other of two sources: God or the Devil. And Jesus couldn’t be some super-spiritual rabbi, being merely a Nazarene tradesman. So . . .

Given their lack of faith, therefore, Jesus couldn’t set out signs—signs that would actually work. The Nazarenes were disposed to interpret any such sign exactly wrongly: as diabolical, not divine.

Indeed, the exceptions prove this rule: “He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” Yes, a few desperate Nazarenes were willing to try even this local boy, and that was enough for them to be healed.

Openness and Closedness

God didn’t heal that hemorrhaging woman for a solid dozen years. Why not?

One thinks of Jesus and his disciples encountering a blind man and their asking him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus expands their simplistic binary: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned . . . but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:2–3).

This woman likewise suffered for a terribly long time—only for God to bless her in an unimaginable way. She didn’t previously lack faith and then find it. She did what she was supposed to do—make use of God’s gift of medicine—and persevered until God showed her another way.

God doesn’t always perform as we like it, but as he chooses. We should keep believing when God isn’t acting in ways that make sense to us, just as she did.

God is always up to something good. And this woman’s faith qualified and compelled her to act in a way that has since blessed millions of people around the world who have read her story and have followed her example. 

God couldn’t perform many wonders among the Nazarenes because those signs, so fatally misinterpreted, would merely confirm their sin. Jesus had strong things to say, in fact, about such audiences:“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces” (Matthew 7:6).

Their lack of faith, therefore, didn’t somehow disempower Jesus. Lack of faith disempowered them. Their scornful unbelief made the exercise of Jesus’ power pointless—even counterproductive.

Signs and Wonders Here and Now

Recently I heard a charismatic speaker wonder aloud why signs and wonders proliferate around the world—from Brazil to Nigeria—and yet are seen so little here in North America. Is it because we North American Christians lack faith, so we should drum it up and expect to see miracles?I expect you would agree that the North American church is not a picture of robust Spiritual health. Still, these reflections make me wonder if our lack of faith is the right explanation for the lack of wonderful signs.

Latin American cultures and sub-Saharan African cultures feature the abiding presence of primal religions, or at least of barely baptized versions of animism, polytheism, and the like. There remain in those populations living beliefs in spiritual powers, both positive and negative.

In this interpretive framework, therefore, when Yhwh performs miracles, it is a simple situation. See! The Christian God is here and this is what he does. It was the same in Jesus’ day among those whose worldviews and experiences set them up, so to speak, to draw the correct conclusions from the signs.

Elijah took on the gods at Mount Carmel, and Israel responded appropriately: “When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, ‘Yhwh—he is God! Yhwh—he is God!’” (I Kings 18:39).

Likewise, Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar witnessed what happened to the three young men in the fiery furnace, and he inferred the right conclusion: “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants!” (Daniel 3:28).

What, however, would happen here in Canada or the US today were lots of similar signs and wonders to be performed? Would a Church currently seen as largely moribund, intellectually backward, and socially parasitical then simply be viewed as weird, too? “Now they’re claiming miracles! How pathetic!”

One might wonder, then, about wonders that would prompt secularized North Americans to wonder much more positively about what is going on in those Christian congregations:

• Churches setting up employment bureaus, businesses, public works projects, and networks of private aid (from car repair to home health assistance to companionship for the lonely) to employ people who have been burned by economic change, and especially those rendered homeless.

• Churches pushing back against the idols of our society: minor league sports that dominate family life; endless time wasted online; and selfish focus on the interests of the middle class (let alone the rich) while the poor languish all around us.

• Churches cooperating with each other in local worship and service as friendly congregations truly united as a Spiritual family and notably across racial lines—not just working anonymously, so to speak, through special purpose third parties such as World Vision or Compassion.

• Churches sponsoring public lectures and debates, along with sustained in-house education, to correct the negative cultural assumption that our religion is intellectually contemptible; churches likewise offering useful and provocative Christian thinking on matters of public importance to equip believers to articulate persuasively in their own conversations the Christian view of things.

Wouldn’t such signs of God’s activity be wonder-full?

Do we have the faith—read: faithfulness̛—to work with God and each other to plant some new, intelligible, and impressive signs on the landscape?

Or will we settle, like the Nazarenes, for the comfort of business as usual—and then despise any who disturb our complacency as devilishly annoying?