Would my faith be enough to save me?

A Reflection for Friday of the First Week of Advent

Find today’s readings here.

It’s always their faith that does the trick when the sick and the disabled approach Jesus seeking a miraculous cure for what ails them. Woe is me, I think: If I were in their shoes and my miracle cure had to rely on the power of my faith, I would certainly walk away sad and still lame or blind or hard of hearing.

My faith feels a flickering thing. Undependable, lazy, mired in skepticism and superiority. I live in a perpetual “show me” state. It could be a hazard of my profession.

Another professional hazard: I’m a blabbermouth. How a scoop makes my journalist’s heart race. That dopamine rush, being the one to break a story before the other guys. I love to be the shmoe that tells people stuff they’re hearing for the first time. 

But Jesus always admonishes his beneficiaries to keep their good news to themselves. If Jesus told me to keep my miracle cure on the q.t., I’d likely smile and nod, “sure thing, Jesus,” and already be thumbing through a mental rolodex to land on the perfect person to tell first. 

Why was he trying to be this low-key miracle worker? What was he trying to keep undercover? Was he worried about being mobbed by miracle stalkers at the next sermon in Capernaum? Was he afraid of the Sanhedrin, who, let’s face it, did not like people upstaging their work?

Maybe he was just worried that the world was not quite ready to find out who this humble Nazarene really was and the demands of his message. If so, it remains unclear that we’ve evolved enough to hear it any better 2,000 years later.

Was Jesus miffed at these blind and deaf folks, the lepers and the lame that he cured, when he found out that—despite his pretty clear instructions not to—they rushed out and told everyone?

Maybe he just understood human nature, maybe it was a strategy, knowing how impossible it would prove to the formerly-ailed to keep their health and wholeness secret precisely because they had been told not to blab about it.

How many of my sentences begin, “Well, I know I really shouldn’t be saying this, but…” or “Well, I promised X, Y and Z that I would never speak of it, but…”

Blessed are those who have not seen but believe, for sure, but for the early church, and for us chronic cynics and skeptics of the contemporary world, eyewitness testimony makes for a solid grounding in faith. Faith may not require proof, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

I may never have a 100-percent faith, the kind strong enough to cure myself or move even a molehill, but the stories of those first witnesses created a twinkling of hope in a troubled world. What do we have to fear when our Lord and savior is a worker of miracles?

Would I have been among those who believed without seeing, who did not demand a reliable witness? I suspect I would more likely be among the hard cases, maybe even a body who personally witnessed a cure, maybe even been cured myself, and still found ways to rationalize it away or otherwise obliterate the miraculous that had been right before my eyes.

Why not? I do that almost every day.

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