Essays in faith - Mike Flynn
It is not the quality of our faith but the object of our faith that matters.
In medicine we study the significance of the placebo effect (where you are convinced that a fake treatment is the real thing). While the placebo effect has a significant effect on health responses, placebos won't lower your cholesterol or shrink a tumour. Instead, placebos work on symptoms modulated by the brain, like the perception of pain. As Dr. Kaptchuck of Harvard Medical school says: “Placebos may make you feel better, but they will not cure you.”
We may choose to trust an oncologist’s recommended treatment plan or not. We may trust it to varying degrees or trust it in different ways. These things will affect our quality of life, our compliance with treatment, the quality of our relationships and our sense of well being. What it will not effect is whether the therapy shrinks our tumour or not.
In the stories in Mark of Jesus power we find trust in Jesus expressed in different ways. In Mark 4:35-41 where Jesus calms a storm, there is little expectation that Jesus is able to deal with the threat to his disciplines lives. Instead, he sleeps on a pillow in the keel of the boat, his oblivion likely caused by exhaustion. The disciples wake him to share their anxiety more than to seek his help. His rebuke: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” Their lack of faith does not prevent Jesus exercising his power but instead reveals more of who he is (Psalm 89:9; 107:29), which truly terrifies them.
Likewise in the encounter with Legion in Mark 5:1-20, the impossible cure of the spiritually ruined man (unclean setting (grave yard), spirits, animals (pigs) in an unclean land (the decapolis) amongst unclean peoples (gentiles)) does not depend upon any saving faith. As James would later write: the demons believe but shudder in this story (James 2:19). Here is the Kingdom of God drawing near to natural and spiritual chaos and each time calming the storm.
The story of Jairus, an influential man of the synagogue, the place where Jesus had recently been accused (Mark 3:22-30), falls at the feet of a carpenter from Nazareth to beg that he attend to, literally, his as good as dead daughter.
His faith is forced upon him as desperation. It is expressed as helplessness and even public humiliation? Again what matters is not the quality or reasons for turning to Jesus but that Jairus (and his wife) seek him, trust and obey him.
The story of the woman healed of bleeding suggests that he had suffered not only from the illness but from the cures she had been offered. Indeed, the medicine had been worse than the disease. The style of her faith may be unusual in our eyes (see also healings from Paul’s handkerchief in Acts 19:12 or Peter’s shadow in Acts 5:15) but in the parallel account in Luke - everyone was reaching out to touch Jesus for healing (Luke 6:19). It is the object of her faith, not how she reaches for it that cures her.
The note that Jesus senses power leave him makes the point that it costs him too restore others. His ministry of physical healing is a shadow of the cross that is coming.
Beautifully, Jesus makes a public statement of the healing of the formerly unclean woman. Much as a Levitical priest would declare someone clean - Jesus makes the declaration to restore her physically, socially and psychologically.
1. Against what forces does Jesus contend in 4:35-6:6?
2. What picture of Jesus emerges in each of the five episodes?
3. Who is Jesus in relationship to the kingdom of God?
4. What can be said about faith and ‘unfaith’ in this sequence? (cf 4:40; 5:34, 36; 6:6)
5. Which details in these stories suggest authentic history?
6. What do we learn about the different types of faith that Jesus welcome? (See Mark 4:1-34)