When people today speak of “faith,” what do they mean?
In print, and online, “faith” is often synonymous with “religion.” So we can say there are, in this country, members of many different religions, which is the same as saying many different faiths. If there is a difference, it is the distinction between religious institutions and religious systems of thought. Christianity, represented by various Church institutions, is a “religion,” whereas the Christian “faith” is a set of doctrines or principles or beliefs.
And then there is another use of “faith” that is supposedly not religious: the idea of “having faith” in something invisible or something unproven or otherwise uncertain. So people might have “faith” in extraterrestrial life as a matter of conviction, even if it has not been proved. This is where “faith” is synonymous with “belief,” by which we mean conviction without knowledge. This is where people speak of “faith in” God in the sense of believing that God exists even if God is not visible and obvious in normal ways. This is very near the definition of faith we get in the famous “faith chapter” of Hebrews 11: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
One of our most common mistakes in reading the Bible is thinking that words always mean the same thing. Words do not always mean the same thing in English—as we have just seen with the English word “faith”—and they don’t always mean the same thing in Greek or Hebrew. When Jesus tells the woman in Mark’s gospel, “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” what does he mean by “faith”?
I hope it is obvious that he does not mean “your faith” in the sense of “your religion.” Though if it is not obvious, let me make it so by suggesting that this meaning of “faith” simply did not exist in the first century, nor did our modern concept of “religion.” There were, in first-century Roman culture, many gods and goddesses and divinities and philosophies. More importantly, there were many different forms of cult, of prayer, and of sacrifice. Those were matters of religion, as was everything else, because “religion” was the general sense of duty and obligation to the common good, inclusive of the self, the state, and the divine. In any case, when Jesus commends the woman’s faith, he does not commend her “religion” in the way that word was used either then or now.
Does he, then, commend her doctrine? That, again, seems like a stretch. Even if we wanted to say that the woman believed something specific about Jesus—that he was the Messiah, for example—there is no indication of such belief in the text. All she says is, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” So we might say that the woman believes this one specific doctrine: that Jesus will make her well. Perhaps that is what he means, but if this specific doctrine constitutes the woman’s faith, it is difficult to see how it made her well. If the thing that made her well was the belief that to be made well, she needed to touch Jesus’ robe, then we have a contradiction, because in fact the belief made her well, not the touch, and so the belief itself turns out to be false. Jesus says that it is her faith, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Jesus to commend her faith if her faith is in fact false.
What in the end is the woman’s “faith”? It’s not her religion; it’s not her doctrine. Is it her blind conviction? Her assurance of something hoped for? We face here the same problem as that of more general doctrine. Jesus could have told her something like this: “Your belief was well founded. You have done well to touch my clothes, because you were right to believe that all you needed to do was touch them.” But that is not what he tells her at all. It was not the touch that healed her, but her faith. What on earth does Jesus mean?
Her faith made her well. Her faith in Jesus—that is, her trust in Jesus. Her personal bonding with Jesus. She was made well not because she held correct ideas in her head, or because she belonged to the right social group: she was made well because she had a commitment to Jesus.
What do we mean by that? We do, sometimes, use the word “faith” in this way in English. We speak of having “faith in” another person, which means that in some sense we have put our fate in their hands—it means that we relinquish control over certain things to the other person. And this is exactly what it means to have the faith of the bleeding woman in Mark. What matters is not in the first instance faith in the sense of doctrine or belief, or faith in the sense of religious identity, but the kind of personal trust that requires me to submit my own well-being and identity to someone else. We may also have beliefs about what such faith will accomplish—as the bleeding woman did, and as all Christians do—but it’s important to understand that foundational first step for what it is.
As the story in Mark continues, we see Jesus in the house of the dead girl, Jairus’s daughter, and as the people lose hope, Jesus tells them, “Do not fear, only believe.” That is, trust; have faith. Note the lack of specificity. He does not say, believe that something is going to happen; he does not say, believe in this doctrine. He says, rather, trust in me. Place your fears and your hopes and your desires in my hands, and see what happens. And then he gives them a reason to have such faith by raising the girl to life.
We put our faith in Jesus, we put our lives in his hands, because he is the one who brings us from death to life. Earlier, we heard a passage from the Book of Wisdom—in it there’s a strict division between incorruptible life, the province of the righteous, and death, the province of the devil and his party. What we see in the New Testament is that Jesus is the ultimate righteous man whose lot is immortality. It is only through his power that we, like Jairus’s daughter, can defeat the power of death. Ideas and convictions will not save us. What saves us is our bond of faith with Jesus—the bond that is mystically accomplished and represented in baptism.
There is, however, a function for doctrine, and for belief—for those other kinds of “faith.” Their function is to keep and sustain that bond with Jesus when we would otherwise tend to unravel or undo it. We just celebrated that great midsummer feast, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul. Many of the prayers for that feast focus on the Church remaining faithful to the precepts “of those through whom she received the beginning of religion.” It is our faith in Jesus that saves us, but the apostolic doctrine and tradition is there to ensure us that the Jesus we trust, the Jesus we follow, is the Jesus of the apostles and not the Jesus of our private hopes and dreams. Our faith, in other words, has a concrete form in the life of the Church; our faith is, in the ancient terms, necessarily religious. Jesus, when he calls the healed woman back from the crowd, denies our right to personal and private faith. He calls it to deeper commitment and deeper love in the communion of his body.
What kind of faith do we have? God give us the kind of faith that heals us and saves us, so that Jesus can unite us with his body and bring us with him from death to life.