The fundamental fabric of faith

And what can we say about faith? It is not restricted to a gender, to a faith community, to a denomination or even an age group.

There are an abundance of definitions, or explanations of this entity called faith. I like Hebrews 11's working definition: Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. ..."

Confidence in what we hope for ...
Assurance about what we do not see ...

The Message takes this same fundamental set of ideas and describes it this way: The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd. By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see. ...

As Jesus taught nearly daily, and his miraculous healings began to increase more and more often, the numbers of followers increased. The people, young and old, mostly male but increasingly female as well, followed Jesus, creeping down the sides of mountains, resting on large, level areas, forcing their way up the next mountainside as if they were peaceful armies. The people came from Judea, from Jerusalem, as far from the north as the seacoasts of Tyre and Sidon and from the dramatically low areas near the dead sea and the town of Jericho.

The people's interest grew, and suddenly they were trying to touch him, reaching out like lost brethren, wanting to place their fingertips on this wonderfully inticing rabbi. Soon, the power --- amazing healing power --- went out from him, and the sheer numbers of those being healed began to startle everyone. Everyone was being healed.

Soon, it was almost a continual dawn to dusk teaching and healing campaign. Growing weary, Jesus looked for a place to rest. Capernaum, his base of operation in the Galilee area and Peter's hometown, was that place.

Capernaum was a home of both Gentile and Jew. As Jesus arrived there, a highly valued slave of a Roman officer was sick and nearly dead. The officer -- a friend of many Jews in the small town -- had heard of Jesus, and the marvelous works of Jesus, and he sent some Jewish elders of the community to ask Jesus to come to the centurion's home. Amazingly, this Roman officer so loved the Jewish people of Capernaum that he had built a synagogue in the town for them. I have no way of knowing whether the one he built was the one I've walked in in Capernaum, but the town itself wasn't large, so those ruins could well have been from the Capernaum synagogue.

Jesus went with the Jewish leaders, but before they arrived at the Roman's house and with the faith of the officer bubbling like boiling water as Jesus listened to his tale, the power of the Son of Man went out to the slave and though he wasn't face-to-face with the healer, he was completely healed. This was an example of Jesus being able to heal from long distance, as it were. He never touched the slave. He simply healed him.

A few things strike me here:
1) A Gentile shows the strength of faith, and a friend of his was healed.
2) Jesus had no one way of healing. Doing a bit of research about the methods of healing, I found that the most common method used by Jesus was the laying on of hands (12 times), followed by commanding the person to act (8 times), then healing by the faith of the receiver (7 times) and speaking the Word over the person (7 times), then healing by the faith of another (4 times) and the casting out of demons (4 times).
3) The least common method used by Jesus was rebuking the sickness (used once). Not once did Jesus pray to God for someone to be healed. The most common combination of methods used would be the laying on of hands plus speaking the Word over the person (3 times) and laying on of hands plus healing by the faith of the receiver (3 times) and commanding the person to act plus healing by the faith of another (3 times).

So, what can we make of this? I would say that there was no rule book, no medical text, nothing that said one had to act, say, pray, function in a certain way for the healing of deafness, the inability to speak, blindness, the inability to walk or even those who were near death to be healed.

One could make a blanket statement that healing came with the faith of the one asking for the healing, but that wasn't always true. In the story we're working with today, however, I love that after the Centurion tells Jesus he believes the Lord doesn't even have to come to the Centurion's home to produce the healing, that one word from the Lord would be sufficient, Jesus says, "I tell you, I haven't seen faith like this in all Israel."