Proper 18 (September 4-10)
Texts: James 2:1-9, 12-17;
Mark 7:24-37; Isaiah 35:4-7a
FAITH AND HEALING: PARTICIPATING IN THE FAITHFULNESS OF JESUS
Is faith a source for healing? On this Sunday in which we incorporate anointing and laying on of hands for healing, I’d like to explore this question with you. How does our faith in Jesus contribute to our healing and our overall well-being?
What the word faith even means has been part of my conversion to a very different sense of the Gospel. Since the Reformation, Protestants mostly talk about faith in the sense of belief. ‘Believe this, this, and this about Jesus.’ I think that the New Testament writers, like John and Paul, mostly are talking about faith as trust in a relationship. Moreover, I’ve come to see that the word for faith could more often be translated as faithfulness. What Paul and the other New Testament writers are talking about, first and foremost, is how Jesus was faithful to God’s intentions for human beings. Jesus was the first person to fully live up to how God intends for us to be human. And he displayed that faithfulness in how he lived and especially in how he died for us on the cross.
A case in point is the first verse of today’s Second Reading. The New Revised Standard Version, the translation we most often use, translates the first verse, “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” Check today’s Sermon Notes to see that translation compared to how I translated it for us: “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really have the faithfulness of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” Instead of wondering if we believe in Jesus, I think that James is asking if we have the faithfulness of Jesus. Here’s another way of asking James’ question: When we show favoritism toward the rich and powerful, are we faithfully following in Jesus’s way of being human, which acts with no favoritism toward others?
But to go deeper on how faith is a source of healing, we need to go to the end of today’s Second Reading, where James says (listening with our ‘Lutheran ears’),
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Because of these verses, Martin Luther called the Letter of James the “straw Gospel.” He thought James was wrong because his hero was St. Paul, whom he said gave us the true Gospel of ‘justification by faith alone.’ Faith alone saves us argued Luther.
James uses a simple example with someone who’s hungry. You can’t say you’re saving that person without feeding them. How can Luther object to that? It even goes against Jesus himself who, as we talked about last week, said things like “I was hungry and you gave me to eat” — as a prophecy of judging the success of our nations, our communities. Matthew 25 seems to go against Luther, too. But let’s try that logic a moment with our focus this morning: illness and healing. In Matthew 25, Jesus says, “I was sick and you took care of me.” There are some Christian denominations today, like the Christian Scientists, who seem to take Luther literally and go by faith alone [fide solo in Latin]. They don’t let themselves be treated by modern medicine. They use only prayer and so-called ‘faith.’ Do we agree with Luther that faith alone saves us? He insisted on faith alone, in calling James the “straw Gospel.” When it comes to faith and healing, the Christian Scientists seem more ‘Lutheran’ than us Lutherans.
This is another part of my conversion to what I think has been for me a better understanding of the Gospel. In the past fifteen years especially, there has been one prominent scholar of St. Paul who has convinced me that Luther was just flat out wrong about the Gospel being centered in Paul’s so-called “justification by faith alone.”1 Luther basically led us on a wild goose chase for 500 years now, when we except his version of Paul’s Gospel. (I’m a Lutheran pastor, but maybe that simply means we keep reforming. We keep striving for a better understanding.) We can’t get into the full story here this morning, but an overview begins with how the justification language appears in only about 10% of Paul’s writings. Why? Because Paul deployed that special language of justification only against a certain false position he was arguing against. (Namely, early Jewish Christians who argued that new Gentile Christians had to convert to Judaism.) We need to know that specific argument to understand what Paul was saying with that justification language. Luther failed to understand this.
So what is Paul’s Gospel all about? Well, there is language which Paul uses which appears well over a hundred times throughout all of Paul’s writings. In Jesus Christ. Paul is incessantly talking to us about living in Jesus Christ. In other words, Paul wasn’t obsessed with being justified by faith in Christ. He was obsessed with participation in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. When we talk about faith, we must always begin, first and foremost, with the faithfulness of Jesus himself — how it is that Jesus was preeminently faith to God in the way he lived as a true human being. Then, when we talk about our faith, our faithfulness, we need to understand it in terms of our living into the faithfulness of Jesus as human beings. We can become new and better human beings because Jesus was, and through the Holy Spirit, we can participate in his faithfulness. In Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ.
So what does it mean to live in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ? Well, obviously, we need to know about Jesus’ life and teachings. There’s a number of things we can talk about. But one of the most important ways is precisely what James is talking about in this morning’s reading. Showing no favoritism. If we are faithful to the faithfulness of Jesus, we learn to live as equals in the sight of God. We live against all the ways in which the world marks some people as superior and some people as inferior. We learn to live to treat every person on this earth as equal brothers and sisters, deserving of respect and compassion.
So now we are ready to see the connection of faith to healing. Well, first of all it looks precisely like Jesus as he healed who in this morning’s Gospel Readings. Gentiles. Non-Jews. He heals the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman “in the region of Tyre,” a Gentile region. Next, Jesus moves to the “region of the Decapolis,” another Gentile region, where he heals a deaf man. In fact, if we move out from just the verses we read this morning, we see that in this entire section of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is continually crossing boundaries between Jew and Gentile regions. I have a mini ‘mapping’ of that in your Sermon Notes. Notice how in the entire middle section of Mark’s Gospel, chapters 4 through 10, Jesus goes back and forth between Jewish and Gentile regions, showing no favoritism. The healing and feeding that he does in one place, he also does in another. For Jesus’s faithfulness, healing and showing no favoritism go together. That’s why in Mark’s Gospel you have the miraculous feeding twice. Once for Jews and once Gentiles. Jesus shows no favoritism.
Next, I want to say that modern medicine gets it. Doesn’t it? It seeks to treat everyone without fear or favor. Our modern medicine isn’t perfect, because we still show partiality in terms of people’s ability to pay for medical treatment. We haven’t yet worked out like many other countries around the world, that medical treatment is a human right. But our doctors and nurses are trained to show no favoritism when they treat the sick. “I was sick and you took care of me” (Matt 25:36). It’s as simple as that. For the most part, out modern medicine follows Jesus in showing no favoritism.
We have this recent emergency of healing called the COVID pandemic, which I believe could have been a much better example of the power of faith as showing no favoritism, except that distorted notions of freedom got in the way. We will talk more about that on Reformation Sunday (Oct 27) when the Gospel Reading is all about freedom and the Second reading is about the faithfulness of Jesus.
I noticed when singing our opening hymn this morning, especially in the third verse, an appropriate transition to our conclusion this morning:
In conflicts that destroy our health
We recognize the world’s disease;
Our common life declares our ills.
Is there no cure, O Christ, for these?2
What I’d like to end with this morning, is that when we talk about Jesus’ faithfulness bringing healing, we are first and foremost about Jesus coming to heal our way of being human. So that we are more and more able to set aside the kind of conflicts we experienced during COVID and instead come together in facing something like a common microbe that’s killing everyone.
This morning, we come together to anoint one another and lay hands on one another, as a sign of this kind of coming together. To participate in the faithfulness of Jesus means bringing the full power of abundant life into play. To participate in the faithfulness of Jesus means that we are a community which shows no favoritism. We are bound to one another in loving service to each other, which among things, brings healing. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 8, 2024
Notes
1. The scholar is Douglas Campbell of Duke Divinity School. His first massive work putting forth this argument was The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (2009, 1248 pages). Recently, he streamlined the argument in a more readable tome, co-authored with Jon DePue, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (2024, 322 pages).
2. “O Christ, the Healer, We Have Come,” verse 3, Text: F. Pratt Green, Hymn #360 in Lutheran Book of Worship (Augsburg Fortress, 1978).
