Proper 25: Sunday, Oct. 28 Year B – Mark 10:46-52

MacMillan

Faith is often thought of from an intellectual perspective. “I believe in my mind that God exists and that he raised Jesus from the dead.” Certainly, that’s an essential component of faith. Jesus tells us we must love God with all of our minds (Luke 10:27). (As the nerdy, bookish type, I’m grateful for this command.) But if we stop here—on the intellectual assent to Christian teaching—we are liable to reduce ourselves to giant brains, like something out of a 1960s science fiction film.

In Scripture, the concept of faith has a fullness that can’t be reduced to the acceptance of factual information. I’ve been reading through the book of Judges, and the story of Gideon reminds me of the kind of faith God is looking for in His people. Gideon is rather skeptical about God’s call for him to lead a brigade of men to conquer the Midianites. When God calls him to the task, he replies, “But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (Judg. 6:15). And the Lord replies, “But I will be with you” (Judg. 6:16). God chooses the lowest and the weakest—a commonality throughout all of Scripture—because He is looking for a faith that manifests as complete surrender to and trust in Him. And just to make sure Gideon’s troops don’t say, “My own hand has delivered me” (Judg. 7:2), God pares them down from tens of thousands to a mere 300 men! What were they up against? “The Midianites and the Amalekites and all the people of the east lay along the valley as thick as locusts; and their camels were without number, countless as the sand on the seashore” (Judg. 7:12). And the Lord makes true on His promise and grants victory to this (hardly!) army of men.

The God of the Bible desires to be trusted. He wants his people to believe that his character is trustworthy and to cling tenaciously to that truth in a way that opens the door to His miraculous power. When blind Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus, the crowd tries to shush him, but he just gets louder. Bartimaeus trusts in the power of Jesus to heal his disease, and so he cries out fervently. His personal trust in Jesus’ goodness and the availability of His healing grace are a display of the kind of faith God looks for—the kind that manifests in fervent prayer. Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he’d like Him to do, and He answers by healing his blindness. “Go; your faith has made you well.”

So, here’s a question for us to ponder: Does our faith manifest in fervent prayer? Not pious mutterings that don’t anticipate much, but prayer that actually expects the Lord to look upon us and see that we trust Him with our whole being. It seems that his response is likely to be, “What do you want me to do for you?”

– The Rev. Cameron MacMillan is rector of Church of the Good Shepherd in Maitland.