Ohhh, I feel so ignorant. I actually spent quite a bit of time in my youth attending Catholic and Baptist churches. How did I not learn more about the Gospels?
Here’s one simple thing that raises questions for me. Matthew and Mark tell the story of how Jesus approached a fig tree out of season and then cursed it and it withered because there was no fruit. But isn’t that unreasonable? It feels like Jesus was acting out of anger. Not to say that people don’t get angry, it just doesn’t feel like something a prophet would do: kill a tree for no reason. I’m just a bit lost on what I should be getting out of that story.
And there is something of greater consequence from the Gospels that is resonating with me personally and emotionally. That’s Jesus’s healing and his words about the power of faith in healing.
I have no problem believing that Jesus could make the lame walk and the blind see based on faith. I’m all good on that front. But when I read the stories about Jesus healing people who were possessed by demons it gets personal. From the modern perspective, I’m inclined to believe that many of those people were actually mentally ill. And according to the Gospels, Jesus healed them. And insisted that they were healed by their faith.
This is where my own history with mental health challenges comes into play. On the one hand, you could say that I simply don’t have the faith to allow myself to be healed by God. And that would be true. Because I believe these challenges are a part of the fabric of my life, that they are a part of the lot that God gave me to cope with, and that how I cope with them speaks to my character. But I don’t believe that any amount of faith would cure me. I don’t believe that’s the way mental health challenges work. And because of that I am feeling torn, and a little bit resentful, and a little bit like a failure, and quite a bit sad.
Maybe the lesson is as simple as the fact that the person who brought us this healing has been dead for two thousand years. Maybe the power of faith healing died with him and there’s simply nothing to compare it to in the current age.
But what if there is? What if Jesus’s message to me in 2018 is that faith could set me free? Because if that’s the message then I am seriously falling down on the job. I’m not willing to throw myself on God’s mercy, go off my meds, and give faith the opportunity to heal me. And that makes me feel like a failure. Like I’m hearing Jesus’s message, the message out of the Gospels that speaks to me most personally, and rejecting it. And that’s not a great feeling.
On to Luke.
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