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March 29: Have Faith

Last Updated: March 28, 2009

In our session last week, one member asked if “having faith” meant the same thing as “having no questions.” The stories and sayings of Jesus recorded in the first three gospels give us some examples of how Jesus used the words that we have translated as “faith” in three different contexts:

  • Faith in the healing stories
  • Faith in the early teaching in Galilee
  • Faith in his later teaching in Judea

(See a note about translations of the Bible that we use.)

Jesus’s Healing Ministry: Faith as Trust

In Greek, the word that we translate as “faith” is pistis. In addition to occurring in the Bible, the ancient Greeks used it in a variety of ways. It could mean “trust,” “belief,” or — in commercial terms — “credit.”

The gospel writers most often use the Greek word for “faith” (pistis) to describe people who came to Jesus seeking healing. In these stories, Jesus often contrasts the deep trust of these people — very often strangers to him — to the faith he finds in his closest friends and disciples. Most of these stories occur in Galilee, where Jesus and his disciples were from and where they spent much of their time wandering from town to town and preaching in the synagogues. Galilee (today part of Israel) was an area north and east of the official Jewish kingdom of “Judea.” While it had a very large Jewish community, it was occupied by others who the Jews lumped into the large category of “Gentiles”: Syrians, Phoenicians, and others, as well as numerous Roman officials and military troops.

Jesus & The Centurion’s Servant

One example of such a story is Jesus and the Centurion’s Servant: a story told both by gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke. A centurion who has never met Jesus before asks that Jesus come and heal one of his servants.

(You might recognize the Centurion’s words that surprised Jesus.)

Jesus’s Early Teaching: Faith, Anxiety, Priorities

While St. Mark’s gospel focuses on Jesus’s deeds, St. Matthew and St. Luke include long passages recording his early teachings when he spoke to the Jewish people of Galilee: the most famous being The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and The Sermon on the Plain in Luke. As noted above, the Greek word for “faith” (pistis) doesn’t occur at all in these early teachings of Jesus. Instead, Jesus only once mentions a related word: oligopistos or “little faith.” The focus here isn’t on questions or doubt, but on the ways people acted and where they put their focus.

Jesus’s Judean Teaching: Faith & Hypocrisy

In the period leading up to his death, Jesus begins to travel further into Judea, the Jewish kingdom. Here he appears to come into increasing conflict with the official Jewish leaders. As he travels, the stories suggest that he spent more and more time speaking to his inner circle of disciples, preparing them for the resistance and animosity of more legalistic and authoritarian religious leaders who dominated the temple at Jerusalem. St. Matthew records that Jesus was outspoken in calling these religous leaders hypocrites, and encouraged his disciples to develop a trust in God that was larger than simply adhering to the leadership’s rules.

St. Marks gospel is the earliest record of some of these later teachings which most closely associated Jesus’s words about the power of trusting God with the responsibilities that come from trusting God and his frustration with the hypocrisy of the temple’s leaders. (See another translation: NAB, Douay-Rheims.)