Christianity is a faith religion. No other religion in the world makes so much of faith. “Abraham believed God,” we read concerning the father of believers, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). “Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid,” proclaimed Isaiah (Is.12:2). “Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me,” stated Jesus (John 14:1). “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Jesus said to the woman of our Gospel reading for this Sunday. When hearing about the death of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus told him, “Do not fear, only believe.”

Many of us who profess to follow Christ have never really grasped this, the prime essential of the Gospel. We press upon Jesus as did the crowds who gathered to witness His miracle- working power, but we often fail to embrace Him in a reckless, all-out, totally trusting faith. We believe in God; we pray when we are desperate; we try to follow the example of Christ, yet we hardly know what it means to allow this Christ to be living and active at the very center of our beings. We come to Him; we hear Him speak to us through the Word; we express our needs through the liturgy and the prayers; we proclaim His praises in the hymns we sing; we indeed touch Him in the Service of Holy Communion – and yet we are still assailed by guilt-feelings, plagued with weaknesses, defeated and overcome with failures, incapacitated by tragedies, and very much in doubt about the outcome of it all. The reason? Perhaps our touch has not really been the touch of faith. We may be jostling Jesus rather than embracing Him.

May our faith not just be “belief in spite of evidences,” but “a faith-life in scorn of consequences.”