I must confess that I am not a petrolhead. I’m not interested in cars beyond their usability. I used to like driving but that stopped many years ago. In other words, I guess that I am a car dealer’s nightmare incarnate – as I recently realised again when I went to buy a new car. My requirements regarding a car are very basic: it must be reliable, relatively cheap to buy, cheap to run and maintain, and large enough so ‘my highness’ can get in easily. Fancy bits and bobs – effectively money spinners – are of no interest to me. However, there’s one feature that I had always wanted, but for many years it had been reserved for high-end cars: cruise control. I had it in my previous car and – as I had expected – it was a godsend. Well, sort of. On the winding roads of the rural county of Moray – my previous parish – it was of limited use unless I wanted to catapult off the road on the bends or park in the back of a farming vehicle in front of me. But when I used it intelligently, cruise control was great!
Today’s gospel is the story of two young women. One’s age was given as twelve, a girl on the verge of adolescence; the other one was addressed by Jesus as ‘daughter’ which would have been very patronising had she not been significantly younger than the 30-odd years old Jesus. Ill-health was the common factor for both females; while the girl’s actual condition remains undefined, the other one’s was most likely of gynaecological nature. It mattered because in line with the Law of Moses she was unclean and ought to steer clear from anyone else; effectively she was excluded from her community, or to use a Latinised expression, she was excommunicated for twelve long years. There’s another factor common for the fate of those two women: desperation to be healed, displayed by the girl’s father and by the older woman herself. However, it wasn’t a hopeless kind of desperation; it led to the determination to get it fixed and in both cases, it literally led to Jesus. The older woman made her way through the crowd, effectively breaching the law of Moses. The girl’s father, a synagogue official, pleaded for help from an itinerant teacher, of whom the Jewish religious authorities weren’t particularly fond (to put it mildly). The third common factor was faith. The girl’s father believed that Jesus could heal the girl; his faith was the reason that he approached the Lord. Similarly, the suffering woman was desperate to touch Jesus because she believed it would cure her. Jesus himself made clear that faith was central when He told her: ‘your faith has restored you to health’, and when He assured the girl’s father: ‘Do not be afraid; only have faith.’
What does it mean ‘to have faith’? What is faith? The Oxford English Dictionary provides a few meanings: a) trust in somebody’s ability or knowledge; b) trust that somebody will do what has been promised; c) strong religious belief; d) a particular religion. All four meanings apply to the Christian faith and all four play their parts. This is where the cruise control metaphor is useful. The entire doctrine of the Church is like a road network, offering a clear and certain way to reach our ultimate destination. All the commandments, rules and teaching of the Church help us to navigate along the route. Having been trained and educated in the faith, we can turn on our religious cruise control and most of the time it will help us to go through life. However, cruise control is not autopilot. There are twists and turns in life that require our attention, discernment and decisions on what to do. Does my religious faith influence my decisions? In other words, do I trust God’s love for me? Do I trust His commandments and the way of life as presented by Jesus in the gospel? These can be tough choices, quite often going against the secular mainstream. If my faith doesn’t affect my life, it’s like riding on cruise control: christening, first communion, confirmation, wedding, funeral… And between those traditional ‘service stations’ a couple of annual shorts stops like Christmas and Easter. Such traditional faith has its benefits but offers little or nothing when life gets complicated. Last Friday night I was deeply moved by a woman whose mother had been trapped in the collapsed building in Miami. She told the reporter that God’s graces come in many forms; she hoped that her mother was alive, or that she had not felt pain and was in God’s embrace. An astonishing act of faith!
The most challenging aspect of keeping the faith is that we are reluctant to trust Jesus. It’s often fuelled by a centuries-old attitude that has recently got its own moniker: FOMO – fear of missing out. It’s a feeling that while the world enjoys all its pleasures and thrills, we – by sticking to our faith – are deprived of joy and sentenced to the perennial gloom. If you think like this, listen to Jesus: ‘Do not be afraid; only have faith.’