First Week of Advent - Friday - ‘According to your faith, let it be done to you!'

Readings: Isaiah 29:17-24; Psalm 27; Matthew 9:27-31

‘According to your faith, let it be done to you! (Mt 9:29)’ It is typical of Jesus that he asks people looking for healing if they have faith in him, or otherwise points to their faith as being linked to their cure. It is not surprising to find Jesus ask the two blind men if they believe he can heal them (v. 28) in today’s Gospel reading. When they say ‘Yes’, it is not surprising that they are then healed – though it presumably caused a stir at the time. What is perhaps surprising is that, their faith confirmed and most probably enhanced, they fail to obey the additional injunction that Jesus then gives that they are not to tell anyone about it. To be fair, it would have been hard for them to say nothing to anyone, as family, friends and neighbours would want to know what had happened to restore their sight and change their lives. But they ‘talked about him all over the countryside’ (v. 31).

Why do they have faith of such a quality that Jesus works a miracle for them but so little faith and respect for Jesus that they wantonly break his command that they are to tell no one of their cure? I wonder if the clue lies in the title they address to Jesus: ‘Take pity on us, son of David?’ (v 27). This is the first time since chapter 1 that anyone has referred to Jesus as the son of David in Matthew’s Gospel. The title implies that Jesus is the Messiah or Christ from the line of David. These blind men believe Jesus is this messiah, but this messiah was thought to be a human figure and one who would operate in the political and military realm to overthrow the enemies of Israel. This is not the way Jesus intended to fulfil God’s promises to Israel. The only time he actually speaks of the title ‘son of David’ (Mt 22:41-46) he critiques the usual understanding of it and points to a figure whom David can call Lord as the one in and through whom God will fulfil his promises to David. Jesus thus points to a divine figure, not a mere human. Jesus is that figure and one to be recognised as such and obeyed as such. The blind men in this account have not seen or understood this and have thus not obeyed God and his way of taking his mission forward. So their faith, in fact, was very limited! They have acted in accordance with it and ended up doing things that Jesus did not want.

Why, then, did Jesus point to their faith and heal them in the first place? The answer gives us both encouragement and a warning. Jesus meets us where we each are, with our limited faith and the needs we take to him on that basis. That is the encouragement. But we need to be aware of our inner blindness and so of the limits of our faith and thus the risk that we might obstruct Jesus. The quality of our faith is tested by our generous and serious obedience to Jesus, more than the signs worked through us by God’s free grace, or the consolations given to us in other ways.

This Advent, let us ask God for an increase in faith, for a purification of our faith, for more illumination into its mysteries, that when Jesus then says to us “according to your faith, let it be done to you”, only good will result.