I will cite the two examples of great faith together before commenting on them. The first is located in Matthew 15:21-28, with a parallel account given in Mark 7:24-30:
21 Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And, behold , a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. 23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying , Send her away; for she crieth after us. 24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying , Lord, help me. 26 But he answered and said , It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. 27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. 28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.
The second example of great faith is given in Luke 7:1-10, the parallel account being Matthew 8:5-13. Both have details that I want to comment on, so I will cite both. This is Luke's version:
1 Now when he had ended all his sayings in the audience of the people, he entered into Capernaum. 2 And a certain centurion's servant, who was dear unto him, was sick, and ready to die. 3 And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto him the elders of the Jews, beseeching him that he would come and heal his servant. 4 And when they came to Jesus, they besought him instantly, saying , That he was worthy for whom he should do this: 5 For he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue. 6 Then Jesus went with them. And when he was now not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to him, saying unto him, Lord, trouble not thyself : for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof: 7 Wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee: but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed. 8 For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go , and he goeth; and to another, Come , and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. 9 When Jesus heard these things, he marvelled at him, and turned him about , and said unto the people that followed him, I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. 10 And they that were sent, returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick .
And here is Matthew's version:
5 And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, 6 And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented . 7 And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. 8 The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. 9 For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. 10 When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. 11 And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 13 And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed , so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour.
There are two things I think we need to note before analyzing these passages. The first is that there is no contradiction between the two passages provided that one keeps in mind that the elders and the Centurion's friends in the Luke account acted on behalf of the Centurion as his parakletos, his "comforters", that spoke in his place due to the mis-match between his state and position, and Jesus' more exalted one: after all, he was asking Jesus to divinely heal his servant with a word where he was unable to despite spending real gold on real physicians who had clearly failed! The way the custom worked, those interceding on the behalf of another as their parakletos were considered one and the same: when the elders and friends spoke, it was as good as if the Centurion was actually there, so the Luke account is more technically and literally correct, although he left out the comment Matthew included in verses 11 and 12 of his account. Matthew's gospel was specifically written to the Jews, and the revelation of Jesus' words was doubtless Matthew ensuring that the Gentile Christian believers were accepted by the Jewish Christians. The point I want to make is that Matthew's conflation of the elders and Centurion's friends into the Centurion himself be recognized as the template upon which the conflation of Our Comforter with us is based (John 14:16 and John 14:26): when we speak, the Spirit speaks, and it is just as good as if the Spirit Himself was speaking on our behalf (Romans 8:26).
The second thing to note is much more germaine to our discussion: the faith of both of these individuals is called "great" even though they are pagans, not Jews. This is very important for it means that a great faith can be had apart from a detailed knowledge and experience of a God-appointed lifestyle. These incidents took place before the creation of the Church, and it is acknowledged that the various incarnations of the nation-state that descended from the Hebrews of the Exodus up to the Crucifixion were God's Chosen People, a fact acknowledged by both Christians and Muslims. Jesus was being very correct (albeit unpolitically so to those of modern taste and sensitivities) when he said to the Samaritan woman that "salvation is of the Jews" (John 4:22), and stated, in so many words, that the Syrophonecian woman was acting like a "dog" demanding the bread from the mouths of the (Jewish) children! Certainly the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, scribes, and priests had added a great deal of unscriptural and unsupported "fluff" to the Law of God as given to Moses and recorded in the Pentateuch, but Jesus himself directed lepers to abide by the leprosy laws outlined in it and counseled people to obey what the scribes and Pharisees said when they were officially teaching, while warning that their lives were not to be imitated (Matthew 23:1-7).
What this second point tells us is that a great faith is firstly a matter of attitude, and secondarily of knowledge. The primary attitude can be discerned by comparing the differences between the Jews of that day and these two Gentiles. The supporting role of knowledge in tweaking that attitude into a proper configuration that gets God and Jesus to act will be discerned by comparing the differences between the Syrophonecian Woman and the Centurion.
Now, this is a rather hard point to swallow, for it was hard for the Jewish Christians to swallow with regard to their Gentile Christian brothers: these pagans were called great in faith because they were not hampered by a detailed knowledge of the Jewish religion! The fact of the matter was that the Jews of Jesus' day knew a great deal about the scriptures regarding the Messiah and the future exaltation of Israel, and thus were looking for a liberating conqueror. Like the Elder brother, they were so intent on obeying God to merit the coming of their Messiah that they failed to have the simple freedom that their Younger brother had when he asked for a third of the entire kit-n-kabootle!
We Christians have lived so long in a culture heavily influenced and conditioned by Christianity that we are clueless as to how real religious pagans lived and thought: our modern pagans would be regarded as godless barbarians by the kinds of honorable, god fearing and god seeking pagans that Jesus and the Apostles dealt with on a daily basis.
This is not to say that those ancient pious pagans had no worries: their big problem was that they, like the Samaritan Woman, worshipped that which they knew not. God was very reluctant to honor the prayers and requests of pious pagan Greeks lest He, the God who required that the marriage bed be held in honor and kept undefiled, be confused or remotely associated with the wayward, adulterous, and letcherous Zeus/Jupiter fathering half of the minor gods through adulterous laisons with human women! Because of this reluctance on the part of God, pagan religions were, to put it bluntly, powerless. Pagan priests made up elaborate rituals and
To put it bluntly, they failed to "be converted and become as little children" (Matthew 18:1-6). How much does a little child know? Not much, other than to know that he/she can trust their Father to know what to give them to eat (Luke 11:11-13)when they themselves know so little that they'd eat anything. I may not remember when *I* was 1, 2, or 3, but I sure do remember when my two boys were 1, 2, and 3! Been there, know all about that!
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An aside: I want to pause here to emphasize the danger of misunderstanding the process whereby God undertakes to bless the world by way of the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12:1-3). Verse 2 outlines the way God interacts with Abraham and his seed, which is to bless him and make him a blessing. However, it is incorrect to add "to the world" to the end of the second phrase of verse 2 to make it read "thou shalt be a blessing to the world." Such a reading, which adds human beliefs and wishful thinking to God's spoken word, making it appear that the blessings would come from Abraham and his children. It is in verse 3 that everyone else in the world is explicitly included. While the blessings God gives to Abraham and his seed are directly initiated and directly come from Him, the blessings God promises to give to the world also directly come from Him, but are indirectly initiated. That is, while Abraham and his seed can interact directly with God and get blessings directly from God, the world cannot interact directly with God, and can only get blessings from God by blessing Abraham or his seed. Abraham and his seed act as a priesthood, and when we talk about priests rendering service to mankind, it is understood that such service means that the priests receive offerings and requests for prayer from petitioners (are blessed), and then go to God (or their gods) to intercede on the behalf of the petitioners. Nobody in any religious culture in the world that uses intermediaries like priests and witch doctors to communicate with the gods or spirits ever expects the priests to answer the prayers directly, for the expectation is that the gods or spirits hear the priests and answer the prayers themselves. After all, if the priests have the power and the goods, then the petitioners would ask the priests for help, not the gods or spirits whom the priests serve. God's intended method for dealing with the gentiles was to follow the Naaman model (2 Kings 5), where it is obvious that HE delivers the goods, not the priests, which explains why Elisha did not come out of his house to speak to Naaman when the man first came to him, but came out after God delivered the man. However, if verse 2 is incorrectly modified in the way I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, then the service of the priests is not a service of petitioning God on behalf of the people (like Abraham did for Abimelech (Genesis 20), but of serving the people without the benefit of God answering their prayers. This forces the priests to serve the people by giving from the blessings that God had intended that they, the priests, enjoy from their obedience. In a sense, the priests are made to forsake their intercessory duties in order to serve tables at their own expense, in the same way that the demands of the early Church for service from the disciples forced them to forsake the Word of God in order to serve tables. The disciples solved their problem by appointing seven men who were not otherwise occupied to serve the tables, but this solution fails when all of the church has already been called to forsake the Word of God in order to serve tables at their own expense. The scriptures state that only a fraction of the Church is gifted to serve because other gifts are given to others, but the current fad in some liberal denominations is to ignore the insight of the disciples that only a few (seven) were called to serve, and instead call the entire Church to serve, as if all of the body is the hand or the eye. The situation is then worsened by their active opposition to what they call "the prosperity gospel". This opposition logically follows from their mistaken belief that God is calling His priests serve (true), but at their own expense (not true). Consequently, like the Pharisees (Matthew 23:4 and Luke 11:46), they bind heavy financial burdens on the priesthood of believers and teach them to not expect God to help them in help lifting that kind of burden!
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