“Now at Lystra there was a man sitting, who could not use his feet; he was a cripple from birth who had never walked. He listened to Paul speaking, and Paul, looking intently at him and seeing that he had faith to be made well, said in a loud voice, ‘Stand upright on your feet,’ and he sprang up and walked” (Acts 14:8-10)
In that eye contact between the apostle and the cripple, the Holy Spirit who is present everywhere bonded the two in a way that made healing possible. The Spirit told St. Paul that the man had faith enough to let him stand upright. St. Paul was not the healer—Christ was. The apostle was the trigger. The wonder is that the man might have spent his remaining years on earth dragging himself along the ground with his arms, all the while with the potential to walk, if the faith latent in his soul had not been energized by the word of the Lord from the mouth of the apostle. We talk of faith healing as if it were from the rare breed of healers possessing the gift of faith in Christ, but it’s really the belief of the seekers themselves ignited by those with the discernment to make healing happen.
Consider the scene when our Lord Jesus took three apostles on the mountain where He was transfigured in their presence, while back at the camp the other nine were impotent to heal the epileptic boy brought by a faithless father. The apostles had been given the power of faith healing. They asked the Lord why it hadn’t worked when He was away. “‘Why couldn’t we drive [the demon] out?’ He replied, ‘Because you have such little faith’” (Matthew 17:19). Perhaps they panicked when the boy was thrashing about in an epileptic seizure, and their composure was shattered by the confusion of the moment, added with the remonstrance from the boy’s father.
The lesson is that those praying for miracles of healing cannot assume it’s enough to wish for an extraordinary phenomenon to take place. They must themselves be part of the process. In our day we are conditioned to be passive receptacles of the world around us. It’s enough to participate by taking in what is going on beyond us. The term for the television channel selector is meaningful: Remote. We prefer to have our comfort level out of reach and apart from the action scene. We want things to happen to us, especially good things. We aren’t involved. But the only Christian way of life is to be engaged with all that affects and influences us. The true Christian is eager to communicate with the Lord of life, ever searching for ways to be in touch with Jesus Christ in whom we have been buried in baptism and now is alive in us, along with the Holy Spirit in whom we are sealed, to whom we respond through all our senses as we reach out to embrace the environment in which we were blessed to be alive and active. We often are startled and surprised when a person will thank us for our healing prayer that was answered, and we say honestly that we were not aware of having healed the one giving us the credit, because it wasn’t as much our petition to the Lord but the faith of the one who was afflicted.
Take note of what one monastic father has to add on the issue of faith:
Do not refuse the request to pray for the soul of another even when you yourself lack the gift of prayer, for often the faith of a person making the request will evoke the saving contrition of the one who is offering the prayer. — St. John Climacus