Today’s readings – 1 Kings 18:20-30, Galatians 1:1-12, and Luke 7:1-10 – could suggest that their authors are inviting us to believe in magic. Elijah sets up a magical test to distinguish between his God and Baal; the Apostle Paul wants his readers to believe that his good news differs from the good news the Galatians are inclined to embrace over his gospel, and the author of Luke-Acts appears to be inviting us to believe in Jesus because he can perform long-distance healings.
So is that what its all about? Is that what it means to believe? If so, then the prophets of Baal were formally correct, irrespective of the success or failure of their magic.
Another alternative, which has enjoyed widespread popularity over the centuries, is to suggest that we should anticipate no relationship whatsoever between the object of our faith and the ability of this object to transform our world. Indeed, when they reduced the Christian faith to the transcendental point of faith, Protestants in effect proclaimed that they had no expectation whatsoever that their God would effect any change at all in the phenomenal world, limiting God’s action to transforming hearts and ethical orientations, not real events in the real world. Insofar as both Elijah and the prophets of Baal — at Elijah’s initiative — put God to the test, each violates a central tenet of Protestantism (and perhaps of Abrahamic religion as a whole).
But, what if this is not what God is inviting us to find in these passages. What if instead we are invited to find in them reasons to anticipate and in fact act in the face of inconceivable odds against us. It is Elijah whose faith brings him to observe that it really doesn’t matter how deep the ditch or how much water we throw on the sacrificial offering. It is Elijah who observes that he is outnumbered 450 to 1. Many of us might be inclined to abandon faith under such conditions. We might also feel, as many in Jesus’ day (or in Luke’s) must have felt, the the healing of the Centurion’s slave depended on some kind of an apparatus or technology, an immediate, direct transmission of magical energy from Jesus’ hand to the Centurion’s ill servant. Is Jesus able to heal a Roman-allied Centurion, never mind his servant, no matter how much he has donated to the development fund? What should we expect as we move out into the Roman-dominated world in the 80s and 90s? Can God heal these people? Can God transform empire? Or, finally, what if the ascetic (and by inference proto-Protestant) gnostic gospel to which Galatia’s “spiritual” Christians were inclined is not good news at all, precisely because it diverts our attention away from the body, away from real service, away from transformative grace?
The question, therefore, is quite clearly not “Do you expect magic?” but rather “What are the miracles that you expect?” If you want magic, you are looking in the wrong place. There is a God capable of bringing down whole oppressive empires, of healing not only Roman Centurions, but their slaves, and who is inviting us to abandon our cosy, ascetic, quasi-spiritual, mystery cults and embrace the living God.
The invitation is addressed to us. Do we expect radical transformation, real transformation, in the real world? Are we ready to make such transformation a test of faith? Are we ready to act on the basis of this transformation? Or are we going to appeal to the comfort of numbers, 450 to 1, or to personal security and inner comfort, the gnostic gospel? Do we believe that the Roman Centurion can be healed? And his servant?
What do you believe?
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