It’s not uncommon in the gospels for Jesus to say something along the lines of, “Your faith has made you well.”
These kinds of statements have led some ministers to blame sick people when they’re not healed. “If you only had more faith, it would happen,” they sometimes say.
This is an oversimplification of healing ministry and a theological misunderstanding of what it means to have faith. It’s not as though the dead man Lazarus had faith when he was healed back to life. Rather, what Lazarus had was the object upon which faith rests: Jesus.
Throughout Scripture, people’s faith healed them because it led them to seek out Jesus and request healing. They participated in the healing process by going to Jesus, but they did not heal themselves. Most people in Jesus’s hometown did not have this kind of faith, so they did not ask Jesus for healing, and therefore Jesus did not heal as many there as he wanted to.
If we believe we need to load some kind of supernatural measuring cup with faith in order to be healed, we are promoting a scientific placebo effect method of healing, in which we trick our brains into believing we are better. This is not what Jesus meant when he spoke of being healed by our faith. Our faith does not lead us back to us. Rather, our faith leads us to Jesus, and then Jesus does what he does.
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