Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

by Barbara Brown Taylor

A disproportionate number of the famous Bible stories about Jesus involve religious strangers—Romans, Samaritans, Canaanites, Syrophoenicians—people who worshipped other gods or worshipped the same one he did in an unorthodox way. These were often the same people who blew Jesus’s mind, opening themselves up to what God could do in ways that escaped the people he knew best. When a centurion came seeking help for his servant, Jesus said he had never seen such faith. When a foreign woman came seeking help for her daughter, he praised her faith too. When a Samaritan returned to thank him for a healing, Jesus told him that his faith had made him well. Most Christians who hear such stories assume it is their faith in him that he praises, but that is not what the stories say. “Your faith,” Jesus says to them over and over again. “Your faith has made you well.” If anything, the strangers seem to change Jesus’s ideas about where faith may be found, far outside the boundaries that he has been raised to respect.