How strange we would look if we came to a doctor with a broken arm, asking for help but not allowing him to touch it. The same can be said of our prayer asking for help, but without faith...

In response to the centurion's request, Jesus did not say something like "let what you ask be done for you" or "your servant has recovered; go." He says: "Go; and as you have believed, let it be done for you" (Matt. 5:13). In this way He tells us the main thing: it is not enough simply to ask; faith is necessary. It is faith that fills the request with "power," makes it real and full. For if one asks someone for help without believing that it can be given, one will scarcely receive it. Besides, if we do not believe that the Lord can help us, we in effect close the road to Him, that is, we simply do not give Him the opportunity to provide that very help.

That is why Christ said: "Have faith in God. For truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours" (Mark 11:23-24).

Our God, the God of harmony and order, dearly loves what we call the "golden mean" or the "royal path." He, who holds the universe in balance, knows how difficult it is to find balance. And for us, people who do not possess His wisdom and vision, it is practically impossible not to slide into one of the extremes that open before us. This kind of tightrope walking is beyond our strength, especially since we are trying to walk this rope not as saints, leaving everything behind in trust in God, but with all the bundles of our own ideas about what is right and what is not, with all our cultural and other baggage. Perhaps these things are useful in some respects, but on the way to God they only cloud our sight. And then we become very much like the person in today's Gospel reading who approached Jesus second (see Matt. 8:21-22): it is very hard for us to part with what separates us from God.

This call, which appears cruel to many, to leave one's unburied father and follow Jesus, conveys very precisely what the Lord truly wants from us. He proposes that we not cling to this world, but, having weighed everything, renounce temptations and set out on the path toward happiness. Yet this must be done in a measured way, because against one extreme, not daring to follow Christ, there is always another: to run headlong without knowing where, making a mess in the process and deeply wounding those around us. Christ gently checks such an unbridled follower (see Matt. 8:19-20) and calls him to a measured decision.

It turns out that following God requires at the same time both radicalism, the resolve to follow Christ leaving everything behind, and a serious act of will, the utmost collectedness. What remains is to learn to find balance...

In the Gospel we can find many stories about miraculous healings and the casting out of demons from different people. These miracles are usually called "signs," that is, they serve to show something. For example, in today's stories the miracles are meant to illustrate the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy about the coming of the Messiah, who was to "take upon Himself our infirmities and diseases."

For the first readers of the Gospel, who knew these prophecies by heart, the allusion was completely clear: these healings are only the beginning of the work of saving the world, which Christ accomplishes in history through His voluntary suffering (Isa. 53). Thus the context of this prophecy, and Matthew's references to it, leads us beyond the bounds of a particular miracle, which in general has little to do with us personally, and brings us into the history of the world's salvation, where all the events in which the prophecy was fulfilled have their place, and into our own life, when Christ saved our life, healed our sickness, and conquered evil around us or within us.