Healing, Faith, and "the Last Mile"

• Your taking of the antibiotics has made you well.
• Your faith has made you well.

We sometimes stumble on the second statement, perhaps seeing it as claiming that the healed one could take credit for the entire power and process of healing. The first statement, though, is easy for us to make sense of. We know that no one today would take credit for inventing, manufacturing, marketing, prescribing, and/or selling the medicines that made them well. But they might deserve an ounce of credit for taking them on time, or in the proper manner. Similarly, maybe people in first century Palestine, or at least Jesus, would have known that the claim about the power of faith was not meant to be taken as referring to all the power and process necessary for healing, but instead just the "last mile," the last part of the process necessary for the healing to arrive at the person being healed.