πίστις pistis
What It Means
The sentence Jesus says last is the strangest one in the room. A woman known in town as a sinner has wept at his feet, dried them with her hair, and emptied a flask of ointment over them, while Simon the Pharisee does the math on her reputation. And then: “Your faith (pistis) has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:50) — not her love, though she loved much (Luke 7:47). That verse turns on one word, hoti, which can be read as cause or as evidence: did her love earn the pardon, or does it only show it? The parable he has just told decides the question — the debtor does not love his way out of debt; he loves because the debt is already gone (Luke 7:41-43). Pistis grows from the verb peithō, to be persuaded, won over; and the scene bears that out, for Jesus never asks her to produce faith. He finds it already there, names it, and sends her home in peace. In the marketplace the word also named a pledge, the proof that seals a bargain; Paul calls the resurrection the pistis God “furnished” (Acts 17:31). Faith is less a thing we generate than a hand that has let go of everything else.
A Story
Centuries later another man went looking for that word and could not find the way in. Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk at Wittenberg, was stopped cold by one phrase in Paul’s letter — “the righteousness of God” — which he took to mean the justice by which God punishes sinners, and hated. He turned it over night and day, until he set it beside the line Paul quotes from the prophet Habakkuk: “the righteous shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17; Habakkuk 2:4). The Hebrew there is emunah, firmness or faithfulness — reliability more than reliance. Paul hears it through the Greek Bible and through the gospel: a development across the canon, not a match in the dictionary. The righteousness, he saw, was not a standard God enforced but a gift God gave. He wrote that he felt reborn, and “to have gone through open doors into paradise.”1
For Your Journey
We are forever tempted to turn faith into a work, the one virtue we must manufacture, so that the question becomes whether ours is the right size and the right temperature. But a hand does not save a drowning man by being a strong hand; it saves by closing on the rope. Simon’s hands were full of his own record; hers were empty, and only empty hands can close on a rope. We do not stop taking our own temperature by deciding to. We stop because he has already named her faith for her, and his word about us is steadier than our reading of ourselves. The faith that saves looks away from itself — at the One it has at last let itself be persuaded to trust.
In Christ
Faith saves because of what it holds, not because of what it is. Jesus does call one faith great, earlier in this same chapter (Luke 7:9) — but what he marvels at is not intensity; it is a centurion content to have nothing but a word to stand on. The weight never rested on her faith but on the One it received, who was on his way to a cross where her pardon would be paid in full. Paul puts the exchange in one verse: God “put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:25). This is grace through faith, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8-9) — the verdict that justifies the ungodly is received, never earned (Romans 4:5). Christ kept the faithfulness we could not keep, and our faith does nothing grander than lay hold of his.2
“Nothing in my hand I bring, / Simply to thy cross I cling;”
- Martin Luther, 1545 Preface to the Complete Edition of his Latin Writings, as translated in Roland Bainton, *Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther* (1950), 49–50. ↩
- The reading of Luke 7 — that the one forgiven much loves much, and that saving faith comes to Christ empty-handed rather than with its credentials — follows Timothy Keller, “Faith in Jesus” (gospelinlife.com). ↩