Proper 22, Year C
Luke 17:5-10
Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
October 6, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’” – Luke 17:5
“Increase our faith.” I suppose that’s something all of us want, really. In an increasingly confusing world where it feels like you can’t trust your neighbors, much less the government, to do what’s right, we as humans want something to hold on to, something stable, something that will never let you down. In times of turmoil, people turn to their traditions, their own ability to reason, or to their conception of God in order to mark a path forward. What motivates them, what gives them any sense of hope for the future, is their faith—faith in others, faith in themselves, or faith in the supernatural. And frankly, that faith too often wears dangerously thin.
The apostles weren’t all that different from us, either. Theirs was a rapidly changing, multicultural world. Taxes were high and didn’t seem to deliver much of a return. People worked themselves to the bone just to get by. The intelligentsia of the day kept dismissing or taking pot shots at their little renewal movement. No one in Israel, except maybe the extremely wealthy, liked or trusted the government, which was always orbiting around its own plots, intrigue, and scandals instead of doing its job of protecting the citizenry from abuse. Corruption was rampant, and there didn’t seem to be any end in sight. They too were clinging to the last of their hope. It made perfect sense for them—just as it does for us—to ask Jesus to increase their faith.
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t find Jesus’ response to be super helpful. His reply seems to skip right past their immediate need, turning their request into something magical or fantastical. It almost feels like he’s mocking them: “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
So, Jesus, we’re telling you that we need help right now just to keep going, and you’re saying, “Try harder”? Are all those self-help books and prosperity preachers right? All of these problems in the world—my dad’s cancer, the biggest employer in town shutting down, the struggle to make ends meet—are my own fault because of my lack of faith? “Change your mindset, and manifest a new reality”? “Just believe,” and God will make everything easy for you? It seems absolutely incredulous.
And it should.
Because despite the popular interpretation, despite some of the genuinely good advice we hear about changing our attitudes to improve our lives, despite what the get-rich-quick schemers try to make of this passage, that isn’t what the Gospel writer is trying to tell us.
Jesus’ statement sounds fantastical because it’s supposed to. He may have been teasing the apostles with his response, but he wasn’t mocking them. Nor was he promising them (or anyone) the ability to make trees fly around. Instead, it’s a kind of gentle warning. He’s telling them that they—and we—tend to look at faith the wrong way.
We generally look at faith as a kind of invisible, intangible, yet very physical object, something we can collect or grow or store up or lose. After all, as Hebrews tells us, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”[1] But here Jesus is telling us that faith is not a commodity. It isn’t something you can gather more of. It isn’t something that exists outside of us. He’s saying that if it were, we would probably just do absurd things with it anyway—can you imagine the environmental, social, and economic damage it would cause if people really could just move trees or mountains into the sea whenever they felt like it?
Another thing that’s happening here is that we have a messed up definition of “faith.” Our language has conflated the word “faith” with the concept of belief or even wishful thinking—a kind of “if you can dream it, you can do it” idea, no matter how absurd that dream may be. In Jesus’ time, the word was more closely tied to what we would describe as “faithful.” In fact, one modern Lutheran scholar wrote that, unless the meaning is absolutely impossible to understand in any other way, every time the word “faith” appears in the New Testament, we should instead think “faithfulness.”[2]
That turns things on its head a bit, doesn’t it? Some of those famous mystical-sounding verses suddenly seem a lot more grounded in reality: “Faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” “Show me your faithfulness without your works, and I’ll show you my faithfulness by my works.”[3]
What Jesus is pointing to here is not that true faith is something you have—a scarce resource you could somehow touch, manage, increase, or even quantify. Instead it’s something you do. I would argue it exists only while it’s in use or action. The person who has faith isn’t the one who believes the hardest, who clings to the craziest ideas. It isn’t the supposed miracle workers. It’s the one who keeps going, who keeps doing the good they know to do whether or not it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It’s like the farmer who keeps tending his plants and animals throughout a massive drought, knowing that not all of them will survive. It’s like the slave in Jesus’ illustration, who works hard all day in the field and then makes dinner for their master before they themselves get to eat. It’s the one who repents and gets back up every time they sin, like the verses just before ours show. It’s the one who continues to treat those around them like humans in an inhumane world. That’s the kind of faith we need more of. That’s the kind of faith that will, over time, ultimately uproot trees and move mountains.
“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’”
[1] Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)
[2] https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/a-provocation-twentieth-sunday-after-pentecost-october-2-2016-luke-175-10/
[3] James 2:18