Text: Luke 17:5-10
Revised Standard Version (RSV)
5 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
6 He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.
7 “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8 Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? 9 Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen
“Increase our faith!”
On the face of it, that certainly seems reasonable, doesn’t it? How many times has each of us asked something similar? Even Martin Luther once famously said, “Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.”
But what motivated the disciples to ask Jesus this question? Why now?
The practice that has arisen in our churches of reading a spoonful of a Gospel per week often does us a disservice. The passages seem disjointed. We don’t grasp the context without a lot of explanation. So today let’s start by taking a look at just what was afoot that would cause the disciples to make that request.
When the Gospels were written, it was understood that they would be read in their entirety at one time. Doing this insured that the listeners would be completely aware of what had gone on in previous chapters. They would experience the entire flow of the narrative. So those hearing Luke’s Gospel presented in that way would have just heard what Jesus said right before today’s lesson: “And he said to his disciples, ‘Temptations to sin[a] are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! 2 It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.[b] 3 Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; 4 and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.’” (Luke 17:1-4, RSV) The very next verse is the one we started with this morning: “The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’”
In other words, “You have to help us! We can’t do this ourselves!”
We can’t forget, either, that Jesus had also just told them “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
And finally, this passage is from the part of Luke’s Gospel where he and his followers are on their way to Jerusalem. Jesus has already told them, as Luke records in chapter 9, verse 22: “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” They are pretty far along on that journey, so the disciples’ dread increases almost with each step. Given all this, who wouldn’t want a little extra encouragement and help? And so they say “Increase our faith!”
You might think that Jesus would grant their request. But, very surprisingly, he doesn’t! His response almost sounds like a rebuke. In fact, as Lois Malcolm, Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary writes, the Greek syntax of Jesus’ response even indicates a “twinge of irritation”![1] Why would Jesus be irritated?
It may be because Jesus has been teaching them for three years now what it means to be a disciple of his – maybe his irritation was the same that we might feel when our kids or our spouses or our friends ask us something for the millionth time that they should already know; maybe the twinge of irritation was because Jesus was frustrated that, even now at this late date, they just didn’t yet grasp what he’d been teaching them all along.
Or maybe it was because the disciples, in asking Jesus to “increase our faith” proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had truly missed the point entirely: Faith does not have a “size.” It can’t be measured like a cup of water, or a stick of wood. You can’t pull out a ruler or a tape measure and measure your faith and compare it to someone else’s. Like the sum total of the energy in the universe, it can neither be added to nor subtracted from.
David Ewert tells us a very important fact about faith: In the Bible, “’faith’ primarily means personal loyalty, personal commitment, fidelity, and the solidarity that comes from such faithfulness.”[2]
He makes the point that Jesus was maybe even indulging in a bit of sarcasm when he talked about being able to cause mulberry trees to uproot themselves and throw themselves into the ocean, if their faith were even as tiny as a mustard seed. That sounded just as absurd then as it does now.
Jesus uses this example because he understood that the disciples were actually asking him to increase their loyalty to him; so, as Ewert explains, “Trust, and loyalty, and bonding with me don’t come in sizes. You either have it or you don’t. It’s like you are asking me to increase being pregnant. You can’t be more or less pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. Your silly request deserves a silly, mocking response.”[3]
Given what we know about what the disciples’ possible emotional state was, this might seems just a bit on the harsh side. Ewert goes on to say that we know that “Jesus is about bringing into reality here on earth the realm of God. About demonstrating how to live as citizens of a distant land called the Kingdom of God.”[4] And this somewhat odd talk about mulberry trees is actually meant to tell these frightened men that they were already citizens of that Kingdom, and nothing could make them more of a citizen. They might just as well worry about whether the sun would come up tomorrow.
So we might rephrase it like this: Don’t ask to have your loyalty increased. Don’t worry about the size of your faith. You already have all the faith you need. Jesus’ reply was maybe just what they needed to hear to reorient them to the miracle of God’s abiding presence which was all around them all the time.
When I have taught German classes in the past, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they have trouble with languages. My answer is always, “Really? That’s strange, because you already speak one language perfectly, and have been doing so all your life. You already have all the mental equipment you will ever need to master another language.”
Jesus tells the disciples in this passage that faith is a bit like that. It’s a matter of perspective. It’s a matter of trust – trusting in God, of course, but just as importantly, trusting in ourselves.
Henry Ford once famously said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” Jesus’ response to those disciples was meant to jolt them, to wake them up, as if to say, “Snap out of it! I did not choose you by accident. I know what’s in you. I know what you are capable of. So knock it off with this craven nonsense about increasing your faith, and let’s get on with it!”
The bottom line is this: We don’t need to go looking for more faith outside of us. All we need do is tap the vast resources of faith already within us. And that faith will bear good fruit.
It already has – I could spend the next hour and then some just reciting a list of the good fruits of faith that St. John’s has given to the world. These good fruits continue, and they’re the acts of ordinary, everyday people. Us. You and me.
Which brings us to the subject of the servants. The way Jesus describes how the servants come in from the field, tired, hungry, and ready for food and bed, but have to serve their master before they can eat, sounds almost cruel. But Jesus, first of all, was just describing something that was common in his day; and secondly, he uses this practice to make the point that the workers themselves would say, “We have done what it was our duty to do.”
To put it in context for us today: Everyday acts of faith done by everyday people like us are what bring the Kingdom closer. David Lose tells us that Martin Luther once even lifted up a father changing his child’s diapers as an act of faith (probably because it was so rare and was considered unbecoming in that day and age): “When a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other menial task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool…God with all his angels and creatures is smiling.”[5]
And when we stop asking God to increase our faith, and stop worrying about mustards seeds, and the like, God and his angels and creatures smile, too!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Malcolm, Lois, “Commentary on Luke 17:5-10,” Working Preacher, October 06, 2013, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1785
[2] Ewert, David, “Luke 17:5-10,” “Holy Textures,” http://www.holytextures.com/2010/09/luke-17-5-10-year-c-pentecost-october-2-october-8-proper-22-ordinary-time-27-sermon.html
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Luther, Martin, quoted in Lose. David, “Pentecost 20 C, Everyday Acts of Faith,” “…in the Meantime,” http://www.davidlose.net/2016/09/pentecost-20-c-every-day-acts-of-faith/