Uprooting mulberry trees and planting them in the sea? If you’ve ever taken down a tree, you know it’s very hard work. First, of course, there’s the chopping or sawing. Then if the tree was on a lawn or public space, you’d probably either rent a stump grinder or pay someone else to take out the stump.
What is Jesus talking about here? We are still on the road with Jesus, heading toward Jerusalem and all that will take place there. In this middle section of the gospel, the evangelist has collected a variety of Jesus’ teachings and sayings. No doubt the evangelist has also tried to arrange them in some coherent order. We’ve heard parables and stories about lost sheep and lost coins, and we heard about a dishonest manager and the rich man and Lazarus. In most of these stories and sayings, the evangelist has shown Jesus using overstatement and exaggeration, one of the favorite rhetorical tools of the rabbis.
As we come to this place in the gospel narrative, the disciples are clearly feeling overwhelmed and downright puzzled by all that Jesus has called them to be and do. So they make what seems like a simple request: “increase our faith.” But what exactly are they asking for? Is a faith a quantity that can decrease or increase? What would more faith look like in real life? If they had “more faith” would the disciples fast, give, heal, and teach more? Would they stop complaining as they trailed behind Jesus? Would they willingly let themselves be executed with Jesus?
Do you find Jesus’ response to his disciples perplexing? At this point, you might not even like the Jesus you see here. He doesn’t reassure the disciples. He doesn’t make a joke or pat them on the back. He barks at them, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed….” Then he uses the image of a master and slaves – overworked slaves – to suggest something about what faith really means. Although the image of hardworking slaves would have been perfectly acceptable to Jesus’ disciples and to the evangelist’s audience, it of course grates on our ears. And more than that, both the sayings about the mustard seed and the image of slaves are surely further examples of overstatement and exaggeration.
So what is the real message here? What is the evangelist suggesting to his own community – and by extension to us – about what faith is? Let’s unpack that word “faith” and look for a minute at what we might think it means. Is faith supernatural power, especially power that, if I believe hard enough, I can make God do what I want? Is faith acceptance of all the traditional statements of the church, believing seven impossible things before breakfast, as one wag put it? Do I have deep faith if I understand and accept every statement in the Nicene Creed? Do I have faith if I take the Bible literally, especially if I believe that creation happened according to the account in Genesis, or that every miracle occurred just as it is depicted? Do I have faith if I adhere to a set of specific devotional practices? Am I person of deep faith if I fast, tithe, and read Forward Day by Day every morning?
The truth is that faith – or perhaps, better, faithfulness – the faithfulness we are called to have as followers of Jesus, is none of these things. To begin with, faith is a gift of God. But it is not something that we earn as a reward for hard work. It is something we already have just by virtue of being a creature made in God’s image. We may have models of people who have faith, like the women Lois and Eunice mentioned by the writer of the second letter to Timothy, but we must still acknowledge God’s gift for ourselves.
Perhaps faith is more what we moderns might call a mindset. When we acknowledge God’s gift, then we can begin seeing the world as God sees it. We can acknowledge ourselves as part of God’s creation, and as such deeply and truly loved by God. We can also understand ourselves as only a small part of God’s creation, as one of God’s many children. And we can begin seeing ourselves as connected to everyone we meet, looking out at those both near and far, not with our egocentric desire to possess and control, but rather with compassion and a desire to help others grow and flourish.
What’s more important, faith is not something static, it is not something that comes in a quantity that Jesus or God can increase at our request. It is not something that we can throw away. We can ignore God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have no faith. And more important, our faith, whether it’s in God or in anything else, is dynamic. It grows, flourishes, and unfolds throughout our life’s journey. It’s apt really that Jesus used the image of a seed for faith. Remember Jesus’ image of the mustard seed that grows to be a great tree, in which even the birds can nest? If we water and tend our faith, it too can become a green living quality within us that will reflect God’s presence within us and in the world.
The most important thing about faith is that it is ultimately a verb. Jesus was right in suggesting that if we have faith we do something. Jesus might have been exaggerating in using the image of the uprooted mulberry tree, but the truth is that ultimately if we acknowledge the divine gift within us, then we show forth our faith “not only with our lips but with our lives.”
And how do we do that? Not surprisingly, faith is a verb that calls us to look in two different directions at once. If faith enables us to see ourselves as one of God’s beloved children, then to remain faithful we must also hear God’s call to us. We must leave ourselves open to God in regular prayer and times of silence, however briefly, and go beyond our rote prayers or our spontaneous calls for help, to reach the God within us, to connect more deeply to the God within us, to hear more clearly the words of that God. And we do this not to prove anything, not to buy God’s favor, not to placate an angry God, but so that we might follow more closely behind Jesus, so that our God-given faith may indeed become that great green tree.
And then we must do our faith out in the world. Writer Debie Thomas reminds us that that to do faith is “To do the loving, forgiving thing we consider so banal we ignore it. Why? Because the life of faith is as straightforward as a slave serving his master dinner. As ordinary as a hired worker fulfilling the terms of his contract. Faith isn’t fireworks; it’s not meant to dazzle. Faith is simply recognizing our tiny place in relation to God’s enormous creative love, and then filling that place with our whole lives.”1 We do our faith by doing what God calls us to do, in our ordinary given lives, and, to the extent that we fallible humans can, with the mindset of Jesus. Doing our faith will look different for each one of us. For many of us, living out our faith will mean truly accepting ourselves as God’s beloved children. And it also will mean looking hard at our lives, forgiving those who have hurt us, forgiving ourselves for the hurt we have visited on others, and asking for forgiveness where we can. Doing faith will mean seeing Christ in the faces of strangers, especially of those who ask for our help. For some of us, doing faith might mean embarking on a new educational or career path, or taking in an unwanted child. For all of us doing faith will mean using our God-given financial resources intentionally, especially to support people and organizations that are helping us to care more intentionally for the earth, and that are working to bring God’s reign nearer. Doing faith will mean working for justice, especially among those falsely accused. For some of us, doing faith will also mean working to abolish the death penalty. And for all of us, and especially in this contentious political season, doing faith will mean using our right to vote thoughtfully and intentionally.
We have a myriad ways to fulfil our call to do faith in the world. And the truth is that we have all the faith that we need. As we do our faith, God may deepen and strengthen our faith. But even now, every one of you has all the faith that you need to do God’s will. Because, “the tiniest fragment of real faith, real fidelity to responding to God’s prior fidelity to us, can work wonders. Not only a sycamore tree, but even much more deeply-rooted problems, can be dug up and planted in to the sea, if we have that basic, deep-down trust in God.”2 May it be so.
1. http://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay .
2. Patrick J.Ryan, America (September 26, 1992), quoted in Synthesis, October 2, 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment