And the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”
Today’s Gospel begins with the apostles calling out to the Lord as one voice, “Increase our faith.” We all know that the Lord is often frustrated with the disciples for their lack of faith. For example, afraid that they were going sink in the storm on the lake he said to them, “Where is your faith?” On another occasion, counseling them against anxiety about meeting their daily needs, he tells them “If God so clothes the grass in the field that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?”
This is the first time the apostles have themselves petitioned the Lord to “increase their faith”. What occasioned this appeal? If we look to the verses immediately preceding today’s Gospel, we hear the Lord address the disciples in this way: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” “Be on your guard”, he warns them.
The next verses concern the challenge of bringing back into the community those who have gone astray: They are to rebuke those who sin and forgive those who repent. The Lord insists that even “if [someone] wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.”
If we go back one step further, we see that these verses immediately follow upon the parable of the rich man and Lazarus which we heard last week. The rich man has caused others to sin by his bad example of pursuing a life of comfort and pleasure while ignoring the poor man Lazarus at his doorstep. Now he wants to warn others of the consequences, and he cannot. He begs Abraham to send Lazarus as a witness to his five brothers to warn them, so that they do not “come to this place of torment.”
Confronted with these demands and challenges, the apostles respond, “Increase our faith.”
Have faith and you will do great things, Jesus tells them. Just surrender, trust, let go, hand yourself over and all sorts of possibilities will open up. In me, you can do a lot, more than you ever thought. A mustard seed is very tiny, whereas a mulberry bush is large and has thick, deep and tenacious roots. Yet, with this small faith, if you were to say to it “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ … it would obey you.”
This “obedience” on the part of the natural order is the fruit of taking on what St. Paul calls our “obedience of faith”. The obedience of faith has such powerful effects in Christ, that it puts the cosmos, the natural order, in our service. In the grace of Christ it obeys our command. Creation, instead of simply presenting us with things that potentially lead us astray, serve as a distraction and pull us in all directions, truly becomes a good placed at our service that works with us for the good in Christ. It cooperates with God and with us in forming good habits and virtues in us. In so far as this happens the created order participates in the divine restoration and achieves its own end as being created good and striving toward the good, toward life, toward wholeness and integrity. All this occurs because of the new life that is given us with the act of faith.
Jesus uses these hyperboles to give his apostles a strong word of encouragement. As though to say, “Your mission will have its challenges, I will made big demands of you, but the faith I give you is sufficient for you to do to do great things. So give your assent, trust, surrender. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.”
In what follows he shows them the way forward, which will be to follow along his own path of humility, by putting on the mind of a servant, like him, who has come among them as one who serves, as he will tell them at the Last Supper.
“When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”
To my mind it helps to get into what Jesus is after here if we look more closely at the imagery Jesus uses to describe the work of the servant. The servant plows the field, or tends the sheep, and serves at table.
Earlier in the Gospels Jesus describes the disciples as those who have “put their hand to the plow”. In that context, Jesus tells them that no one who puts his hand to the plow who then “looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” They plow the field when they spread the Gospel. With this comes great responsibility for as Jesus warned them, woe to those who in their teaching become a stumbling block for others, causing them to sin.
The servant tends the sheep. The apostles tend the sheep when they act like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind to go after the one who has gone astray. This corresponds to the command of the Lord to rebuke those who sin and to forgive again and again those who repent.
But this is not the end or sum of the role of the servant of the Lord. There are also all the ordinary day-to-day tasks that must be performed. These are represented by serving at table.
These three make up apostolic activity as faith working itself out in love.
We find this pattern at work in the Gospel itself. Earlier, Jesus sends the Twelve out with the mission “to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal [the sick]. Upon their return they tell Jesus what they had done. Together, they all withdraw to Bethsaida. But the crowds followed, so Jesus spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who needed to be cured. He plows the field and tends the sheep. When the Twelve advise Jesus at the end of the day to send the people away, he responds “give them some food yourselves.” They feed five thousand with twelve wicker baskets left over. They serve at table.
Again, when Jesus had completed his “field work” just before his passion, he instructed Peter and John to “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.”
When they are gathered together for the meal he said to the apostles, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer…”
To my mind, the Lord’s demand that once the apostles have done all that is commanded they should consider themselves unprofitable servants who have done what they were obliged to do is best understood when seen as pointing to this eager desire of the Lord to eat this Passover with them. For here he opens up their service into a share in the paschal mystery. He will not only die for them but grant them a share in his suffering.
For this to be full fruit he needs them to be humble servants who receive everything from their master. He needs them to be ready be put on his own mind, to be ready to be conformed to him in his own self-emptying love. To be able to say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
The genuine humility that sincerely renounces all attribution of achievement to oneself and hands it over to God frees us up to share in the whole of Jesus’ own experience. It frees him to to lead us wherever and in whatever way he wishes, bestowing gifts as he sees fit, knowing that he will find in our hearts a fertile field in which to plow deep furrows with his teaching, sheep that will recognize his voice, who, when they falter, will heed his rebuke in sincere repentance and receive the joy of the forgiveness of sins. In this rich dramatic action we find the increase of faith begged for by the apostles, a life that opens up into thanksgiving, joy and praise. This is a living participation in the eternal messianic banquet the Lord eagerly desires to share with his disciples.
