The Wonder of It

Twenty-seventh Sunday of the Year. Fr Robert Ombres preaches on the extraordinary gift of faith.

Jesus often startled the apostles, and in the opening of today’s gospel he still startles us. If we have even a small amount of faith, as tiny as a seed, we can uproot and move a tree. Although said some two thousand years ago, these words will not just glide past us. They startle and puzzle us, they make us pause and marvel.

In fact, a sense of marvel may be needed to make us appreciate anew what an astonishing gift our Christian faith is, especially if we were baptised as infants. The virtue of faith is God-given and not a natural development, not a higher stage in the evolution of the human species. We are not Christians by birth, but by baptism. No one can give faith to another, only God can. We can of course pray that someone be given faith, we can help to remove obstacles (intellectual and moral) to accepting faith, and we can explain the consequences of having been given faith.

Faith is astonishing, something to marvel at. To have been given faith relates us to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. To believe has various meanings for Christians, one of them being ‘to believe in God’ in the sense that we say of someone  ‘I believe in Mary, she will not let me down’ or ‘I have faith in Fred, he can be relied on’. With faith comes trust in the reliability of God. It is because we trust God that we can entrust ourselves to him.

But is all this just arrogance on our part? Anticipating this reaction to the greatness of faith, Jesus in today’s gospel immediately speaks about our littleness before God. As the remarkable power of the seed-like faith is made startling by Jesus, so is his description of the dutiful servants as unworthy.

At this point, our second reading is illuminating. We are told that we have been trusted to look after something that is precious; we have to guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. Something that is precious because it involves the faith and love that are in Jesus Christ.

As in so much that God does, we cannot understand fully the reasons for it. Why some individuals are given faith and not others is beyond our knowledge; this too is part of the wonder of it. God’s loving providence of course extends to everyone, with or without the gift of explicit faith that makes us Christians. But for those to whom faith has been given it is a precious gift to be guarded and used.

Today’s gospel invites us to marvel at the gift of faith without us claiming it as our achievement – not to us Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory! These two dimensions of our Christian faith, the greatness of faith and the smallness of the believer, were summed up elsewhere by St Paul when he said that we have a treasure in earthen vessels. This was to make clear that an extraordinary power comes from God and not from us.

So two truths are given to us today, one about God and one about us, and we need to hold on to both of them because they are interconnected. We should marvel at the extraordinary gift of faith we have received from God, yet be conscious that we are only the fragile holders of something precious. Experience teaches us which of these two truths is proving hard to believe and accept.

On the one hand, we may think there is nothing precious or extraordinary about being a Christian, nothing to marvel at in what God has done and we should witness to. Faith then becomes a merely human construct, a personal choice we can make from among the several points of view and life-styles on offer. On the other hand, we may become arrogant and over-confident before God and others, thinking ourselves to be beyond the reach of sin. In the end, we need to have great confidence in God and a humble evaluation of ourselves.

Readings: Habakkuk 1:2-3,2:2-4 | 2 Timothy 1:6-8,13-14 |Luke 17:5-10