How Big Is Your Faith?

20th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 17:5-10

How "big" is your faith? Do you find this a strange question? Well, let’s think about today’s Gospel reading.

The disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, increase our faith,” [Luke 17:5-6] and he responded by telling them that if their faith were only as big as a mustard seed, they could order a tree to jump into the ocean! In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus also talks about moving a mountain. What’s this about? Was Jesus telling us we don’t have enough faith? Was he telling us to try to move mountains in order to prove that we have faith?

I think our problem is that our perspective is wrong. We look at the mustard seed from “our” side – compared to it, we are giants, many thousands of times larger. From this perspective, it seems that we ought to easily be able to come up with such a tiny amount of faith, and yet Jesus tells us that we don’t even approach that quantity!

We really should look the other way. Jesus is telling us that we have plenty of faith, that only the tiniest amount is all we need. Even if our faith is only the size of an atom – nowhere near the size of a gigantic mustard seed in comparison – it is plenty, it is all that we need! I don’t know if Jesus knew anything about nanotechnology, but I think he was hinting at just such a thing – a truly infinitesimal amount of something can be very powerful.

We need to change our point of view, our perspective, and we need to see that an amount of faith as large as a mustard seed would be a great deal indeed – far more than is really needed, unless we are into magic tricks like moving trees and mountains.

The other consideration in what Jesus says today lies in what the disciples requested: “increase our faith.” That was the wrong thing to ask, and Jesus may have been a little peeved with them for asking. It is not Jesus’ task to increase our faith, to give us faith, or to do anything other than what he did – to offer us a reason to believe. Asking Jesus to increase something that we should already have enough of, that we should actually be offering to him as a gift, is just plain wrong.

Instead of addressing his followers’ impertinent request, Jesus patiently reminded them that they already had all the faith that they needed. The issue was not how much faith they had – and they really only needed a tiny amount – it was the fact that they doubted themselves. They thought that their problems, issues, doubts, and concerns were getting in the way of their faith. All they needed to do was forget about such things and get to work building the Kingdom.

That’s what Jesus tried to tell them in the parable that follows [Luke 17:7-10]. He asks a simple question: does the master reward the servant for doing his or her job? No, of course not! The master receives the servant’s labor and accepts it – and the servant – for doing what is expected, for a job well done. That’s all we need to think about: not how much faith we do or do not have, but whether we are doing our work as children of God and citizens of God’s eternal Kingdom. As long as we are doing that, worrying about increasing our faith is a waste of time, and Jesus does all he can to set us on the right path.

So let’s forget about asking Jesus to increase our faith. Let’s stop thinking about that mustard seed as something tiny and recognize it for what it is – a quantity that is many times more than what we actually need. And let’s stop doubting ourselves and our faith. We have all the faith that we need. There is work to be done, and we are the ones to do it. Let us be about it. Let us go forth and labor. Let us serve the Lord and each other. Amen!