Jesus’ followers asked him to increase their faith. But who has the responsibility to make that happen?
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the seventeenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 17:5-10), in which the apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith.
Jesus responded first with that well known comparison between faith and the mustard seed. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed — which is quite small — then you can say to a tree: go, uproot yourself from the ground, and plant yourself in the sea. And it will.
Jesus then went on to say, how many of you, if you are the master of a house, would come back and say to the servants, “Go and feed yourselves?” Instead, you tell them to prepare your dinner and you sit down at the table and they feed you. In just such a way, said Jesus, you should be doing what God has told you.
It seems a puzzling response to a question about “increase our faith.” And yet, when I think about it, the question itself is a puzzling one. “Increase our faith” and we want God to do that for us, or at least that’s the implication of the apostles’ question. But is that where faith gets increased?
The beginning of faith is something of a gift of God revealing God’s self to us in such a way that we can begin to have faith. But how does faith increase? Isn’t that something that’s our responsibility? Isn’t that something that we do? Isn’t that something that we work at?
Jesus compared it to serving a master and, indeed, that is a well-known metaphor for our relationship with God — put in a very specific way, preparing the meal, performing the service helps people out.
Now I don’t know that we need to feed God. I’m sure God appreciates our efforts to feed the Divine. What I do know is, that that basic task of preparing a meal for those around us is one of those things that God has asked us to do. If we are to increase our faith, then preparing meals for others and therefore opening our hearts to God: that is the way to increase our faith.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
