This week we began the extraordinary month of Mission, October is the month when we pray for the missionary’s who bring the gospel message to those in other countries so that the people there will have faith in Jesus and what he teaches us. The Gospel for this Sunday is made up of two apparently unrelated sayings of Jesus, one dealing with the gift of faith and the other a very stark and challenging reminder to the apostles of the call to service they have received as people sent by God to share in Jesus’ mission of proclaiming the Good News. We might be tempted to skip over such ‘hard sayings’ but we are asked to listen to them because the Gospel always liberates us from false ideas about ourselves and God and that can only be a good thing.
So many people have little or no faith and many who have been brought up in the catholic faith have left for many reasons. Perhaps we think that having faith means believing certain things. Thinking our faith is small can keep us from doing so many things that we are called to do by our faith in Jesus the Son of God. The disciples must have thought their faith was so small they couldn’t act on it. But Jesus wants his disciples and by association ourselves to trust and act on our god given faith.
The alternative to acting out of faith would be saying things like: I can’t take on that responsibility, I don’t have enough faith. I can’t be kind to those people that will take more faith than I have. The disciples may have felt similar inhibitions after hearing what Jesus just taught about not leading others into sin and the necessity to forgive someone seven times a day (17 1-5). But Jesus teaches, “Act on the little faith you have. You’ll be surprised what you can do.” His example of the deep-rooted mulberry tree underlines his lesson to us about the power of the smallest seed of faith to work marvels. We may find ourselves doing something that surprises us and those who know us. Perhaps it’s a great act of charity; working away on another’s behalf; or, an act of forgiveness. Such deeds often win praise among those around us. But despite the remarkable things we might do, we must acknowledge the source of all our good deeds the mustard seed that is faith planted in us by God. Realising this we can say with those servants in the parable: “We are unprofitable servants, we have done what we were obliged to do.” We could also add: “We have only done what the mustard seed of our faith has enabled us to do. “God gives us the grace to do great things in his name.
As we pray for our faith to be strengthened we thank god for all those people who helped us to have faith in the first place, our parents, families, teachers, friends and our clergy throughout our lives all of them played their part in giving us the faith. Although Christ was speaking to the Apostles, His words apply to all of us, in our own lives here and now. Following the example of the Apostles, we must all pray for greater trust and faith in God and his love for all of us.
Fullerton T 