27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
This weekend we begin the month of October and there is a dual theme throughout the month. It is the month when we celebrate the missionary effort of the Church throughout the world as well as celebrating the Rosary. Also this Sunday we have the annual Day for Life and it has as its focus caring for the Older Person. We remember all those members of our families and our friends who are Older as well as those who care for them. In the First Reading for this Sunday the prophet Habakkuk asks God how long he is going to ignore the cries of his battered people. He accuses God of simply looking on while tyranny and violence flourish. His cry is not a scream of despair but a cry that is rooted in faith in God and what he had done and is doing for his people it is a cry of faith. The Prophet believes God will do something and his perseverance in prayer and faith is proved right.. This Reading with its cry to God is our cry to God as we see all the things that are happening in our world today. We pray like the prophet that god will listen to our prayers knowing that he will hear and answer in due course.
The Gospel 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 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. 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 as well as 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. 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 not seven times a day but 77.
Jesus teaches, us to “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. But despite the 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. Realizing 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, Going forward we pray for greater trust and faith in God and his love for all of us so we are able to bring the seed of faith to others in their time and place .
Fullerton T 