Lord, increase our faith

5 OCTOBER 2025 | LUKE 17:5-10

The disciples’ plea for an increase of faith arises more from fear than fervour, and understandably so: they were on their way to Jerusalem, where their association with Jesus would almost certainly put them in mortal danger. Doubtless some of them wavered, wondering what they’d got themselves into; and so, not unreasonably, they looked to Jesus for reassurance. But what they got sounds like a ticking off rather than reassurance.

What lies behind Jesus’ seemingly unhelpful response, however, is his realisation that, yet again, they were missing the point: they were asking for the right thing, but for the wrong reason, while relying on what they hadn’t got for what they didn’t need. Their problem wasn’t weak faith, but misplaced faith. Their mind-set, in other words, was a religious one and their faith was religious faith, not Christian faith. Jesus was trying to teach them that faith in him, Christian faith, isn’t just a new version of an old thing, but an unimaginably different and entirely new thing.

And that’s where his bizarre illustration fits in. Jesus stops them in their tracks by telling them that if they’d even the tiniest faith – faith, that is, as he meant it – they’d be able to uproot the deepest rooted of all trees and plant it in the sea. They would be able to do, that is, both the impossible and the unimaginable, with faith even “the size of a mustard seed”, not because their faith was great, but because God is great. As psalm 17 has it: “With You, I can break through any barrier, with my God I can scale any wall.”

Faith, as Jesus means it, as opposed to the way they (and many of us) misunderstand it, is not something we learn, earn or, merit, and certainly not the fruit of cleverness (though it certainly engages cleverness, where it finds it) but, rather, a knowing born of love (Lonergan). Faith is the kind of knowledge that can be given and received only between persons, a sharing in a person’s own knowledge of themselves, a disclosure or, better, a revelation which, even in our experience of one another, surpasses all other ways of knowing. In the gift of faith, God shares his own knowledge of himself with us, as we do with one another, in the love that is friendship, the core of all authentic love. That is the heart of Christian faith.

In Christian faith, what is borne in upon us by grace, is that, because we are loved, come what may, our lives are held safe in God’s providence. That unconditional love is experienced, to adapt Gerard Manley Hopkins and to paraphrase St Paul, respectively, as an ‘inrush’, in which God’s love ‘floods our heart’. Or, as when, as Seamus Heaney has it (paraphrasing again), the heart is caught ‘off guard and blown open’. Love is the only possible response: love responds to love, “heart speaks unto heart” (Newman). In Christ, the heart of God has spoken to our hearts.

In this sense, what we believe and what it is to believe come together. The whole of what we believe is rooted in the fact that the ultimate mystery behind and beyond everything, “creation’s secret force”, is personal. We are not just made by God but loved by Him. Faith is the conviction that the profoundest truth about us is that “it is because we are loved that we exist” (Olivier Clément). To live and to die in and by faith is to reside our entire trust in that all-encompassing truth.

And, lastly, what are we to make of the enigmatic tailpiece to this gospel to the effect that we should think of ourselves as unworthy servants? On the face of it, that sounds like an incitement to self denigration. But it’s making another deliberately colourful, if slightly oblique, point about mind-sets and mentalities. Jesus is steering us away from that particularly unattractive mind-set, the book-keeping mentality, that prioritises cost over value. Our relationship with God is not transactional or instrumental: everything that is ours is ours only because it has been shared with us. The greatest gift God has shared with us is not just life as we know it now which, though precious, is time-bound and finite, but his own divine life, which is eternal. That God did not count the cost of sharing with us what is of infinite value is testament to his unfailing love and friendship.