October is not an especially exciting month liturgically: we have an uninterrupted run of Ordinary Sundays, with readings from chapters 17 to 19 of St Luke’s Gospel. But sometimes unexciting can be a good thing, and it’s especially valuable to pay attention to the flow of the Gospel as it unfolds from week to week.
In particular, our first two Gospels this month, Luke 17:5-10 and 17:11-19 combine to form an important part of Jesus’s teaching on discipleship as Luke relates it. It begins and ends with faith. When in verse five the apostles ask the Lord to “increase our faith”, as our translation has it, we should read this as a response to what has come immediately before, for some reason omitted from the lect-ionary, which is the demand to forgive repeat-edly (v4). To do this, overlooking the faults and failures of our brothers and sisters, even of our enemies, over and over again, is of course quite unnatural – or better, supernat-ural. This kind of mercy is a characteristic of God, and in asking us to act like God Jesus is asking us to act supernaturally. Supernatural behaviour demands a supernatural gift, and that is what faith is.
We may feel downhearted when we read that if we had the tiniest bit of faith we could uproot trees. There is a danger of thinking that we just need to strain harder and harder to feel faith sufficient to move mountains, but this is not what faith is like. It is a gift, something we can never build up for ourselves, never work hard enough to deserve, but a new way of seeing, a new way of being and a new way of speaking that comes from God.
To speak from faith, for example to utter a word of true forgiveness, is to speak with divine power, to share in the power of the Creator who does so much more than uproot trees and move mountains. It seems to me more powerful to bring God’s untiring mercy into the lives of our fellow sinners than it is to uproot a tree.
This kind of speaking from faith is what it is to labour in the vineyard as a disciple. Christ goes on to speak about the rewards of our labours, and he reminds us that, since faith is a pure gift from God, we can claim no credit for exercising it, and therefore deserve no reward. He gives us our lines to say: “we are merely servants; we have done no more than our duty”. We rehearse these lines every time we go to Mass, when we say “Lord, I am not worthy…”
Is this another reason to feel downhearted? Especially if we notice that a better translation of “merely servants” is in fact “useless slaves”! Are we really to conclude that, because owners treat their slaves this way, God will treat his children so? I should say not. Rather, we are presented with a challenge: will any one of us say to his servant, “Come and have your meal”? Will we allow our faith to make us into servants of all, welcoming everyone to sit at the groaning table of the Lord?
That God offers this welcome to all is emphasised in the next week’s reading, in which the contrast is drawn between the Samaritan leper and the other nine who, presumably, were Jewish. This newly-cleansed leper is told “your faith has saved you” at the end of the reading, and this takes us back to the theme of the previous week: as disciples we are all saved from the status of outcasts – outcasts from God’s love, because of our sins, now forgiven through Christ. To be saved is to be cleansed, healed and forgiven, and our response must be to give thanks, recognising that we have done nothing to merit any reward.
More than this, though, the response of the Samaritan leper is contrasted with that of the others who are also cleansed. They do as they are told, we may suppose, and go and show themselves to the priests. But the Samaritan wants to remain with Christ, thanking him and worshipping him. He recognises in the presence of Christ the visitation of the Lord to his creation. Here in this person is the mercy of God to be found, here in this man is the place of encounter with the living God. To be a faithful disciple is to recognise that, to give thanks for it, and to allow the power of God working in us to make us also into places of encounter with the divine mercy.
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