Luke 17:5-10
If you were a disciple of Jesus as he traveled around the northern part of the Holy Land, you would have observed him curing people of all kinds of disorders, and sometimes he would say, “Your faith has saved you.” He also accused his apostles of having very little faith -- you remember when the disciples found themselves in the middle of a storm and called on him to save them; he woke from his nap and said to them, “Ye of little faith, why are you afraid?” So our friends the apostles seem to have decided that faith was something you could have more of or less of, and they wanted more. If you only had enough faith, great things could be done. It’s still a common position in the Christian world -- the more faith, the more miracles, the more prosperity, the more good things for you. So Lord, increase our faith.
I think I hear a little sarcasm in Jesus' voice when he says “IF you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you!” And surely the apostles, and some of us modern hearers, might think to ourselves, “Why on earth would anyone want that to happen?” It wouldn't do anyone, including the mulberry tree, any good whatsoever; it’s a pointless act that at best might amaze a few people for a short time.
We still speak as though faith is a quantity. We admire people with a lot of faith; when someone falls away from the church, we assume he does not have enough faith. We even talk about faith as a gift, and indeed it is, but it can’t be quantified. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that ordinarily, our intellect takes in sensory information and integrates it with memory, and then commands the will to act through the body and mind. The intellect comes first. But in supernatural faith, the will commands the intellect to contemplate something which cannot be completely known. It’s like a woman who falls in love with a man; she doesn’t know everything about him and never will, but makes the decision to love that person despite the uncertainty of what she knows about him; and it works both ways of course. In other words, faith is a decision to commit oneself to something only partially known
And that's the point of Jesus’ reflection about slaves. I know it says “servant” in the gospel passage, but the Greek word means slave, and the people who wrote the gospels knew the difference between servants and slaves. Slaves in Jesus’ time made up about a third of the population. Some lived under deplorable conditions, like the African slaves in the early years of our country. Those were the ones who would usually try to escape and get executed for their trouble. But most slaves were working off a debt, or had a long history of being associated with a well off family. Being a slave of a king was actually considered an honor. This was the kind of slave Jesus was talking about.
Unlike servants, slaves were part of the household. It was expected that they would be fed and given a place to sleep, and treated more or less humanely, and they would be expected to carry out reasonable labor for their master. Society as a whole acted as a check on abuses; if your slaves were relatively content and your household peaceful, that was a good thing; if there was a lot of strife and disruption, that brought you down in the eyes of your peers. And that’s the kind of situation Jesus envisions. The slave was a member of the household, although a subordinate member; and there was no mistaking his place.
In the Christian community we have been given a home by our Father and we are expected to carry out his will. The Pharisees and many Christians believe that the more good we do the greater our reward. But God the Father has given us a place in his household and looks after all our needs according to his own plans. Whatever good we do, whatever service we render, that’s only to be expected, because God has given us everything we have and promised that his slaves will one day be welcomed into the Master’s joy and given a place in the family like that of his son Jesus -- we will be adopted as children of the Master.
Faith is not magic; faith is not quantifiable; faith is the disposition to submit to our God as slaves now, knowing that although he needs nothing from us, he gladly accepts what we give. But he has already made plans for those who he has invited into his household, and being a slave to such a master is a privilege, not a punishment.
