It seems like an ordinary question the disciples just asked Jesus in this gospel reading: Increase our faith, it says in this translation, or, if you look at it literally, they say give us more faith.
We are at a point in the gospel where Jesus has been asking them to do some impossible-sounding things. Look backwards just a few chapters in this gospel of Luke to some of the parables and commandments Jesus has given these people. He has told them that they have to step forward and correct people who have sinned, and yet that they must forgive people endlessly for the same mistakes. He told them not only that they have to feed the poor, but that they have to lose any connection with money as a reward they care about. The list goes on and on.
We somehow imagine that the disciples, living with Jesus each day as they did, seeing miracles, hearing everything he had to say, knowing him personally, we figure that they had some clear advantages over us in the faith department. But the disciples have the same reaction to hearing Jesus’s view of the world that we do, they say, “Give me more faith.”
Who wouldn’t want more faith? Who could possibly take issue with that? The fact is, Jesus takes issue with the whole idea. He tells them that faith isn’t a matter of quantity, that there aren’t people who have a lot of faith who can do great things, and people with a little faith who don’t have the power to do much at all. That’s very hard for us to imagine. We think surely there are exceptional faith people and ordinary faith people — we think there are decisions or changes we couldn’t ever make because we don’t have enough faith, whereas these other people with all that faith can do the things like sell everything, go anywhere, take risks. Because they have such great faith, it’s easier for them.
And so we want more faith, we say. But maybe this whole idea that we’re not people of great faith is yet another one of the ways we find to push God away from us, keep God at a distance. If we imagine that God hasn’t chosen us for great things, if we think that God doesn’t look at us quite the same way, with the same love and excited expectation as any other person God has created, if we think that we somehow haven’t reached some kind of an inner circle, then we also, maybe, think that we’re not really included in those challenges Jesus kept throwing out to his disciples, when he asks them to do something foolish, or radical, or a big change from the way most people handle things. That would be a pretty safe place to be, standing a bit outside of the circle. But that’s not where we are.
If we believe nothing else about our relationship with God, it needs to be this: we are all equal in faith, because we each have the same portion of God’s love, and we have the same power to respond to God in ways that are miraculous. It is wonderful news, and yet we really fight believing it. So we find ways of thinking that there is a hierarchy of some sort where we are a little outside of the zone, and that we’re people who aren’t ready yet, who haven’t done enough of the prep work to take on what Jesus wants.
Now it’s true that you may feel like you don’t have enough knowledge of theology, or that you’re a little out of practice in your spiritual life, or there are some things having to do with our church that you’re not too clear on or happy about. All those things may be true. But those things have not much to do with the kind of faith Jesus is talking about. Because look what Jesus says, he answers a question about faith by talking about servants, it’s as if he’s saying, if you want faith, then you just get to work. If you are here in this church today willing to call yourself Jesus’s follower, then the idea that you only have a little faith is all wrong. You have plenty. Saying we don’t have enough faith can just be a way that we fool ourselves into imagining that we’re somehow spectators when Jesus talks, instead of his willing servants.
Maybe what the disciples were really saying today was that if they had more faith, they’d feel like the things Jesus asks them to do won’t seem so hard or so life-changing. Unfortunately, Jesus tells them, that’s not true. Doing what you hear Jesus calling you to do is just as hard for saints as it is for us regular suburban folk, and Jesus asks us all the same questions.
It’s good to want to be more in touch with God, but not to wait around for more faith. As it says in that second reading from Paul, God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather of power and love and self-control. We have enough of that spirit now for us to get started on anything.