Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXVII per Annum C
2 October 2022

 For many weeks now we have been hearing the Lord’s teaching while on an extended journey to Jerusalem.  This section of St. Luke’s Gospel contains many challenging parables.  The Apostles, and we, have heard parables about the cost of discipleship over these weeks.  We have heard parables about repentance, being lost, and the extravagant mercy of God who searches us out.  We have heard parables about the proper use of wealth and riches, and the call to put our resources at the service of others as good stewards.  Today we are reminded that we are servants who have duties to fulfill and that we ought not fulfill those duties as if expecting some particular praise or reward for doing what we simply should do.  We have done only what we were obliged to do, to use words from the Gospel.  We each face many challenges in life and in living the faith.  We are not promised that we will navigate this life without difficulty.  We are not promised that the final resolution to suffering and challenge will be here in this life.  With this in mind, I bet the prayer of the Apostles could easily be the prayer each of us makes to Jesus: “Increase our faith.”

 Now the Apostles by this point certainly already had faith.  They had encountered Jesus and they had been changed.  They had come to believe in him.  Yet, they must walk with him and journey through life encountering all the things, all the ups and downs, that life brings to any one of us.  That the Apostles ask that their faith be increased is a reminder to us that faith is not static.  It is something that must grow.  We might even consider that hearing the series of challenging parables from the Lord, parables presented to us these past many weeks, we might suggest that the Apostles are also asking that their trust be increased.  The personal trust of the believer is, after all, another meaning of the word “faith”.  In other words, they are not seeking only the faith that believes in things but the faith that leads them to deeper trust to maintain their relationship with the Lord through all that life brings.

  In their prayer for increased faith, increased trust, Jesus uses the simple example of the mulberry tree.  He says, even if you have only a little faith, “you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”  The example highlights two unlikely, and even impossible things.  First, a mulberry tree is known to have such a broad, expansive, and deep root system that it is unlikely you are going to uproot it.  Second, a tree is not going to be planted in the sea and survive.  The idea with this image then is that faith has the ability to do things beyond our capabilities.  Faith can do the seemingly impossible.  And it does so, not because of us but, because of God’s power.  It is God who accomplishes things when we let Him act, when we have faith that calls out to Him for things we cannot achieve.

  Each of us faces moments and events of life that test us and that leave us feeling powerless.  The first reading from the Prophet Habakkuk demonstrates this and uses words that might resonate with us in our challenges.  “How long, O Lord?  I cry for help but you do not listen!... Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?”  Again, in this fallen world we are not promised an easy passage.  Suffering comes and it may last for a long time and it may come frequently.  We want answers and solutions and happy resolutions here.  But the word of the Lord through the Prophet Habakkuk calls us to have faith in the vision of the Lord’s promises to come.  That vision, the Lord says, “presses on to fulfillment…. If it delays, wait for it, it will surely come…. The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.”  There will be challenge and suffering, yes, but the one who has faith shall endure and shall live.

  And so, we come to the words of Psalm 95, the responsorial psalm of this Holy Mass, a psalm that the Church prays daily at the first prayer time of each day in the Liturgy of the Hours, called the Invitatory.  That psalm begins by referring to the Lord God as the Rock of our salvation.  That image is not just a generic image for strength and solid foundation.  Rather, it is a direct reference to the experience of God’s People in the exodus and desert wanderings.  The rock is the rock that Moses struck to provide the people water in the desert at Meribah and Massah.  There, as the people were being led and provided for in the desert, they were given water to drink yet at the same time they doubted.  They failed to completely trust.  In the very moment of being provided water the people were saying, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  And so, the section of the psalm we use today references that very event saying, “Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the desert, where your fathers tempted me; they tested me though they had seen my works.”

 The Church recognizes the challenges that each life brings and recognizes that even in the midst of blessings and God’s workings among us we are tempted to doubt and to lack faith.  The Church recognizes that we need greater trust because we lose perspective and focus in “our deserts”.  Just like the People of Israel did, we, too, have our places of contention and grumbling and testing, we have “our Meribahs” and “our Massahs”.  And so, at the beginning of each day, not knowing what may come our way, the Church places on our lips this very experience from the desert wanderings.  We use these same words today, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”  Like the Apostles we call out to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”  We beg that our vision and perspective may be purified in all things – all the moments and events that life brings us – that we may let God work to do the things we cannot see or achieve on our own.