2 October 2022
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Maybe, we have faith all wrong. A common perception of faith is that it can be another skill that we can work on. However, is faith a skill like fitness or set of knowledge aspects that any of us can build up, study, or work on? Another common expression regarding faith may come at a time of loss, challenge, or struggle. After receiving difficult news or enduring a failure or getting hit by a tough blow, we may be consoled by our friends who say, “Have faith, everything is going to be okay.” But, this, “Have faith” way of offering consolation is used as if faith is like a favorite food that will comfort us. “I know that you are struggling, have a piece of cake. Things will work out.” By no means am I criticizing how faith is used or suggesting that faith should not be offered as a form of consolation in the midst of struggle. Faith is the best of all consolations! However, we may have this faith idea wrong. So, if faith is not a skill we can work on or a comfort food that we can savor, what is it?
According to the Catechism, faith is one of the three theological virtues, along with hope and love. “Theological virtues relate directly to God. They dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have the One and Triune God for their origin, motive, and object.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1812). In other words, faith, hope, and love are gifts of sanctifying grace provided by God to us so that we may be “divinized” or drawn into the relational love of the Triune God. There is no better consolation.
Who really has faith? Consider our Gospel today coming from the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus considers how a master would treat his servants. The servants are out in the fields dutifully working away at their labors. At the end of a long day of taking care of sheep and plowing, the servants come into the house and then it is only natural that the master expects them to keep working to prepare the dinner. The master is not the one who will prepare the dinner for his servants. So, the “faithful” servants carry out their duties, preparing the master’s dinner and doing what they have been commanded to do. And this is where Jesus drives home his lesson about faith to his apostles and to all of us. “So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”
What is faith? According to this brilliant scenario Jesus shares with his apostles and to us is that faith is the expectation God, the master, our Father, has in each one of us, his servants and his children. God is the one who has faith. God is the source of faith who then imparts faith onto us. In other words, God has faith in us to carry out the duties we have been created for; to perform our vocational calling to the full; to live our lives so completely in love and forgiveness of our brothers that we imitate the perfect obedience of Jesus who went to the cross for love of us to carry out the will of the Father.
At the end of the day, when we come home to our Master, our Father’s house, may we hear “well done my faithful servant, you have done what you were obliged to do.” There will be no better consolation.