REFLECTION Sunday´s Gospel

27th Sunday of the Year
(3 Oct 2010)

Fr James McTavish, FMVD

Needed - Courageous fidelity!

To live life well we need a healthy dose of courage. It takes courage to be faithful, to be faithful in the small details. Our faithfulness is a concrete sign of our faith. In the first reading of today we have the prophet Habakkuk asking God for some reassurance. Habakkuk complains that with all the woes around, it seems as if God is doing nothing about it. God answers him “Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.” (See Habakkuk 1,2-3;2,2-4). I don’t know if Habakkuk will feel reassured with this or not! This week I was praying and asking the Lord if all the things I am doing are useful and if they will have any positive outcome. It is easy to lose patience with God and think that he is just not doing anything! The psalmist reminds us not to harden our hearts. I remembered the saying of Jesus “Remain united to me and you will bear much fruit”. Sometimes you just gotta’ believe what the Lord tells you! That is why God tells Habakkuk “the rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.”

It takes courage to believe. For example to believe that prayer is efficacious. The danger today is to place so much emphasis on action, action and more action. Of course, action is important but not to the detriment of prayer. We need faith to believe in the power of prayer, we need to be courageous to make time to listen to the Lord in our busy schedules. Once St Theresa of Avila was writing to the renowned Bishop of Osma, commending him for his good deeds, but chastising him for his lack of prayer. She wrote “When I gave thanks to God for all the graces with which he has adorned you, humility, charity, zeal, I asked him at the same time to give you an increase of every virtue. He allowed me to see that you were lacking in nothing except the one grace which is the most necessary of all and without which the whole edifice will crumble and collapse. You are lacking in prayer and perseverance in prayer.”

In the second reading St Paul is writing to his beloved disciple Timothy “Beloved: I remind you, to stir into flame the gift of God that you have through the imposition of my hands.” (See 2 Tm 1:6-8, 13-14) It is a reminder to us all to stir into a flame the gift of our faith which we received in baptism. To be courageous disciples – as St Paul reminds us “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.” Cowardice is listed as a serious sin (See Rev 21,8) and many times it leads to omission, or o-mission (=zero mission!). Do I have a cowardly spirit when it comes to addressing the problems around me? This is why we have to fan into a flame the faith we have.

In the gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they gotta’ have faith! The apostles plead with Jesus to increase their faith. Jesus tells them “If you have 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.” In this he is not denouncing them for being faithless but is actually affirming their faith according to Fr Thomas Rosica, CSB. When Jesus says “If you had faith” we should remember that the Greek language offers two types of “if” clauses: those that express a condition contrary to the fact (“If I were you”) and those that express a condition according to fact (“If Jesus is our Lord”). The conditional clause in this verse is the second type; we could translate it “If you had faith [and indeed you do].” Fr Rosica comments that “Jesus’ response, then, is not a reprimand for an absence of faith, but an affirmation of the faith they have and an invitation to live out the full possibilities of that faith. Even the small faith they already have cancels out words such as 'impossible' " Actually a little faith can be very powerful. Pope John Paul II, in a homily on today’s gospel, wrote “Faith is always demanding, because faith leads us beyond ourselves. It leads us directly to God. Faith also imparts a vision of life’s purpose and stimulates us to action”. A little faith can ask a mulberry tree to shift! A small seed of faith can have a big result. Actually, to move a mulberry tree is not easy as it has a very extensive root system and is hard to uproot. What can the mulberry tree represent? A life that is fixed, immovable, static, comfortable and rooted in a routine. What can move us when we find ourselves like this? A little faith! It can move the mulberry tree to the sea which is a tall order as a tree would not be expected to grow there. When we trust what the Lord is telling us we find ourselves thriving in a new, unexpected, challenging and seemingly impossible environment. The New Jerome biblical commentary reminds us “Genuine faith can bring about quite unexpected things”.

Let us pray for the grace of a lively faith, one that is shown in action. In what way does your faith show in your life? In what way might Jesus be asking you to be more faith-ful? Let us ask Mother Mary’s help too, to be more faithful disciples of Jesus. The goal is to be faithful, until the end. May the Spirit grant us the gift of courageous fidelity, until the end. Amen.