We long for a faith that crashes down on us like wind and waves. We desperately crave some still, sturdy centre which will hold through every trial, even death itself. This is the faith we seek, and maybe even the faith we need. We imagine that such a faith is mighty, strong, and powerful.
What faith we have, though, seems to be something else. It disappears in a momentary rage. It provides no comfort in our anxious waiting. Distraction and busyness appear, and faith departs. We are creatures of a fragile and easily misplaced faith. We wish that it were otherwise.
***
The apostles want something to surrender to, and in a moment of catastrophic boldness, they ask to have their faith increased. They want to be able to endure anything. They want to give their whole lives over to the unreachable immensity of the numinous. They want to live in resonance with the Holy, and empty themselves even of their humanity. They, like us, ache to dissolve into powerful subservience, in which we do not need to worry, in which all will be well.
There is this wish for the ease of the hero’s sidekick, to be able to just let life wash over us, not confronted with our own weakness, but wrapped immovably in the comfort of God’s power.
Jesus tells them that if faith were something they could hold onto, something as fixed and firm as a mustard seed, however small, then impossible things would occur with ease. The mulberry tree does not move when commanded, however, and it does not thrive in the waters of the sea. The roots anchor it where it is, and the water that nourishes it has no salt. Faith is not a thing that can be held, can be stored, can be passed from person to person; faith is no object, and no commodity. Faith, instead, is lived.
Their wish to surrender, for him to be able to fix them, to make their faith somehow more robust, is a familiar one. We search for people who can promise to fix us, and then we offer ourselves to them, through the books that we read, the practices we take up, and the hours we sit at their feet, if only they will bring us to wholeness. At some point the book ends, the practice is over, and we are left alone to face the difficulties of really living. Perhaps we are a little more ready for the task, but never more than a little more ready. Life, faith included, is hard.
***
The apostles were not wealthy landowners endowed with a great many slaves to wait upon them. Jesus finds them in the streets and on the margins, these are wanderers and strangers, workers and seekers, not the established and endowed from among the great and the good.
These are the people with whom he shares this parable.
Christ tells the apostles that some great and powerful ruler, with hierarchical authority over those who serve him, does not actually care all that much about the wellness of those who serve. That kind of power is concerned with its own appetites and its own comfort, and makes only the barest provisions for the maintenance of the servants, the slaves. Those who are surrendered into their care will be taken care of just barely well enough so that things can continue as they are.
The apostles have cast Jesus, and for that matter God, in the role of a superior who can make choices for them, who can make it all better, who can fix that part of them which struggles to hold onto faith. He tells them that God is not like that, and he is not like that.
Power and authority looks out for itself, and God is not simply withholding from them the nourishment that they need. They want to let someone else make it so that they can proceed in some kind of powerful submission to the Holy, and this they have mistaken for faith.
God is not telling them when and whether they can eat, and Christ has no use for their slavery.
***
We do seem to think that God is deciding how everything will go. We imagine that God could really make it all better, but somehow we need to suffer, and God refuses to grant us miraculous salvation because either we have not yet earned it, or it’s better for us this way.
It’s no wonder that faith slips through our fingers when we try to find hope in a God like that.
We cast the Holy as a dictator who may or may not show benevolence towards us, and whose good graces we can stay in only through self-sacrifice. This is not the God we meet in Jesus.
Again and again, Christ shows us directly that life is very hard, and that the human experience is a real one, of deep significance in God’s sight, and not a game, a play, an illusion. There are some things which are passing away, but we are not among them, and our lives are real, and Christ joins us in our suffering. In the midst of all our trials, we must reach out as he does throughout the entirety of his ministry, by seeking to connect deeply with one another.
Life is hard and lonely, except that we can love each other, and band together, and hold the space in which we can truly see that God is, in fact, with us all along. There are some things that do not fail, and we find them in the love we share with one another, and not by the private power of the Holy which we ingratiate ourselves to through the willingness to surrender to an objectified, abstract, and external faith. It is how we live together that saves us, it is how we love that saves.
***
I want God to make it all better. I want a faith that lets me really rest in the presence of the Holy. My idea of what that looks like is almost certainly in error.
I think about how mustard grows, which is a recurring image of the Kingdom of Heaven in the Evangelion — the Good News — the Gospels. A lot of little, tangled plants grow up from little seeds, and because they are knit together, because they fill the field, they are good enough.
Mustard isn’t glorious, it isn’t triumphant. It is a plant that asks for little, that can subsist on scraps, but offers its own scrubby sort of existence. It isn’t much, but it’s enough.
The faith we are called to cultivate is not grand and mighty, but it is scrubby and scrappy. We have faith in love and in God while having very little understanding of either. We live out clumsy lives with good intent and often forget ourselves along the way. We do have fear, and we have moments where we actually do glimpse that nothing can destroy us. We know our smallness, and that our smallness is held and richly loved in the hands of God forever.
The increase of our faith looks smaller and scrubbier than the apostles think it has to. We consider that perhaps God really meant it in calling all Creation good. We entertain the possibility that other people, all people, even ourselves, are really children of God. We see that God is with us, even when that doesn’t make everything better.
Faith slips through our fingers, and still it isn’t really lost. We fall short of all our hopes, but we do not fall out of God’s love for us. We forget the Holy, and dwell in illusion, and the Holy does not disappear forever. This is a little faith. It comes back to us. It endures.
***
May your faith hold you in all the moments when it seems lost. May you surrender to the life that has been given you, and not wish too much for a life you could not ever really live. May you take up your place in the Kingdom, even if it is not all that you might have hoped. May you know the deep joy of a journey towards wholeness over grandeur, and togetherness over power. May you know that God is with you, and know that you are loved.