October 6th: Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time – Faith as a mustered seed

The power of our faith doesn't depend on its quantity but its quality; It seems to me that this is why, when the apostles said increase our faith, Jesus took them immediately out of the area of quantity, and brought them to the smallest seed he could think of, the mustard seed. Jesus could have said, for example: If your faith were the size of a grain of sand, or a speck of dust, but the point of the comparison with the mustard seed is that it is living; it has a living power which a grain of sand does not. Just as a small weed can split a slab of concrete, or a mustard seed can produce a huge tree in which the birds of the air find shelter, so the living power of faith can move mountains. The secret of the living power which faith has is that it is built on the living word of God. Faith, trust and deep commitment to the wonderful things that God does through the strangeness of his ways, are the basis of the Christian life. Through a deep and trusting acceptance of the goodness, yet strangeness of God’s ways, revealed to us through the loving gift of His Son, we can make sense of our lives. We, who have received this gift of living faith in God’s Word, have a responsibility for its growth in us, or more precisely, we have a responsibility to grow in this gift of faith.