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Back in 1985 when I came to faith…let me quantify that statement. I had been raised in and around the church. I believed in God. I believed Jesus died for my sins. I believed in forgiveness and Heaven and Hell. I believed that you had to be a good, moral person and that good, moral people went to church. I also believed that the US was specially blessed by God to bring peace and order to the world (I lost that one in university.). I believed all that stuff you’re supposed to believe if you’re a Christian in the US. I lived in the Bible Belt of the Southern US. Those beliefs were so much a part of that culture that even if you didn’t believe them, you still knew you were supposed to. If you just believed these things, you were on God’s good side.
But there was something missing from that blessed magical formula. What I hadn’t come to believe, was that God was really with me, that Jesus was with me and that by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit I could hear and follow him. In the wee hours of the morning on January 1, 1985 I gave my life to Jesus. I entered into servitude to him. I had to seek to know him and to listen for what he wanted me to do throughout this life he has given me and then do it. That is a markedly different approach to life than just doing what I wanted to do hoping God would bless me for being good and believing the right stuff about him.
So anyway, back in 1985 when I came to faith, TV preaching was in its heyday. The most prevalent message among the TV ministries seemed to be what was called the Health and Wealth Gospel, or the Name it and Claim It Gospel, or simply the Prosperity Gospel. Its basic tenet was that Jesus didn’t want his disciples to be sick and poor. You just have to believe that and claim it for yourself in Jesus’ name and you would have good health and become wealthy. If you wanted that fry cook job at Burger King you had to say “Fry cook job at Burger King, I claim you as mine in Jesus Name”, then wait for the phone call. If you were just scraping by, just give money to a TV ministry and what you gave would be returned to you 60, 80, or 100 times as much, so they promised. If you got sick and didn’t get better or didn’t get the job or your gift was returned multiplied, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith. You wavered. You doubted. And so, you needed to ask the Lord to increase your faith. To those TV folks, faith was a magic power that could be annulled by doubt. The more you believed, the more you would receive. Just believe!?
Well, the question for this morning is what did the disciples mean when they asked Jesus to increase their faith. If we take the passage out of its context, it very nicely fits into the “faith as magic power” school of thought. It sounds like if you remove all doubt from yourself, you could be like a Jedi warrior in the Star Wars movies and make a tree uproot and go jump in the ocean. I will admit that in the Greek world and language the word we translate as faith sometimes did get used that way. Regardless, if we put the disciples' request in the context of what has happened in the previous chapters in Luke’s Gospel, they are not asking for magical power.
They also are not asking for the ability to believe the right things about God and Jesus. Just like I was raised to believe there is a God, and Jesus died for my sins, and all that, they aren’t asking for Jesus to help them believe all the more what Jews in their day were supposed to believe. So, what were they asking for?
I hate to tell you this, but I am reasonably sure that we are reading our modern definitions of faith into this passage. We hear it as if the disciples were asking Jesus to make it so they had less doubt and more trust in him. Faith means more than just belief and trust as opposed to doubt. Faith is loyalty, devotion expressed through the fulfilment of obligations. The weight of its meaning falls more towards what we would call faithfulness not just faith. Just as love is not love until we do love, so faith is not faith until we do faithfulness.
Moreover, I am inclined to say that “increase” is not the right word. The Greek word simply means “add to”. So, “Lord, add to our faithfulness.” Were they asking for more faith to be added to what they already had or were they asking for something else? I think they were asking for something else; for more obligation through which to show their loyalty. Here we go; Randy’s complicated explanation.
In the chapters before this, Jesus has been using parables to prophetically proclaim that God had taken the responsibility of shepherding his people away from the Pharisees because they were abusing their role and authority. Instead of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with their God, they were power-greedy lovers of money who were using the Law of Moses to control and grow rich off of God’s people. Their modus operandi was to give the people the false hope that the Messiah was coming and if they wanted a place in his kingdom, they were obligated to keep the Law jot and title… or they would be fined if they were caught breaking it.
Jesus’ last words to his disciples (albeit within the hearing of the Pharisees) on the matter was simply that people are going to slip up and do something for which they feel guilty and ashamed of but WOE to anyone who causes another to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves. Inflicting guilt and shame was the business the Pharisees were in. The Pharisees were like a sycamore fig tree rather than mulberry which it resembles. The mulberry tree isn’t well rooted and it looks like Cousin It from the Addams family, but its fruit is delicious. It produces good fruit. The sycamore fig is better rooted and has a strong trunk that they used for lumber, yet its fruit is inedible, bad fruit just like the Pharisees. Jesus’ disciples were to instead practice the good fruits of accountability (to the Law of love) and forgiveness as opposed to the bad fruit of legalism. I am persuaded to say that the disciples, in realization that the Pharisees were out as the shepherds of Israel, were asking Jesus to add obligation to their loyalty, something more to do to prove their loyalty than just following him around as his students. They thought themselves ready to be the new shepherds of Israel.
Jesus’ response to them on this matter goaded their apparent lack of humility. Jesus asked them which of you would bring your servant in at the end of the day and sit them down at the table to eat (which they had been doing all along nearly daily every time they ate with him). Would you thank your servant for their work? Would you strip down to your loincloth and wash your servant’s dirty feet and then feed them (which Jesus would soon do for them). No, you would tell your servant who just came in from a hard day’s work, to make dinner ready for you and then feed themselves when you were done. You wouldn’t expect your servant to want to be thanked. You would expect your servant to humbly do what he was obligated to do.
In order to shepherd the people of Israel Jesus’ disciples would have to know humility. They would have to know how to humbly serve the people as opposed to ruling over them. They already had loyalty and faithfulness (faith like a mustard seed), they just needed to learn humility. Unfortunately, they won’t know humility until their teacher has washed their feet, until they’ve seen him die for the people, until they have felt his forgiveness for their betrayal, desertion, and denial of him. Just believing isn’t faith. Faith is faithfulness shown in humbly serving one another in love. Amen.
