Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon in which I spent a fair bit of time talking about all the connections between the gospel reading for that morning and the preceding two chapters. This is not that sermon. Luke gathered a fair number of sayings and brief scenes which he wanted to use that didn’t belong to any larger collection of stories and sayings; he dealt with them by inserting them between the main sections of his narrative. Luke 17:1-10 is one such insertion, comprised of four brief scenes of Jesus teaching his disciples; the compilers of the lectionary, for whatever reason, have given us two of the four.
I thought at first about just doing one of those two. It’s easy, if a biblical text seems to lack unity and coherence, to chop it up like a butcher into chunks of disconnected meat. Several major commentators on Matthew, for instance, take this approach to the Sermon on the Mount. One of the things Regent taught me was to resist that easy assumption and look for connections and structure; so I decided to see if I could find a common thread between the two parts of our passage this morning. Spoiler alert: I think I found one, as you’ll see in a little bit.
Before we get there, though, we need to spend some time with each section in turn. In verses 5-6, the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith—give them more faith, strengthen their faith, however you want to think of it. In their request, they sound a lot like modern American churchgoers, because the idea that the size and strength of your faith matters is a common one. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong, as Jesus proceeds to illustrate. He holds up a hand and says, “Look at this mustard seed—if you can see it peeking out from between my fingers. Even if you have only this much faith and all the rest you have is doubt, you can command this mulberry tree to be completely uprooted, teleported to the sea, and grow there—and it will.”
Three points of interest here. First, have you ever tried to uproot a mulberry tree? I know some of you have heard stories about my wife’s years-long war on the yucca plants on our property; she’s declared victory more than once, only to have the yucca come back like a determined cat. We don’t have many yucca now, almost 18 years after we bought our house, but we do still have them. That said, as Sisyphean as Sara’s war on the yucca has been, we’ve had more success getting rid of them than we have getting rid of mulberries. There’s good reason for that, because mulberries develop exceptionally broad and deep root systems which have enabled some to survive for six hundred years. Uprooting an entire mulberry tree is a huge task if you don’t have a fleet of construction vehicles handy; but Jesus tells his disciples, “Just say the word.”
The second point of interest is the image of a tree growing in the ocean. Between the ocean’s instability and unpredictability and the fact that ocean water is salt, not fresh, all of a sudden the idea of uprooting a mulberry tree seems downright plausible by comparison. It’s a vivid hyperbolic image of the impossible. As such, it’s akin to the image Jesus uses elsewhere of a camel going through the eye of a needle—it’s ludicrously impossible. And yet, this, too, Jesus says, you can command and it will happen if you have just the least bit of faith.
The third point of interest is that on other occasions Jesus upped the ante even further. In Matthew 17:20 and 21:21, Jesus tells his disciples if they have faith the size of a mustard seed, they can command “this mountain” to move and it will. We’ve generalized this over the years, but it seems clear to me Jesus had one particular mountain in view when he said these things: Mount Zion, on which Jerusalem and the Temple sat. Why does that matter, when Zion is fairly short as mountains go? Look at Psalm 125:1: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.” We’ve moved from the practically impossible to the logically impossible to the scripturally impossible, with no less assurance.
Now, to be clear, Jesus is not saying “faith can move mountains.” In 1989, Kim Boyce released a song titled “Faith” which got heavy airplay on Christian radio; the chorus declared, “Faith can move the highest mountain,/turn deserts into fountains,/part the mighty waters of the deepest sea;/faith can make a broken heart mend,/bring the rain from heaven,/faith can even change the course of history.” Many, many people believe that, but it’s categorically wrong. Faith does none of those things. God does those things. That’s why even faith the size of a mustard seed is sufficient—we only need enough to make the connection.
Now, as some of you know, a week ago last Friday I went down to our September presbytery meeting at Covenant Church in West Lafayette, and Bronwyn went with me because that’s her church down there. Our presbytery’s stated clerk—the administrative leader of the governing body—is a teaching elder, the pastor of a church in Flint, Michigan, named Pete Scribner. I have a lot of respect for Pete; he’s one of those people whose integrity goes for miles. He told the story of driving down to western Indiana for a meeting and having his GPS re-route him twice due to a bad accident on the freeway and a bridge closure on a state highway, resulting in a lot of miles on county roads through a lot of places the size of Packerton. In one of those little towns, he saw this on a church sign: “We’re a little church, but we serve a big God.”
That is the understanding and the mindset Jesus wants us to have. What matters is not the size of our faith, or of anything else about us, what matters is the size of the object of our faith. That’s why our idols will always betray us in the end. It’s why our persistent efforts to find salvation through better laws and better politics will always fail; it’s why my first political principle anymore is Psalm 146:2: “Put not your trust in princes, in mere mortals, who cannot save.” You don’t need bigger faith, you need faith in a bigger God. If you understand how big God is, then if he calls you to do the impossible, the implausible, the unbelievable, the ridiculous, if you have barely enough faith to do what he tells you—it will happen. It doesn’t matter if your faith is big enough. God is big enough. If you want your faith to be stronger, act like it already is.
As we turn to verses 7-10, I want to invoke the spirit of the least-remembered great American leader of World War II, Admiral Ernest J. King, know facetiously to the Navy as “Uncle Ernie.” Admiral King was made Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet in 1940, then promoted to Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet after Pearl Harbor. A few months later, he was also appointed Chief of Naval Operations, making him the only man in American history to serve as both COMINCH—the senior operational commander for the U.S. Navy—and CNO—the Navy’s senior administrative official—at the same time. He may have had more to do than anybody but FDR with how the war was won. However, he didn’t cooperate with the press; one reporter grumbled if King had his way, the U.S. would issue one press release for the entire war, it would come at the very end, “and it would read, quote, We won, unquote.”
King was tough, demanding, abrasive, authoritarian, irascible, and fiery. FDR famously said, “He shaves every morning with a blowtorch.” His level of expectations created a certain amount of resentment in the Atlantic Fleet over the course of the war, because it was a lot easier to win medals in the Pacific than the Atlantic. Admiral Nimitz, I gather, was reasonably willing to award military honors to those who served under him, while the Atlantic Fleet under Admiral Ingersoll followed King’s philosophy: “Don’t expect a medal for doing your job.”
As odd as this introduction may seem, King’s dictum is the lesson of this parable in a nutshell. We shouldn’t think of God as being like Ernie King, of course; this is a man of whom one of his daughters said, “He is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.” The problem is, we tend to go too far the other way. Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants, for the servant doesn’t know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends,” and we start to think of him as on our level, as “buddy Jesus.” That’s a grave mistake. Yes, Jesus calls us friends, but we are still his servants. We’re still just human, even with his Spirit in our hearts; he’s still God, vastly greater, more powerful, more glorious, and more good than we are. Yes, he serves us, but that doesn’t make us masters; it is purely his grace to us, and nothing we deserve. This parable helps us keep ourselves and God in proper perspective.
In unpacking it, I’m indebted to Kenneth Bailey for two key points of understanding and one point of emphasis. The first key is understanding the scenario. Most people in that culture had at least one servant. In fact, the master in this story is probably on the poor end of the working class, to use our terms, because he only has one. Only the poorest of the poor had no servants at all; they would often hire their children out as household servants to ensure they were fed. This may sound demeaning and unfulfilling, but remember, this was a world in which mere survival was far harder than it is for us, and one which was ruled by class and social status. In that world, being a servant was usually a pretty good deal. Yes, it meant absolute obedience to one’s master, within the limits of the Law. It also meant security, a place to live, and food to eat; and for one who served a good master, it gave life a sense of meaning and value.
This master is a good and reasonable one. The meal here is not dinner but supper, eaten about three in the afternoon. The servant has done a normal day’s work outside, nothing terribly long; once he makes supper, he’ll have some time for himself. He isn’t being abused or treated with disrespect. What’s expected of him is fair, and in return, all his own needs are met. He has no reason for discontent, and no cause for complaint.
You might wonder how I can say that when the master won’t even thank his servant for serving him; but while that’s how our English translations render verse 9, that’s not actually what the text says. There’s a standard Greek word for “thank you,” eucharisteo, which Luke uses as many times as Matthew and Mark combined; but he doesn’t use it here. The literal reading of Jesus’ question in verse 9 is, “He doesn’t have grace for the servant because he did what was commanded, does he?” It’s easy to read that and miss the significance because your brain is used to the standard translation; that’s where the point of emphasis comes in, because this is important. The question here is not “does the master appreciate the servant and say thank you?” but “does the master give the servant special favor for doing his job?”—to which the answer is “No.”
This matters not just because it gives us a better understanding of the master in this parable but because it sets us up to understand verse 10, which is where we really have problems. Why would Jesus tell his disciples to call themselves unworthy? Or, worse, worthless, as we see in other translations? Here’s the second key point: that’s not what Jesus is saying. The word the NIV translates “unworthy” literally means “without need”; from “unneeded” it came to mean “worthless” or “miserable” in common Greek usage. Thing is, of course, Jesus wasn’t speaking Greek, and if we take that literal meaning we get something which makes perfect sense for the Jewish culture in which Jesus lived and taught, and for the cultures of the Near East and Middle East down to the modern era. Let’s say I did something for you and you wanted to know if you owed me anything. The idiom to express that would be to ask, “Is there any need?” To tell you no, you don’t owe me anything, I would respond, “There is no need.”
Following Dr. Bailey, I believe this is what Jesus is on about here. He’s telling his disciples, “When you’ve done everything you were told to do, don’t expect a medal for doing your job. Instead, say, ‘We’re your servants—you don’t need to pay us extra for doing what you pay us to do.’”
Now, I said earlier I thought I’d found a common thread between these two brief scenes, and it’s this: the economy of the kingdom of God is based not on earning but on gift. On the one hand, we don’t have to earn God acting by having enough faith. We have to have faith, yes, but that’s not because we have to meet some sort of minimum standard, it’s just a practical reality: if we don’t have any faith in God at all, we won’t go to him, we’ll turn to ourselves or to someone else. There is no great merit to the power cord for your refrigerator, but if you cut it off, all your food would spoil. Something is all that’s needed. As we see in Mark 9:24, even crying out, “Lord, I believe—help my unbelief!” is enough.
On the other hand, we can’t earn extra favor from God by anything we do. None of it goes beyond what he expected of us, and none of it is anything like enough to put God in our debt. I was talking about this a bit with one of my colleagues this past week, and when I said that all is gift, she asked, “What about the rewards that are promised in the Bible?” My immediate response was, “Those are gift, too.” I spent some time later thinking that over, and decided I agreed with what I’d said (which is always the preferred conclusion, of course). Jesus will reward his faithful ones, not because we’ve earned rewards as a bonus for our excellent work, but because he delights in us and in our efforts to follow him. God doesn’t need us. He could accomplish all his purposes without us—and quite frankly, could probably accomplish them a lot more efficiently. But God isn’t in this to maximize efficiency; he’s not a devotee of Six Sigma or Kanban or anything like that. He invites us into his work, with all the breakage and all the mess we make, simply because he wants to include us. It’s all gift, front to back, start to finish.
This means what we think we deserve, whether good or bad, is irrelevant. Nothing we do is going to outweigh the love and grace of God, and nothing we do is going to obligate him to do anything. Nothing we do and nothing we receive gives us any grounds for spiritual pride or for a claim of any sort of superiority over anyone, and nothing gives us any grounds for piling the crushing weight of “having enough faith” on anyone else. We have no grounds whatsoever for self-righteousness, because anything that comes from ourselves isn’t righteous. All our righteousness is from God; all of it is the purest gift.
It all comes down to this: the life of the kingdom of God, the gift of the kingdom of God, the righteousness of the kingdom of God, the reward of the kingdom of God, is the love of God in Jesus Christ. Fear is gone and hope is sure: Christ is ours forevermore. This we celebrate, this hope we raise, this we re-member, as we come to the Table of the Lord. We remember that when we could not go to God, he became one of us, living our ordinary life and dying an extraordinary death, bearing all our blight down to the depths of Hell—and leaving it there to rise again from the dead. We declare that by his death, resurrection, and ascension he has established a new and eternal covenant of grace and reconciliation so that we might be accepted by God and never forsaken.
We celebrate that Christ himself gathers us to this table, together with all his body across this world and across the full span of time itself. We see this now only in promise, but we declare that when time comes to its harvest, we will see this in full.
We raise our song of hope, for this bread and wine are not all there is; they are a promise made physical for us to see and touch and taste, the beginning of the great feast which is coming. We declare that Christ is faithful and his promise is sure: time will come to its full ripeness, that he who scattered the seed will reap its full harvest, and on that day he will gather us to himself, we will see him face to face, and at last we will know as we are known.
As you come forward to the Table, there’s one more thing, one very small reminder of the promise and gift of God: a dish of mustard seeds. Please feel free to take a few—there are paper cups to carry them in—to remind you of the promise and the gift of God.
“Military Ribbons 3 x 5” ©2021 Wikipedia user Xplormtn; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
