Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
1 st reading: Hab. 1: 2-3; 2: 2-4
2 nd reading: 2 Tim. 1: 6-8, 13-14
Gospel: Luke 17: 5-10
Through the Eyes of Faith
Seeing the world through the eyes of our Faith, being continually
aware of the presence of God everywhere, enables us to grow stronger in
our faith. Jesus warns that temptations to sin will always be with us.
When someone sins against us and then asks forgiveness, we must be
willing to forgive. The apostles then ask Jesus to increase their faith.
They have seen the miracles Jesus has performed which certainly give a
very strong indication of his authority and words of wisdom. They
probably feel they need the same authority if they are to preach as He has
done. Jesus’ reply seems extraordinary. Who has ever commanded a tree
to be uprooted and it was done? But the point of Jesus’ reply is not so
much to emphasise the quality of faith necessary, but its smallness. The
mustard seed is the smallest of seeds. Nor is Jesus suggesting they have
no faith at all because they are not uprooting trees! The faith that Jesus
wants for us to have can be as little as that and it will grow provided we
nourish it daily.
It is important to understand the nature of faith which Jesus is
pointing to. As the Catechism has explained, faith is certain. If you have
faith, you cannot doubt it. “To be sure”, the Catechism says, “revealed
truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but (as St
Thomas Aquinas says) the certainty that the Divine Light gives is greater
than that which the light of natural reason gives.” Faith is a grace, a gift
we receive from God, from the Divine Light. And as St John Henry
Newman wrote: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” And
furthermore he says: “I may love by halves, I may obey by halves; I
cannot believe by halves: either I have faith, or I have it not.” And this is
why Jesus frequently upbraided his disciples for doubting. When at the
Lord’s bidding Peter fearlessly stepped out of the boat but then became
afraid of the wind and began to sink, Jesus caught hold of him saying “O
man of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Doubt is what can bring a person from belief to unbelief. It will not
strengthen faith. We should realize that this is quite different to the way a
scientist works, and legitimately works. He proposes a theory which he
then sets out to test by experiment. If the theory agrees with experiment
he can have a certain confidence, but not an absolute certainty, in the
validity of his theory. The great scientist and engineer, Sir William
Froude, close friend of Newman, claimed he had “a sacred duty to doubt”
because this is how he worked, and was very successful in his work, as ascientist.
But this is not how faith works. Faith is a gift from God which
we receive, certainly following evidences we observe, but once we
assent, there is no doubt. Froude could not accept this and so ended up
being an agnostic throughout his life, despite the fact that one after
another, His wife, Catherine, and his children became Catholics under the
influence of Newman! We cannot devise experiments to prove that God exists.
See the beauty in creation. The great physicist Paul Dirac wrote
that you can recognize truth by its beauty. See the world and God’s
providential care for it through the eyes of faith, the eyes of love. The
Irish writer, Aubrey de Vere, friend both of Newman and of Wordsworth,
wrote of this poet who was so inspired by nature: “In the presence of
Nature he seemed to be always either conversing with her as a friend, and
watching her changeful moods, or sometimes rapt, like a prophet, in
mystic attention to her ‘oracles’. It was by no means the picturesque
aspects of Nature which affected him most – … for him it was in her
deeper meanings that the inspiring influences of Nature chiefly resided.”
This is what inspired his poetry. “He was never tired of insisting on it that
the soul of poetry was Truth.” But even greater, deeper, more mysterious
and inspiring than this ‘soul’ is the mystery of the soul of the human
person. It is far beyond the inspiring mysterious beauty of natural light or
any other part of nature because man and only man is made in the image
and likeness of God, of Truth Himself. See the world through the lens of
Sacred Scripture and the Liturgy. We have from Psalm 8: “When I look at
Thy heavens, the work of Thy Fingers, the moon and the stars which
Thou hast established; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the
son of man that Thou dost care for him. Yet Thou hast made him little
less than a god.” Within the human soul the Holy Trinity resides. St
Augustine in his search for Truth eventually came to this realization:
“Late have I loved you, beauty, so old and so new … you were within
and I was in the external world …” In this Divine Light, we can only see
our neighbour, any person, our enemies, especially the most innocent of
human life, the unborn child, with love.
The Angel Gabriel greeted Mary “Hail, full of grace. The Lord is
with you …” We tend perhaps to gloss over this when we pray the Hail
Mary, but the text uses a construction that can mean much more than
simply something like “The Lord is always by your side.” Rather it
means that “the Lord is in communion with you.” Her interior life was
always governed by a profound union with the Lord, becoming ever more
deeper in a mystery through her spousal union with the Holy Spirit.
Through the grace of our baptism we also have the Lord with us, although
our sin can disrupt this union during our earthly life, though never
completely. Seeing the world and God’s Providence acting in it through
the eyes of faith and love is precisely what Mary always did. Her great
hymn of praise, which we sing each day at Vespers, is an outpouring of
her faith through and in the Holy Spirit. No matter how difficult our trials
are, even the most extreme, they should lead us to this view and
awareness of God who is always acting for our good and never otherwise.
Our day should be, beginning to end, one continuous prayer. How should
we end our day? On our knees in profound adoration and thanksgiving
however well or bad our day has been. Blessed are those families who do
this together. Aubrey de Vere wrote of his days end with Wordsworth:
“Each night prayers were read by Mrs. Wordsworth in a voice full of
reverence and sweetness. He knelt near her with his face hidden in his
hands.”