Increase Our Faith! - Reflections on Luke 17:1-5, Pentecost 17, Year C
by John C. Holbert on Sunday, June 15, 2025
Luke 17 contains a list of sayings that on the surface seem to have little direct relationships. However, vss.5-7 are certainly about the lack of faith found in Jesus’s closest disciples. They as a group have been absent from the narrative since Luke 9:10, though Peter does ask Jesus a question in 12:41. Their question here in Luke 17:5 comes out of nowhere. One might expect that they had demonstrated in their actions some singular lack of faith recently that would require them to ask for faith help from Jesus, but the question merely hangs in the air. “Give us faith,” it may be translated, but NRSV reads “Increase our faith,” a translation more literally rendering the Greek, “add faith to us.” What might that mean? One possibility is as follows.
The disciples present themselves to their master as persons who, try as they might, cannot seem to muster the requisite amount of faith to persist in their decision to follow Jesus. The story of Jesus is fast concluding on his way to the cross, a terrible and lowering cloud hanging over their journey to Jerusalem. The disciples find themselves unable on their own to sustain the ministry to which Jesus has called them, and their faith may be flagging. The cry “increase our faith” bears within it a desperation, a begging request that Jesus teach them once again what sort of faith will be required to continue on the Way. That is one possibility of meaning. But there may be another.
As often in the gospel, Jesus’ answer is less than direct, is, it may said, no real answer at all to the disciples’ plea. “The Lord (kyrios) said, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, Be uprooted and planted in the sea! And it would obey you!’” (Luke 17:6). Instead of offering them keys to an increased faith—more fervent prayer, longer meditations, more work with the poor—Jesus rather tells them, by means of a negative sentence, that in reality they do not have any faith at all! “If you had faith,” he begins, making it all too plain that they have little faith at all. And he uses an outlandish example to teach them just how little faith they have. If they had real faith, he says, they could command a deep-rooted mulberry tree to uproot itself and be replanted in the sea! This is of course absurd on several counts. Should faith be able to produce such magic acts, and even so why in the world would one ask a tree to uproot and be planted in the sea? Is the sea any place to plant a tree? Hardly! I have long wondered whether Jesus is playing a joke on his disciples, making their question about increased faith ridiculous on its face. I can only imagine the shock on their faces as they hear this particularly weird reply to their query. Well, thank you very much, Jesus, and thanks for not helping us with our request for increased faith!
It could be that the final verses of our text for today get a bit closer to addressing that question about faith, although even here the answer is hardly a direct one. Luke turns to the social issue of the master/slave relationship. Do you ever ask a slave who comes in from field work, hot and sweaty, to sit down and join you at dinner? Hardly! Don’t you rather say to the slave, “Get to work, put on your apron, wait on me until I am finished eating and drinking. After that, you may eat.” That is the correct way to treat a slave. And then, you hardly say to the slave, “Thanks for doing what you are commanded to do” (Luke 17:7-9). The slave deserves no thanks for acting under command. You should act the same, says Jesus. “When you have done everything commanded of you, you should say, ‘We are worthless slaves! We have done what we were supposed to do!’” (Luke 17:10).
The implication of these small bits of advice appears to be: do not expect great affirmation if you do only the minimum required of anyone who chooses the rule of God. In other words, whatever faith you do have is sufficient—no need to ask for more. By asking for increased faith, you disciples sound suspiciously like the Pharisees of Luke 16:14 who claim loudly to be defenders of God’s word while never in fact begin to fulfill even the most basic demands of that word. Beware of puffing yourself up so as to think that more faith will make you somehow better than others. How often in other parts of the gospel narrative do the disciples do precisely that, namely attempt to lord it over others, struggling over who is greater in the kingdom. Jesus says to them in these tiny sentences to avoid at all cost the desire to be better than others, for such striving for enhancement and betterment are anathema in the realm of God, or antagonistic to the rule of God.
Those of us who are ordained to the ministry, who enjoy wearing our priestly garb, who welcome the chance to stand in front of our congregations and expound what we hope is the word of God, are especially prone to these particular dangers. When we say, with the disciples, “Increase our faith,” what we may really be saying is “make us superior, lift us higher, offer to us larger churches and better salaries.” This is hardly a lovely trait we have, but have it we too often do. And we who have spent our ministries primarily in the world of academia are hardly immune to this same disease. May God protect us from our foolish self-aggrandizement and help us to find our location in the realm of God alongside others, not over them.