Mr. Mulla Nasruddin’s house was on fire, so he ran up to his roof for safety. There he was, precariously perched on the roof, when his friends gathered in the street below holding a stretched out blanket to him and shouting, “Jump, Mullah, jump!”
“Oh no, I won’t,” said the Mullah. “I know you fellows. If I jump, you’ll pull the blanket away just to make a fool of me!”
“Don’t be silly. Mullah. This isn’t a joke. This is serious. If you stay up there you will be burnt by fire. Jump, Jump!”
“No,” said Nasruddin. “I don’t trust any of you. Lay that blanket on the ground and then I’ll jump.”
[source: De Mello].
Unlike Mr. Mulla, Hebrews 11:1 calls faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.”
Faith does involves trust, as Donald Baillie illustrates:
Take the case of a small child in nursery school. The little fellow is taken into the room where the teacher is and left in her care. But she is strange to him, he does not trust her, but looks distantly at this strange woman from the opposite corner of the room. She wins his confidence by words, gestures, and smiles until at last the little fellow’s mistrust is melted away, and he crosses the floor to sit beside her.
[Source: Measure of faith: 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10 by John Rollefson September 21, 2004].
The Greek word for "Increase our faith” in Luke 17:5 is “prostihemi” from which we get the word prosthetic. E.g., Hip Prosthesis is the surgery of Hip replacement.
When the apostles said “increase our faith” they were essentially asking for a crutch. They were saying, “We can’t do this on our own. Give us something to lean on as support.
One Sunday a Protestant minister asked the congregation the question "Are there any members of the congregation here today who have an unshakable faith, if so, would those persons please stand up?”
The minister said, “To my immense bafflement, and somewhat to my chagrin, a young man about twenty years old rose to his feet. I knew this young man. He was sitting with his parents and two younger siblings. He rarely came to the parish church these days because his relationship to his folks through his teen years had been so stormy that he moved out early, took up residence in the next town, dropped out of high school, and now worked for Pizza Hut. After acknowledging his admirable faith, I somehow recovered my rhetorical thread—my little ploy having failed miserably—and pressed on with my sermon on faith.”
The minister continued, saying, “But the reason I remember this incident so vividly was not because this religiously confident young man stole my thunder but because a year and a half later he was dead from a drug overdose.”
[Source: Increase Our Faith! Julia Gatta, Sewanee Theological Review 48:1, 2004].
Faith comes from a divinely infused supernatural virtue, but the power to accomplish difficult things comes from the material object of faith which is what the Church teaches or the content of faith.
For example, in paragraph 2291 the Catechism says the use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life and is a grave offense except for legitimate medicine, and clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs is direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.
God has already revealed this, the Church just points it out.
Church teaching illuminates the inherent structure of any act of believing.
You can’t order mulberry trees to be “Uprooted” and planted in the sea by whispering at them through a “generic confidence” of God.
However, if you are just a little bit convicted by what God has revealed, a mustard seed of faith, you can do difficult things that seem almost impossible.
Go to Adult Education, to Bible Study, to Sunday School or CCD. We need to seek out solid sources of our Christian faith. The dogma or material content of the Faith will always be preserved if seek true Biblical teaching, which implies a crisis of Faith of tainted or withheld doctrine or teaching elsewhere.
Think of, for example, gender indoctrination in public schools or proposed laws where it would be illegal to distinguish between a man or woman. However, God made them male and female—this has been already revealed and the Church just points it out, in love.
We can uproot problems by being seated in the heavenly realms as Ephesians 2:6 says, where all the truth of our faith proceeds from above.
When declare and confess the truth that God has revealed we can access with that faith the power to uproot difficult problems.
That is what Habakkuk did in our First Reading, Habakkuk 2:1 says, “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me…”
If don't connect with God through adherence to what he revealed in doctrine and spend time getting into the Word, we are going to O.D. (overdose) on something, like stress, being harried rushing home from work.
1 Corinthians 2:10, says that we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God,… the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God.
Amen.
