There’s a line from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, where Alice was talking to the Queen. Alice told the queen, I can’t believe that. Try, urged the queen. “There's not use trying,” Alice said: “one can't believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Do you believe impossible things? More specifically, do you believe you can do impossible things? That seemed to be what Jesus was asking of the disciples in our Gospel reading for today. We came into the reading in sort of the middle of a section. Jesus had just finished teaching the disciples about forgiveness. He’d told them, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.” Even, Jesus said, even “if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent,” you must forgive.” Whoa. Seven times. In the same day. Now, I mean, I get one or two times in a day, or even seven times over the course of a lifetime. But seven times in one day. I don’t know about that. Fool me once, right?
The disciples weren’t too sure about this either. Not too sure it was a good idea, maybe, but certainly not too sure that they were going to be able to pull it off. That is a lot of turning the other cheek and forgiving. So the disciples appealed to Jesus, “increase our faith.” Which, you would expect Jesus to praise them for, right. Increase our faith. Help us be more faithful, help us be better followers of you. Seems like the exact sort of thing Jesus should want from his followers. Solomon asked God for more wisdom, and God was all over it. Gave Solomon not just wisdom, but riches and honor also. So you’d think the disciples asked exactly the right question here, requesting more faith. Except Jesus didn’t praise them. Instead, he said something kind of strange. So the Greek is a little strange here. In the translation I read it said, “if you had faith,” but it is a first-class conditional phrase, so a better translation would be “since.” But then the second part is a second-class conditional, which means the statement is not true. So a better translation might be, “Since you have 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 [but you can’t, so it won’t].”
So, wait, what is Jesus saying here? At first it sounded like Jesus was telling the disciples, if you only had the faith of a mustard seed, you could do something as impossible as cause mulberry trees to uproot themselves and replant themselves in the sea, which why you would want that it in the first place is beyond me, it seems like it would be bad for the mulberry tree, but anyway. You don’t even have the faith of a mustard seed, so no moving trees for you.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. If the better translation for the verse is not if, but since, what if the problem isn’t the disciples’ amount of faith, but that they’re asking for faith instead of simply talking to the mulberry tree. What if what Jesus was saying to them, in albeit a sort of confusing way, was, look you already have all the faith you need. Yes, it is just a little tiny amount of faith, faith the size of a mustard seed. But remember what I’d said to you back just a little way into the journey. Back in Luke chapter thirteen, verses eighteen and nineteen, for those of us with chapter and verse numbers, about how the kingdom of God was “like a mustard seed… it grew and became a tree and the birds of the air made nests in the branches.” So even though you only have this tiny little amount of faith, it is the right amount of faith. You don’t need any more. Since you have faith the size of a mustard seed, tell that tree to move and see what happens.
To make a modern analogy, I think what Jesus was telling his disciples was that faith is like gravity. It’s all around us, we always have it, and always in the right amount. You never think to yourself, man, I really wish I had just a little bit more gravity here, so I could get this thing on the ground. No, right, that would be ridiculous. And yet gravity, and in fact the exact amount of gravity we have, no more, no less, is necessary for life as we know it to function. Too much gravity and we would be crushed, not enough and we would just float away. Or, worse, we would explode. I think what Jesus was saying was that faith is like that. You can change how you relate to it. Like we can make something heavier or lighter by changing the weight of it, or we can work our muscles to be able to work against gravity and lift a bigger object, but we cannot, nor do we need to, change gravity itself. Similarly, we have enough faith, all the faith we need. We can be bolder in responding to our faith. We can find friends and companions who challenge us to take risks. We can study scripture to understand how faith works. We can learn, and pray, and come to believe more deeply, but we do not need to, and in fact we cannot, increase our faith.
We cannot increase our faith, because faith itself is not something we control. It is a gift from God. Ephesians chapter two, verse eight is that popular Lutheran line, “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” and we tend to stop there, but the verse goes on, “and this is NOT YOUR OWN DOING.” Hear that, “for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” By grace you have been saved through faith, and it is the gift of God. Faith is a gift. And we all have it. God gave it to us in our baptism; it is God’s birthright to us. We can choose to trust it or not, we can choose to believe it or not, we can choose how we act, how we respond to it. But we cannot change that we have it, because faith itself is God’s gift to us. God gives faith to us; God has faith in us. We can do impossible, bold, and faith-filled things, not because of our faith, but because of the faith God has in us.
What I think happened in this story here was that the disciples heard the hard work Jesus had for them, and it freaked them out. And they thought, I will never be good enough to live up to Jesus’ expectations for me. So they begged Jesus to make them better, to make them stronger. And what Jesus essentially said to them, when he refused their request for more faith was, “You are already enough, I have already made you enough. Your problem is not that you are not good enough; your problem is you do not know your own power. So stop standing here worrying about how you will get to be enough, and start talking to that tree.”
The other problem I think we find in this is that we expect the mulberry tree will uproot itself all at once. But Jesus didn’t say anything about how long it would take for the mulberry tree to move. Maybe he didn’t mean that if the disciples just demanded it, they would all have to duck, because suddenly mulberry trees would be flinging themselves into the Mediterranean. Sometimes it might happen like that, but often change is a slow process. The mulberry tree might start with just one moved shovel of dirt, one root exposed, one branch outstretched. Until, inch by inch, the mulberry tree will slide down the embankment and into the sea.
Dear people of God, you have enough faith to move the mulberry trees in your life. Whatever tree is in your way, you can move it to the sea. You have enough faith. It might take some work, as you struggle to develop the muscles needed, be they actual muscles, or muscles of endurance, confidence, hope, or determination. It might take some time. The mulberry tree may not fly through the air in the way you might be hoping. It might be a slow, gradual slog. But you have enough faith, God has given it to you. So start telling those mulberry trees in your path to get a move on. Since you have faith the size of a mustard seed, there is nothing that can stand in your way. Amen.
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