27th Sunday in Ordinary Time / C
3/10/2010
Luke 17, 5-10 (p. 707)
this Sunday's Gospel addresses two essential realities of our Christian life: faith and works two realities that go together and are inseparable.
demand apostles to the Lord, "Increase our faith" is instructive on this reality. First note that lively apostles' awareness of their lack of faith. Yes, their faith is weak and they recognize with humility. They turn to Him who is the origin of faith: Jesus as Son of God. For faith is primarily a gift of God. It does not only arise from our desire to believe in Him. The most important demand of the Apostles is located precisely in the verb "increase." This reminds us that our faith is not fixed but a reality rather a dynamic reality. Indeed the day of our baptism we die to that faith lives in us, it makes us live in union with God. If faith is alive, so how surprised she knows the ups and downs, moments of darkness and light? We must do everything to accommodate us in a faith ever more grand and intense, but remember that God may allow our spiritual progress of the darkness of faith, moments or believe in God is more obvious or comfortable. Doubt in this sense is not the opposite of faith, it does not delete it. It puts TRIAL and we can emerge from this ordeal with a faith more adult and more mature. The answer to the apostles of the Lord gives us another characteristic of the Christian faith: his power. We are accustomed has the image of faith that moves mountains, in this Gospel it moves the trees! What that can it mean? Faith in God unites us has made us participate in his power. In Genesis when God created it just a word for that life arose. By faith we participate in the same power of the Word of God can create. Put our faith in God does not make us people diminished, weak and passive. The dynamism of faith is contrary to that strength that God gives us to be winners of all the forces of death presented in ourselves and in our world. And how about the power of faith without mentioning in passing the power of prayer? Power which in both cases does not mean efficiency in the common sense of the word. The effectiveness matches or requires immediate and visible performance. The power of faith is real. To receive we must be able to read the signs of God in our lives and the world. And when we have an overall view we can say: yes, my faith in God was powerful, yes, my prayer is a fruit.
If our faith is alive it necessarily bears fruit, it is manifested in our actions, our works. And that is the subject of the second part of our Gospel with the parable of the servant and master. As always read the parable in connection with the Gospels in their entirety. The leading edge of this teaching is not a description of the type of report that we have with God (the master of the parable). For if the Christian is a servant of his God is in a whole new meaning. The spirit that we have not received a spirit of fear but a spirit of power, love and reason. Jesus told us: we are no longer for him servants but friends. Our Christian relationship with God is not that of the slave with his master. And in the New Testament revelation is God himself who is the servant of his creatures as shown in another scene between the washing of feet. The teaching of this parable for the report so that we not with God but with our deeds and our actions. By asking us to consider ourselves unprofitable servants when we have done our duty of state and our duty of Christians, Jesus calls us the humility that is to tell the truth. The danger for us is to take pride in our good deeds, we glorify our fidelity to the commandments of the Lord by forgetting that all is grace and that our power comes precisely from our faith in him.
So this Sunday is just the equivalent of a throw late for our francophone community in Copenhagen are pleased to be men and women of faith. Let the recognition for the power of our faith manifested in our lives and all our actions. Are certain that if we are obedient to the breath of the Spirit throughout this school year, God will by wonders we love in our hearts, our families, our places of life and our community of Sakramentskirke.
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