Faithfulness in Quantity and Quality as its Own Reward

16 Pentecost, C proper 22 October 5, 2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14 Luke 17:5-10

Lectionary Link

It is easy from the hyperbolic words of Jesus to literalize them and then to present the real Christian life as the stage performance art of having the faith magic to cast mulberry trees into the sea.  

Or we could understand the enigmatic words of Jesus as sayings in the tradition of a wisdom teacher who is presented as having both a public ministry and a very private and individual master/disciple relationship with individuals.

These words of Jesus are being written down by teaching scribes who are trying to present a new way of life within the religious landscape of the various expressions of Judaism as well as the many forms of the Mystery Religions which were part of the Romanizing habit of an omnivorous empire using both sheer force as well as political syncretism of local religious traditions to promulgate the Roman legitimacy to be the ruling glue of the world.

The words and the traditions which surround the life and ministry of Jesus needed scribal teachers, and the writing of the Gospels were evidence of a movement that had widespread communities with local charismatic leadership but without the coherence to be a viable institutional entity within the Roman Empire.  The coming together of the Gospel writing traditions and the eventual formation of a canon or collection of writings with enough widespread usage to attain status as the official text book of the church that could represent many local churches with a degree of standardization was part of the unifying dynamic of a movement becoming institutionalized for longevity within the Roman Empire situation.

When we read the various paragraphs that have come to the canonical Gospels, we might ask the questions about the origin of the written words.  Do they retain fragments of how Jesus of Nazareth speaking in the Aramaic language and having become transmitted for decades to be used as subject matter for writers in the Greek languages to create, as it were, disciple manuals for their various gathering of disciples?

And as we ponder the great difficulty of knowing the original contexts of these Gospel words, we are left to our own readerly intuitions based upon our own contexts of how we have understood and used these words in our own lives.  And we cannot presume to have final authoritative meanings for these words, even while we seek for their functional relevance to our own lives of faith, and we know that various confession communities try to assign final or preferred meanings which is basic for their own community cohesion and discipline.

In our appointed Gospel reading for our liturgy, we have read two vignettes about faith.  There was a request from the disciples to Jesus: Increase our faith.  This might beg the question, how is faith a matter of quantity?  The answer includes the riddle of comparing the smallest with perhaps a very great event.  Having faith the size of a mustard seed could result in some great supernatural act.  The point is that faith is a quality of living, and whether one is doing something very small like helping one's neighbor or something big and heroic, each is but a single act of faith, the very same faith.  But where is faith as quality related to faith as quantity?  How does one come to have the quality of being faithful?  By the continuous accumulation of single faithful acts.  With the collection of faithful acts, one's life is likely to become habitually faithful in small deeds and great and heroic deeds.

The second vignette provides a different sort of insight about faith.  A slave or a modern day worker lives in a situation of having a job description.  There is a contract which defines the tasks of the worker.  A typical job description does not include the clause: "Upon the completion of a task, the employer is required to heap boundless praise upon the employee for doing his job."  Yes, it would be nice if the boss would occasionally thank the employee but the typical work situation is governed by the contractual definition of duties.

The hidden wisdom in this vignette might be this: doing faithful acts are their own reward; one does not do them in order to be praised.  And because each small mustard seed acts of faith is its own reward, the eventual award of coming to have the habitual character of faithfulness is its own reward as well.

The Gospel message for all the various people, including us who processed these Gospel words attributed to Jesus might be this: Being faithful is not for getting some future reward of praise; rather being faithful is its own reward for doing what is good and right both in the specific act of faith itself, but also in the value that each act of faithfulness has in contributing to the accrual of such body of deeds to form the habitual character of a life of faithfulness.  This is an important lesson for each of us as disciples of Christ to learn.  Amen.