Christ said: “Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you (St. Matthew 17:20).
Faith is at the center of today’s Gospel lesson. What does it mean to have faith? As the passage in the bulletin points out, it is more than just an intellectual acceptance of a certain set of facts. This may be an indicator of faith (and even part of the process of acquiring it), but it is not what Christ is talking about. Facts are not the kinds of things that can move mountains. He is talking about something much greater. If we really want to enjoy the fruits of God’s grace, then we have to do more than accept as true the things described, for example, in the Nicene Creed. The Truth of Orthodoxy is simple, but it’s not that easy.
Instead of intellectual acceptance, we could think of faith as something one believes so strongly and finds so important that one is compelled by reason and conscience to act upon it. Here, I think we are getting closer to the truth. The student may learn and give her assent to a certain set of formulae that describe how the mechanical world works, but the engineer and the builder are compelled to live and work as if those formulas were true. Similarly, the Christian takes the message of the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ and lives it. Engineers and builders make reliable structures when they believe – the Christian does even more. Learning facts may allow the student to do well on an exam and the person who memorizes the Creed may fit in during our Liturgy, but neither really believes in their knowledge until they put it into action.
But even here, we are not quite to the deeper meaning of Christ’s words about mustard seeds and mountains. There is a great temptation for us to think of Christianity as a kind of white of magic, where the acceptance and mastery of a certain kind of knowledge gives us the power to affect the world, as if we were somehow able to channel the fundamental power of creation (love) and use it for our own ends. This was the temptation that Simon Magus fell to. And while the power is certainly there and it is available to all those who truly believe, part of “faith”, part of “belief” involves submitting our will to the Great Creator’s will. And [this is a hard truth] the mountains He would have us move may not be the ones that we, in our fallenness, would prefer to have moved.
So faith is more than facts, and it is more than using those facts to change the world: it is making God’s plan for the perfection of this world our plan. This is key, and it is something that we find so hard to do. We want the power, but we want to use it to accomplish our own plan. This is not faith in God, it is faith in ourselves … even if we have constructed our plan to serve others. God is perfect love and perfect knowledge and perfect power. Our love is real, but imperfect; our knowledge grows every day, but remains flawed; our power is staggering, but will never be great enough to heal the real problems in this world. This is why trusting God and accepting His plan [and accepting it so completely that we become His Body, His instrument for accomplishing this plan] is such a rational response.
We must give our lives to Christ. We must repent of our pride. .
And when we do, the fruit of this new life is more than power – it is a contented joy. God wants us to live life abundantly. One of the first mountains that He offers to move for us is the one that keeps us from this very thing. Christianity is serious. It is hard work, but it has its rewards. And here I speak not of the inheritance that awaits us in the kingdom which is to come, but the reward of a deep and lasting peace in this life. This and more comes to those who live in Christ and Him in them.
