NOTES for Luk 17:7-10

"...we are unworthy servants, because we have done what we ought to have done..." These words can offend us. We can say to the Lord, But You Yourself told us: I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I heard from My Father (John 15:15). But there is a difference: in one case He does not call us servants, and in the other He calls us to call ourselves servants. And what is the difference, if I am simply "no longer a slave, but a son" (Gal. 4:7)? This is a question on which lovers of objective materialism or opponents of subjective idealism keep banging their heads every time. Suppose there is a party decision according to which I am no longer a Pioneer but a Komsomol member, and no one is allowed to say to me, "Be ready!" but only and exclusively, "The party has said: it is necessary." In reality, everything is not like that at all, and there is no univocal answer; the world is richer and wider than our words and concepts. The Lord gives certain markers of meaning that we must hold to, but the path between them is our personal creativity. There are moments of tenderness and moments of severity. And everything is filled with meaning if there is love. Therefore no single phrase taken by itself from the Gospel has the divine authority that the Gospel possesses in its wholeness. But besides this, it is important to understand the more prosaic meaning of today's words of the Lord: a slave, when set free, often does not learn freedom, but enslaves those who gave him that freedom. It is not enough to be a former slave in order to become a son. There is still a long path between these two concepts. And each of us must walk this long path. The whole Gospel has not been spoken once for all, but is still being spoken; it has not been completed, but is still being carried out. "Christianity is only beginning," as one contemporary holy martyr said.

Today we read the evangelist Luke's account of a somewhat mysterious dialogue about faith between the Lord and His disciples. At first glance, Christ's answer is hard to connect with the disciples' request that He increase their faith. Perhaps, as the evangelists often do, Luke reports Christ's words much more fully than the essence of the disciples' question. In such a situation, we should try to understand from what the Lord answers what the disciples had in mind. In addition, the evangelists often tell us about dialogues in which a person coming to Christ asks Him a question, while the Lord intentionally answers not the outward form of the question spoken aloud, but what deep in the heart moved the person to ask it. It is very possible that today we are seeing just such a dialogue.

So the disciples ask Him to "add" faith to them. The "increase" of the Synodal text renders a Greek word that, in an arithmetic sense, means addition rather than multiplication. So to speak, they ask Him to increase the quantity of faith, to give them more of it than they and other people have. Judging by Christ's answer, the disciples' request sounds like a request to sit at His right and left hand. The Lord says that the "quantity" of faith is not what matters. Even a small "quantity," faith the size of a mustard seed, in the Savior's words, transforms the world.

After this the Lord tells the disciples that a person should not expect a reward for doing what he is obliged to do. How does this thought agree with the previous one? Most likely the point is that the disciples, who have already grasped what the Lord says about the importance of faith for a person's salvation, are asking Him to give them faith that would "advantageously distinguish" them in God's eyes.

They have already understood that God needs not outward reverence, but faith. "See, we have left everything and followed You," Peter once said to Christ... Now the disciples, it appears, are asking Him to give them such faith that they could say: "See, we have great faith; what then will there be for us because of this?" It is precisely to such a question that the Lord answers with the words that faith capable of moving mountains is comparable to fulfilling one's duty before the Master and does not allow one to speak of merits. This is, of course, a very important revelation about God and the human person, especially if it is compared with the parable of the workers of the eleventh hour.

The paradoxical nature of God's Kingdom penetrates the most hidden areas of human life. Today, at the center of the paradox is faith. This may be the most difficult word in human language, because we almost always use it for the wrong purpose. For example, when the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, it turns out that they are asking for the wrong thing. They could move mountains even with an insignificantly small faith (a "mustard seed" is clearly something very small). But what could be more important? After all, Christ says many times to different people, "Your faith has saved you." This also happens with the healed Samaritan leper: the miracle of healing itself happens to all ten, but "faith saved" only him. And what kind of faith could this heretic have? The others went to show themselves to the priests, which was exactly what their faith required. In both cases, by "faith" Christ clearly means not quite what the disciples mean by it, or what you and I usually mean.

As the Savior's words show, the question of faith is directly connected with the question of spiritual life as such. What does it mean to increase faith? How did the disciples themselves understand an increase in faith? They must have meant something connected with the confidence they experienced when, at their Teacher's command, they preached the Kingdom and joyfully saw that not only people, but also spirits obeyed them. In those days, this sense of power was usually associated with faith, with its presence or absence. Jesus, however, is speaking of something somewhat different. He speaks of faith as a spiritual state. Precisely and only a spiritual one. After all, any manifestation of inner strength in a person is a natural phenomenon as much as a spiritual one. Here there is not only the spiritual impulse as such, not intention alone, but also nature and the psyche, which also respond to spiritual influence. But Jesus speaks only of the spirit. Only of the will. Only of intention.

Spirit is not nature. Quantitative measurements are impossible here. Spirit, or will, does not come in larger or smaller amounts. If the will is not fragmented, if it is not scattered through inner, psychological space or outer, physical space, it has absolute force. Not in the whole universe created by God, of course; only the will of the Creator Himself has that kind of power. But at one concrete point, it certainly does. That is why faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move a mountain from its place. Faith here is not inner strength, and certainly not conviction about anything at all, but the fullness of relationship with God. It is that same fullness which, when directed toward creation, becomes the source of an infinitely powerful force, if only it is fully concentrated on something specific. But reaching that kind of concentration is not easy. No psychological techniques will help here.

This concentration is a derivative of that fullness of the life of the Kingdom which, in principle, has been opened after Christ's coming to everyone who seeks. It is the same fullness whose experience lets a person serve without counting merit: we have done what we were supposed to do; we are only servants who do not deserve a reward. It is the fullness in which one understands that every sin is absolutely destructive, and that, although sin is inevitable in the fallen world, complicity in it is always an existential catastrophe for a resident of the Kingdom. It is the fullness that is possible only in the Kingdom and without which there is no Kingdom. The fullness for which alone it makes sense to live.