Trinity 16 2022
There’s an old German folktale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in which, for reasons far too complicated to explain, the hero finds himself ambushed by robbers in a forest, and bundled into a sack. The robbers tie a rope around the sack, haul it up into the trees and scarper, leaving him dangling up there with no way down. Fortunately, he hears someone coming along the forest track on horseback. He peers out through a tiny hole in the sack and sees that it’s a student from the local university. He doesn’t know, of course, whether he will be a friend or foe, so he decides to use a bit of low cunning. As the traveller comes closer, he calls out a cheery greeting from the sack. The student asks him what he is doing up there and whether he needs help.
“Help? No, not at all. This is no ordinary sack. It is the sack of knowledge, and anyone who spends time in it will know everything there is to know about everything – philosophy, science,literature…
The student’s eyes light up – this will be a lot easier than all that book-reading he has to do. “I don’t suppose you’d let me swap places with you for an hour or so?” he asks.
The man in the sack agrees, trying to sound as reluctant as he can. The student lowers him down to the ground, and changes places with him, and is hauled up into the trees instead. The sack swings there for a few minutes, and then the student shouts down “Tell me, how long does this take to start working? I’m not feeling any more wise than I did before.”
“Ah, give it a little while,” says the man down below, “and I can guarantee you will have learned a very important lesson indeed…”
And the student did, even if it was only that you should never trust the word of a man who is tied up in a sack…
Of course, we all know that you can’t acquire all the knowledge of the world by sitting in a sack, but the promise of a quick fix is still very tempting. The enticing gym membership offer which we buy, but then never use, the language learning app which says you’ll be fluent in three weeks, which we never open, the musical instrument bought in an enthusiastic moment, but never actually played… We’ve probably all been there, hoping it would all happen by magic somehow.
The story of the sack of knowledge came into my head as I read that desperate request from the disciples to Jesus in today’s Gospel. “Increase our faith!” they cry. They’re starting to realise that living as he calls them to, living justly in an unjust world, is more challenging than they thought it would be. And they know they aren’t up to it. So, they ask Jesus for more faith, as if it is some sort of magic substance which you can go into a faith shop and buy half a pound of.
They are making a category error, like asking “how big is yellow?” The question makes no sense, because yellow doesn’t have a size. In the same way, faith isn’t something that can be dispensed – one lump or two? It’s something which we discover within us as we do the things God calls us to, and find that he is right there helping us. Jesus tells his followers that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough, if you actually do something with it, because it’s the act of doing something with it which makes it grow.
Jesus goes on to develop the point by painting a little word picture. “If you’re a slave or a servant,” he says – the two words are the same in Greek - “you don’t expect your master to drop everything and do your work for you – it’s your work”. It’s a problematic image for us, because we automatically start thinking about the evils of slavery and exploitation, but Jesus is just using a scenario he knew people would be familiar with.
His words may sound rather harsh, but essentially he’s telling them that the growth of faith is an intrinsic, natural result of doing what they are called to. It’s not some sort of magic, nor is God is not a sort of heavenly slot machine who’ll give out goodies if we put in the right coins – saying our prayers, turning up at church. Helping others too, can be just a bargaining chip, if we do it in the hopes it will get us into God’s good books. That sort of transactional view of faith insults God, treating him as if he can be manipulated, put into our debt. But on top of all that, it doesn’t work, because it produces a faith, if we can call it that, which tends to fall apart as soon as anything bad happens to us.
If we believe that God will give us health, wealth and happiness if we do the right thing, then where does that leave us when sickness, poverty and unhappiness strike, as they almost will? The natural conclusion is that either we’ve done something to deserve punishment, or that God has reneged on his side of the contract. It leads to us stigmatising others who are suffering too.
The prophet Habakkuk was battling that sort of ‘transactional’ thinking about God in our Old Testament reading, probably written just before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. The nation was falling apart politically, socially and morally in front of Habakkuk’s eyes, knowing that they would soon be overrun by mighty armies. Some of the other prophets said that the nation had brought all this on itself. It was a punishment from God. Whenever there is a disaster – plague, war, earthquake – you can be sure someone will say this. It’s attractive, in an odd sort of way, because it gives us at least some sense of control. We can kid ourselves that if we had acted differently, we could have prevented these bad things happening. Even if that’s nonsense, it’s better than feeling we have no power at all.
But Habakkuk took a different position which faced up honestly to our powerlessness. Bad things happen to all sorts of people, he said, the good and the bad alike, without any rhyme or reason we can fathom. What we are called to do is to look for God even in the midst of them. It is fine to lament and to cry out to God, as Habakkuk does, to ask “how long, O Lord?” but his faith doesn’t depend on getting an answer , still less on God swooping down and delivering him miraculously. He’d learned to find God in the darkness and the troubles, and that meant that he had a faith that was indestructible. The book of Habakkuk ends with the lovely words, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord… God the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights”.
Habakkuk has learned to trust God, not because he understands what God is doing, but because he knows who God is, what his character is, that he is a God who never stops loving his creation, or withdraws from it, no matter what we do.
Jesus, whose way of salvation led through the pain of the cross and the darkness of death, knew how important it was that his followers learned Habakkuk’s lesson too, not to look for a magic bullet or a quick fix, or even just someone to blame, but simply to get on with living in his way, walking in his path, doing the work he calls us to. As we do so, his promise is that we will discover that God is with us, in failure as well as success, weakness as well as strength, death as well as life and our faith will be indestructible too.
Amen
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