Luke 17:5-6

Luke 17:5-6

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith."

The Lord replied,
"If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,
you would say to this mulberry tree,
'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

Some thoughts to contemplate:

Jesus compared an amount of faith to a mustard seed – something very small.

He could have compared faith to a single atom or a muon or a quark

for that matter.

So we might say:

It doesn’t take much faith to do something seemingly impossible. Why ask

for more if only a little will do the job?

Or, faith does not come in sizes and can’t be increased or decreased. You

either have faith or you don’t.

Did the apostles mean to say, “Lord help me to believe.”?

Can faith be equated to belief? Heb 11:1 equates faith to assurance and conviction.

If I cannot do the seemingly impossible does that mean I do not have faith?

Did Jesus mean that if you have faith God will give you all you ask?

Was Jesus just using hyperbole to make a point?

James 2:18

Indeed someone may say, “You have faith and I have works.”

Demonstrate your faith to me without works,

and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

Here it’s said that faith can be exhibited by seeing one’s actions.

Can the apostle’s request of Jesus “increase our faith” be rephrased to

“Lord give us the assurance and the conviction to be able to follow your way”?

Balthasar' Theo-Logic

The following quote of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is from the April 2006 edition of First Things and was the motivation for my interest in Balthasar.

"He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one's effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counter-intuitive nature. One spends pleasurable hours reading Balthasar not so much in an analytical mode as in surrendering oneself to the beauty of how his mind works and its adventurous probings of theological imagination. Reading Balthasar is in large part a meditative exercise bordering on the contemplative."

Once again I've gathered the fortitude to wade through more of Balthasar's "heavy duty intellection" in search of some "scintillating insights".

I don't know how scintillating one may find the quotes that follow. One may say, "Oh, yea, I knew that." But, have you ever attempted to put the ideas presented into your own words? Thanks to Hans Urs von Balthasar I am able to articulate some thing that I was previously able only to intuit.

From Theo-Logic Volume 1:Truth of the World

P.12 – “… the supernatural takes root in the deepest structures of being, leavens them through and through, and permeates them like a breath or an omnipresent fragrance.”

p.16-17 – “All of the perversions that human freedom can inflict upon being and its qualities always aim at one thing: the annihilation of the depth dimension of being, thanks to which being remains a mystery, even, indeed, precisely in its unveiling. The formula “A is nothing other than …” typifies this perversion, whatever the transcendental it affects. It is much rather the case that A is always “something other than …” Neither goodness nor beauty nor truth is exhausted by any definition; the multi-dimensional reality of the transcendentals can ever be flattened out by any kind of reduction, and there is no way to capture the mystery either of their existence or of their essence in a formula. Of course, the ultimate ground of the mysterious character inherent in the knowable is disclosed only when we recognize that every possible object of knowledge is creaturely, in other words, that its ultimate truth lies hidden in the mind of the Creator, who alone can speak the eternal name of things. …. It is God, then, who secures the transcendentals against all the assaults of human freedom – however much ruin this freedom might cause.

A SARCOPHAGUS AND THE SINNERS

Tomb of St. Francis

Roman Brandstaetter was a Polish poet (1906-1987). The poem that follows was published in a collection of poems entitled Francis and Clare edited by Janet McCann and David Craig. I felt a need to return to this volume of poetry and it is curious that this poem found me after two posts consisting of excerpts from another Polish author, Sholem Asch.

Two parts of the readings from the previous Sunday's scripture readings struck me as meaningful when I heard them.

"keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith" Heb 12:2    and Jesus' words,
“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!" Lk 12:49

Am I allowing Jesus to perfect my faith? Is there a fire ablaze in my heart? Am I dousing it out or fueling it with love?

Our poet appeals to St. Francis to help us set our hearts on fire.

A SARCOPHAGUS AND THE SINNERS

We came to you from afar,
Because we want to be good,
O Sarcophagus.

We seldom manage.
Perhaps never.

Evil torments us
Like black goats.

We torture the people
We love.

We wrong our neighbor
Whom we want to help.

Behind our every sacrifice
Stands egoism
Like a skinny prompter.

One beautiful poem
Is more important to us
Than a good deed.

That's why we speak to you
By way of crying,
O Sarcophagus.

A long examination of conscience
Can only be told in tears.

Sail on the brackish waters of our tears
Saint Francis.

Sail on a crusade
Against our sins,
O singing Middle Ages.

Sail, sail,
You bird song.

Can a new man be born
From a tear?

Create us from our tears,
Create us from our cries,
From our stormy cries,
Dear Saint Francis.

Your sarcophagus reposes
On our prayers
As on expectant columns.
                  Roman Brandstaetter

more from "The Nazarene" by Sholem Asch

Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion

The prose in the volume of The Nazarene that I read was quite lofty at times. In the excerpt below Asch in one short paragraph provides a physical description of Joseph of Arimathea, a view to his character, his inquisitive nature and a description of the culture in which Joseph Arimathea lived.

"When I came to know Joseph Arimathea he was no longer young, for he had passed his fiftieth year. But his body had retained all the manliness and vigor of its prime. His limbs were firm and muscular; his body was erect and square, as if cut out of a giant cedar. But the whole was light and elastic in movement, as became a man who had frequented the gymnasium in his youth. Even his head was still youthful, despite the streaks of gray in his curly hair and trimmed beard: and I noted that, in the matter of his beard, he did not encourage the full growth, as the pietists did, nor, of course, did he permit a razor to touch his face. He compromised, and the result was the Roman style. It was strange that he should make this impression of unspoiled pristine vigor, for his face was a mask of care and thoughtfulness. Only the straight Roman nose and the long jaws had been rescued from the network of wrinkles. In the company of the philosophers Joseph was all ears; he took their discussions perhaps more seriously than they; his eyes were drawn down in the intensity of his concentration, and he sat on his raised stool like a picture of spiritual concern. One would have, said that he was not listening to an analysis of distant themes, but rather to a debate which had a practical life-and-death significance for him; and the conclusion of the discussion would have for him the validity of a juridical pronouncement on his own fate. In a sense this was comprehensible; for the struggle still went on within him and the argumentation which moved back and forth dragged his soul now to this side, now to that; it was a battle for the possession of his inmost self. Yet it was more than this; for he conceived that the dispute over his individual soul was parallel with that over the possession of the soul of his people; indeed, the soul of the world. My Rabbi [Nicodemus] was like a seraph armed with a fiery sword, bursting into the harmonious earthly paradise which the Greek philosopher Philippus [ Philippus of Gederah]had created for Joseph. Beauty, and the grace which flows from it, was for the latter the highest conceivable good; the soul of man was but a note in the wholeness of the harmony of the gods. But the soul was not entrusted to all men; it was the privilege of those who were blessed with a superior intelligence. The soul introduced balance into the passions of man, calmed the fiery outbursts of lust and imparted to his bearing the grace of the gods. Therefore the wise man followed the golden mean, having refined his desires and impulses according to the nobility of the soul."

The Nazarene by Sholem Asch

 Asch (1880 – 1957) was a Polish-Jewish, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. I was introduced to his writings in his novel, The Prophet. I've always been attracted to the Old Testament and the way it describes the development of faith in the people of God. The revelation of God to the Israelites is intricately entwined with their very earthy and natural relationship with creation. The development of humanity through the centuries has had the effect of pulling us away from the natural world. Our work lives and our play lives are being drawn into a world of high-tech effects, rapid changes and into a world of video fantasy. I look at my being drawn into biblical worlds as a yearning to return to the experience of the natural. Longing for connection between my mind and my body to the natural world around me, connecting me to the Earth, plants, animals and my fellow human beings; connecting all of God's creation to our past and lighting my imagination to a picture of the road that humanity took to be where we are today. This is the draw I feel to the Biblical world.

Asch has written a number of novels that depict the Jewish and early Christian world. One of his more controversial novels is The Nazarene is one I’m currently reading. His fellow Jews were not all happy about his depiction of Jesus. He tells the story of Jesus through a narrator who is transported to Israel during Jesus's life by a mystic Pan Viadomsky. The novel is divided into three sections each one having a different point of view from which to experience Jesus's life. Part one of the novel provides a picture of Palestine through the eyes of Cornelius, a military governor of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Part two depicts Jesus’s world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot. Part three through the life of Joseph, the son of a sheep herder who desired to have one of his sons become a student of the Torah. At the age of 13 his father took him to a Rabbi Nicodemus to begin his education.

The book could be considered to be three novels: the book is 698 pages in length. The beauty of the writing however carries the reader through the stories effortlessly. The author has a way of putting flesh and mentality on the biblical characters he's portraying. I hope to do several posts on some of the text from the third part that I found particularly appealing.

I’ll start with the narrator's description of one aspect of the culture in Judea during the time of the Herods.

“Thus Greek and Roman went hand-in-hand. And it was a powerful alliance. All the measures taken by our Rabbis to halt the advance of this demoralization were vain; the poison spread through thousand secret channels into the heart of Jewish life. It affected the daily conduct of the Jews; it was manifest in the meals they prepared, their clothing, their headdress and their choice of ornaments. But there was something deeper: a change in the attitude toward the body. This was, among many Jews, no longer regarded primarily as the vessel the soul, but as an intrinsic treasure, a gift of God to man. The influence of the Greeks crept into our language, too, and the Aramaic dialect of Jerusalem began to sprout Greek words.

But it must not be thought that this influence was wholly one-sided. Many Greeks, observing at close range the pious modesty of Jewish life at its best, learning for the first time the nature of the Jewish faith, with its central concept of the single and living God, were deeply affected in turn. They were moved by the lyric expression of the desire for life beyond death, and they meditated on the universal hope which was embodied in the Messianic idea. The Greek mood of fatality was disturbed, the Greek mind set in motion among unaccustomed thoughts by the measureless devotion of the Jew to his God, by the voluntary acceptance of the strong discipline, by the tragic struggle against the temporal and the destructive, springing from deep faith in the divine and the timeless. It was as though a cold Greek statue had ceased to stand in moveless indifference, but had been touched with spirit, so that the lines trembled and the original harmony was disrupted. There was something extraordinary in the juxtaposition of Greek and Jew; two hostile worlds felt an inner longing for each other. They were like the complementary halves of a single being which had long regarded each other as enemies, and which now, brought into intimate contact on the soil of Judea, were beginning to discover in the midst of warfare a unifying principle.

The song of that contact between the two worlds was heard in its most harmonious form in the house of Joseph Arimathea.“

I'll close this post with a prayer from part two of the book. It is typical of prayers that preceding sections of part two describing Jesus’ world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot.

“Blessed art thou, O father in heaven, that thou hast chosen our portion that we may serve thee, and that thou hast not made us as the peoples of the world into idolaters which bow down and worship the work of their hands. Have compassion, father in heaven, on thy creatures and open their eyes, so all of them may see that thou alone art king of all the worlds, and that there is none beside thee."

The Mighty Oak

the Mighty Oak

Now mighty can mean big, tall, broad and strong. But, mighty can also mean tenacious. What you see here is a White Oak tree in all its mature splendor, a mighty Oak.

I contrast these two meanings of mighty because I’m excited to announce that the reports of the death of my baby oak tree, started from an acorn, have been premature. The tree was viciously attacked last spring by a savage chipmunk, squirrel, rabbit or some such other wild beast. All of the tender shoots and leaves were eaten in this attempted arborcide (I just made that word up). In the throes of grief I refused to remove it from the ground, hoping against hope that it would miraculously recover from this devastating blow.

This spring the little shaver was not showing any signs of life. I became resolved to finally remove it. A little warm weather lured me to the back yard again. I was resolved to remove the beautiful ornate fence I had place around my tree (which had very large openings that allowed the savage attack to begin with). But, my heart leapt (or leaped, maybe both) for joy when to my great and grateful surprise tender shoots were once again springing to life.

Here you can see this tenacious little life springing from the ground. The mighty Oakus lives on!

C. S. Lewis and the Real Presence

Leanne Payne was founder of Pastoral Care Ministries. She was a noted scholar of the writings of C. S. Lewis and participated in cataloging the letters of C. S. Lewis for the Wade Collection at Wheaton College. The following is from her book "Real Presence: The Christian Worldview of C.S. Lewis as Incarnational Reality"

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The Scriptures teach that Christ listened to the father; trusting the Holy Spirit, (Jn 14:16-17, Lk: 4:1, 4:14, 5:17, Acts 1:1-2) He taught and healed through the power of the Spirit. The apostles learned this from Him. This capacity to collaborate with the Holy Spirit is also given to us. Herein we see the artist and the Christian brought together. The artist to free the work, must get self out of the way; he must die to self. So it is with the Christian. To do the works that Christ commanded, he must first get self out of the way; he must die to the "old man." And, just as the Spirit gave form and beauty back to the earth which "was without form, and void" when "darkness was upon the face of the deep," so the Christian, listening to God and collaborating with the Holy Spirit, frees the souls of men. Chaotic, fallen, like the earth after the angelic fall, without form and void, the soul cries out to be delivered from chaos, to be given back its form and beauty. The Christian, proclaiming liberty to the soul held captive, calls forth the real person; he frees the prisoner as Michelangelo freed the “Moses”. The true artist and the true Christian collaborate with the spirit: "The spirit comes into us and does it.

This is Lewis’s mysticism.