'Lord, increase our faith!'

If we had not heard it all before, when we read a saying like this one, with its bizarre grouping of faith, mustard seeds and mulberry trees, we would surely register surprise. Faith is a quality, an attitude of spirit and of mind, the focus of hope and aspiration; it has something to do with trust and belief, but nothing, surely, to do with mustard seeds. Mustard seeds are physical objects. Most of us, however, have heard the phrase so often, although more usually in the version we find in Matthew’s Gospel, the one speaks of faith that moves mountains rather than mere mulberry bushes and casts them into the midst of the sea. We have heard it before, and because we are so familiar with the saying it does not strike us strange or illogical in any way.

The disciples’ request, "Increase our faith," yet these are the same men who earlier in this Gospel had been sent out by Jesus (9:1-6) with power over demons and diseases. As they pursued their mission they preached and healed. They had gone out without any supplies of their own. They had the faith to trust God for their necessities. They had the faith to heal the sick and cast out demons. They had the faith to proclaim the coming Kingdom of God. But now they ask for more faith.

Because faith is not a commodity that can be bought or sold, the request appears quite ludicrous. Perhaps that is why the response appears ludicrous also. For Jesus says, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you." Faith is not at all about uprooting mulberry trees – or mountains in Matthew’s version – and casting them into the sea. Faith is about how we live our lives in relation to God, each other, and the world, and not about accomplishing impossible and meaningless physical tasks. So there seems to be a problem with Jesus’s reply to his disciples. At face value his saying seems both to belittle the faith the disciples already possess and holds out to them an ideal of faith that is quite unobtainable. I think, however, that here we have come up against the problem we always have in interpreting the written word when we cannot hear the tone of voice or see the expression of the face. The saying, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you," means something quite different if it is said in a teasing tone and with an encouraging smile than if it is said with a face set in solemn finality and in a tone that brooks no argument.

I suspect that there is something teasing in Jesus’s response to his disciples’ request, ‘Increase our faith.’ His response is designed to set them thinking about what they ask for and the faith they already possess. He speaks of faith ‘as small as a mustard seed,’ not to belittle the faith they already have, but to encourage them with the thought that even a little faith, even the smallest amount of faith imaginable, can go a long, long way.

But why a mustard seed? Behind the teasing, the answer would appear to be that a mustard seed will grow. Provided it is bedded in the right material and subject to the right conditions, it will not remain a seed, but will grow into a plant and in time produce more seed of its own. And faith, provided it too is nurtured, will grow and in growing will give rise to more faith. So, it is not a matter of saying, whether to one another or to anyone else or even to God, ‘Increase our faith;’ rather it is a matter of nurturing the little faith we have; it is a matter of nurturing the life of the spirit and then, as if organically, little by little, faith will grow, for we have available to us the means of grace that will nurture and encourage that growth.

The point of Jesus answer is that the disciples should learn – and you and I should learn – that faith is not something we receive simply because we ask for it, but something we build up within ourselves, a resource, that arises because we practice it, because we live it. It is because we live faith that we learn to nurture it, and we nurture faith as we practice our religious devotions, our hymns, our prayers, our reading of the Bible, our meditation upon its word, our fellowship with each other, our conversations about our faith, the conversations we share with fellow believers and the conversations we share with others who are sceptical and who do not believe – these are the things that by the grace of God tend to nurture faith, to sustain faith, and to build faith up.