Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4 / 2 Tim 1:6-8, 13-14 / Luke 17:5-10
At Mass, the letter “I” is used only a few times. At the Penitential Rite, it is at the “I confess”. At the Communion Rite, it is at the “I am not worthy”. And at the Creed, it is at the “I believe”.
The letter “I” is a singular, first-person pronoun. We use “I” when we want to talk about ourselves, about what we do, and how we feel.
So, to say “I believe”, it points to a commitment and a conviction. But to say “I believe in God” is not just a personal commitment or conviction.
To believe in God requires faith, and faith is a gift from God. It is with the gift of faith that we can believe in God, and we respond with faith to the call of God to be His People.
So, to be a Christian means that we have a love relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
God does not treat us as lowly servants that He can use to do some thankless work, or to make us fear Him because He will punish wrongdoers.
Rather, God calls us to be His children, He wants to love us, so that we can love Him in return and to serve Him with love.
It takes faith to do all that with love. So, it can be said that with faith, we will be able to love God and to love others.
Faith can be as small as a mustard seed, but the love can be so powerful that we can tell the mulberry tree to be uprooted and be planted in the sea and it will do so.
But faith and love need not be so dramatic and spectacular.
In the 1st reading, the prophet Habakkuk cried out to God even though his faith was eroding.
What Habakkuk saw around him was despair and distress. There was oppression and injustice, there was outrage and violence, and God doesn't seem to be doing anything about it.
But Habakkuk’s faith was restored when God answered and even told him to write down the vision.
What restored Habakkuk’s faith is that God's promises are eager for its own fulfilment, and it does not deceive. It may come slowly, but come it will without fail.
All that can be summed up by that last line of the 1st reading when God said this: The upright man will live by his faithfulness.
So yes, we are given the faith to believe in God, to believe that God is good, God is love, that God is kind and compassionate.
If we believe that God is all that, then with our mustard seed of faith, we will want to believe that people can be like God.
A story goes that a mother gave her little daughter two apples. Then, she asked the girl to give her one of the apples. She thought that if the girl gave her the smaller one, then she would teach the girl to be generous and respectful to elders.
To her shock and disappointment, the girl quickly took a bite of the bigger apple and just as the mother thought she was going to give her the smaller apple, the girl took a bite of the smaller apple too.
The mother was very sad that her daughter was selfish and cared only for herself.
Then the girl stretched out her hand, gave an apple to her mother and said: Mummy, you eat this apple, this apple is sweeter!
The mother was ashamed that she didn’t believe in the goodness of her daughter.
Yes, we ask the Lord to increase our faith so that we can believe in the goodness of the Lord.
And let us ask the Lord to increase our faith so that we can also believe in the goodness of people.
May the Lord increase our faith, so that our love will also increase.
When we are able to see the goodness of the Lord in the people and everything around us, then God's blessings will also increase upon us, and upon our mustard seed of faith.