Jesus Reveals the True Meaning of Faith

 

 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.

"Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here immediately and take your place at table'? Would he not rather say to him, 'Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished'? Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?

So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.'"

This was the gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass.

Jesus’s initial statement is striking: if anyone has the slightest faith, they can order trees to uproot and grow on the surface of the ocean.

It would seem to follow that nobody has even the slightest faith. Because nobody can do that. Doesn’t that mean all is lost?

No, wait—I can do that. I can make a mulberry tree uproot itself and float upright on the ocean. I can do it in my imagination, in my mind’s eye. Anyone who has a decent imagination can do it. And we can draw it, too, or put it in a story.

So what Jesus is actually telling us is that faith = imagination. Or rather, faith is the willing suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept that the world of the imagination, and not the material world, is the real world. Our imagination is the kingdom of heaven, or our window into it.

But although the kingdom of heaven is in this sense within, we are also not in the kingdom of heaven now. We are living in a material world, where we must tend to our ploughs and our flocks, earning our daily upkeep by the sweat of our brow. This is what Jesus goes on to point out: we are servants spending most of our time just maintaining ourselves. And when we have free time—we ought to be taking the products of the fields, and using them to feed God. “You may eat and drink when I am finished.”

The kingdom of heaven is our reward, once we have done this—presumably, in the next life.

And this stands to reason. There must be some need for the material world; otherwise, why did God create it? Why not have us born into heaven?

The need is not simply to prove our worthiness for the world to come, although this might be reason enough. We are here to accomplish something God needs us to accomplish: to feed him.

That is, to take the produce of the fields, of the material world, and fashion something from it that will satisfy him.

Which seems to me to describe the process of creating art. In making art, we are co-creators with God; we are completing his plan for creation.