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“If I just had more faith….” I think most of us have struggled with that at some point in our lives.

If I just had more faith, I wouldn’t have so many questions or doubts.

If I just had more faith, he wouldn’t have died; she would have recovered.

If I just had more faith, I would be a better person, a better parent, a better spouse.

If I just had more faith, I would know what to do, I would handle things better.

If I just had more faith life would be different.

It’s an approach to faith at least as old as the apostles’ own faith. Indeed, it’s the approach they’ve taken in today’s gospel. “Increase our faith,” they ask Jesus.

Faithfulness

Jesus has just warned them not to become stumbling blocks to others and bade them to forgive as often as an offender repents, even if it’s seven times in one day. That will be difficult. It will be challenging to live that way.

The request to increase our faith, the belief that if I had more faith things would be different, reveals, at best, a misunderstanding of faith itself and, at worst, demonstrates our own unfaithfulness.

Jesus is very clear that faithfulness is not about size or quantity. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says, “you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

Faith is a relationship

Faith isn’t given to us in a packet to be spent as currency in our dealings with God. Faith isn’t measured out according to how difficult the task or work before us. Faith is not a thing we have or get.

Faith is a relationship of trust and love. It means opening ourselves to receive another’s life and giving our life to another. That other one is Jesus. That one faith-relationship is foundational of who we are and how we live.

Faith isn’t about giving intellectual agreement to a particular doctrine or idea. It’s not about how much or how strongly we believe Jesus’s words or actions.

Committed

When we speak about a married couple’s faithfulness, we don’t necessarily mean they believe or agree with each other’s every idea or even a particular understanding of marriage.

They’re faithful because they’ve committed themselves to each other in love and trust. They’re faithful because they continually give their life to the other and receive the other’s life as their own.

They’re faithful because they carry with them that one relationship wherever they go, in all that they are and all that they do. And so, it is in our faith-relationship with Jesus.

Faith will not, however, change the circumstances of our lives. Instead, it changes us. Living in faith doesn’t shield us from the pain and difficulties of life, it doesn’t undo the past, and it will not guarantee a particular future.

Rather, faith is the means by which we face and deal with the circumstances of life – the difficulties and losses, the joys and successes, the opportunities and possibilities.

Live and move and have our being

Faith doesn’t get us a pat on the back, a reward, or a promotion in God’s eyes. It’s simply the way in which we live and move and have our being so that, at the end of the day, the faithful folk can say, without pride or shame, “We have done only what we ought to have done!”

Nothing more and nothing less. We have lived in openness to, trust in, and love for Christ. We have allowed him to guide our decisions, our words, and our actions. We have been sustained by him in both life and death.

Faith, however, is not lived out in the abstract. It’s practiced day after day in the ordinary everyday circumstances of life. Some days when the pain and heaviness of life seem more than we can carry, it’s by faith, relationship with Jesus, that we get up each morning and face the reality of life.

The lens and criterion

Other days present other circumstances, other challenges. When we feel the pain of the world and respond with compassion by feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, speaking for justice; when we experience the brokenness of a relationship and offer forgiveness and mercy; when we see the downtrodden and offer our presence and prayers – in all those, we have lived, seen, and acted by faith.

Then there are days when we feel powerless, lost, and can’t see the way forward. By faith we sit in silence and wait.

Faith, then, is how we live; the lens through which we see ourselves, others, and the world; the criterion by which we act and speak. Faithfulness means, that no matter where we go, no matter what circumstances we face, we do so in relationship with the One who created, loves, sustains, and redeems us, the One who, as Paul reminds us in our first reading today, “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

Planted within us

The apostles appear to be seeking some miraculous injection of faith that will insulate them from the unpleasantness around them and allow them to act like the heroes they would like to be.

Unfortunately, faith doesn’t work like that. Jesus suggests that they already have enough faith to get on with what they are actually being asked to do.

We too live by faith not because we have enough faith but because we have faith, any faith, even mustard seed sized faith. That’s all we need. Jesus believes that. So should we.

The question is not how much faith we have but, rather, how are we living the faith we do have. How is our faith, our relationship with Jesus, changing our lives, our relationships, the lives of others? If it’s not, more of the same will surely make no difference.

The mustard seed of faith is already planted within us. It’s Christ himself. He has withheld from us nothing. We already have enough. We already are enough. We do not need more faith. We need more response to the faith, the Christ, the mustard seed, the relationship we already have.

‘Planted within us’ was delivered by Sheila Beattie at St John and St Mark’s on Sunday 5th October 2025. It was based on Luke 17:5-10.