October is not an especially exciting month liturgically: we have an uninterrupted run of Ordinary Sundays, with readings from chapters 17 to 19 of St Luke’s Gospel. But sometimes unexciting can be a good thing, and it’s especially valuable to pay attention to the flow of the Gospel as it unfolds from week to week.
In particular, our first two Gospels this month, Luke 17:5-10 and 17:11-19 combine to form an important part of Jesus’s teaching on discipleship as Luke relates it. It begins and ends with faith. When in verse five the apostles ask the Lord to “increase our faith”, as our translation has it, we should read this as a response to what has come immediately before, for some reason omitted from the lect-ionary, which is the demand to forgive repeat-edly (v4). To do this, overlooking the faults and failures of our brothers and sisters, even of our enemies, over and over again, is of course quite unnatural – or better, supernat-ural. This kind of mercy is a characteristic of God, and in asking us to act like God Jesus is asking us to act supernaturally. Supernatural behaviour demands a supernatural gift, and that is what faith is.
