29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Collect

Almighty ever-living God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Reflection

This is the third consecutive Sunday in which the word “faith” is mentioned: first, we heard the disciples asking Jesus to increase their faith, and He replies, “If you had faith as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Luke 17:6). Then we had Jesus’ statement to the leper who returned to thank Him: “Get up and go; your faith has saved you” (Luke 17:19). And today, Jesus concludes His discourse on the need to pray without ceasing by asking a rhetorical question: “But when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?”

It’s a question that takes us aback, especially after all the emphasis on faith and on God’s desire to do justice for His chosen ones who cry out to Him day and night. What is Jesus trying to say with this question? It’s not an easy one to answer, particularly because the passage ends abruptly, and after this question, the scene changes—as we’ll see next Sunday.

In several stories—as we saw last Sunday—faith is often linked with healing miracles in the Gospel according to Luke, and therefore with a personal encounter with Jesus, who alone can grant salvation. A question like this might give the impression that Jesus is already disheartened, thinking that once He arrives in Jerusalem and is crucified, after His resurrection and ascension, faith will vanish. The disciples will not succeed in the mission entrusted to them. And when He returns at the end of time, He will find the world as He left it—if not worse: a redeemed humanity that still has not embraced salvation, or those who were meant to bring it to others having failed in their mission, and everything having come to nothing.

It’s a question that might also place each of us personally in a bit of a crisis. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to examine our faith and trust in Jesus: whether we believe in the way Jesus understands faith; whether we have genuine trust in Him, or are merely paying lip service while our hearts are elsewhere. Are we like that judge who neither feared God nor cared about anyone, and thus lacked the perspective that only faith can give—recognising our nothingness before God and our equality with our fellow human beings, since we all share the same dignity as children of God? Or are we like the widow, who keeps on persevering in prayer, trusting not in ourselves—for our strength can fail in the blink of an eye, and our sense of justice can bend to suit the moment—but trusting in the justice of God, which is always rooted in truth?

I believe Jesus was being truly realistic when He asked this question, because the truth is, it’s not something automatic—that He will find faith on earth when He returns at the end of time. It’s not automatic that, when He calls us at the moment of our death, He will find genuine faith in us. It’s not automatic that He will find in us the kind of faith He desires when, through hearing His Word and through the Eucharist, He enters into us and becomes part of us. And so, this is a question that ought to shake us a little.

But Jesus was not being fatalistic with this question—not like those who say, “It’s all over,” or give up hope and lose all trust even in God, though they don’t say it out loud or even admit it to themselves. Jesus is not a fatalist, because, as He will later say to Peter during the Last Supper—even though His Passion will put them all to the test—Jesus prayed for Peter so that his faith would not fail, and that once he returned, he could strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:32).

And He does the same with each one of us: He prays for us before the Father so that our faith may not fail, because true faith, complete faith, is not the product of our own efforts or reasoning, but a gift from God. And God will certainly not deny this gift to those whose hearts are open to Him through constant prayer—that is, through a life that tirelessly strives to remain open to God, so that He may enter and dwell within us, and thus, through us, dwell in the world.

Prayer

Lord, I believe that when You return, You will find faith on earth, because You never withhold the gift of faith from anyone whose heart is open and ready to receive it. Grant that my faith, even when tested, may not fail, but each time may be refined and purified until what remains is only that pure faith in You—the very faith You long to find in us when You come to meet us in our lives, in our death, and at the end of time.

Amen.