Forgive over and over again.
A little faith does a lot.
We are worthless slaves.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Was none of them found to return, praising and thanking God, except this foreigner?
For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.
Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.
A series of wisdom sayings are built into the narrative. A chapter like 17 can feel a bit disruptive, with less narrative consistency and more sort of wisdom teaching. But Jesus is inviting us into internal work, soul or heart work, mind-changing work. The book "Breathing Underwater" by Father Richard Rohr applies the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous to the Christian life. He suggests that we are all in recovery from self delusions and denials about ourselves and God.
We may ask ourselves, what teaching is speaking to me right now? Is it a need to forgive someone who has wronged us? We may hear that forgiveness is not a one-time thing, but that we may need to keep on forgiving again and again. Sometimes a single past act continues to cause us pain and we need to talk our way into forgiveness. Sometimes we focus on the scar and fail to see that time has healed us and the pain has dissipated. Sometimes the pain persists and the offense lingers. So, keep on forgiving. Its for you, as much or more than for the one who offended or sinned against you.
To the disciples, faith is accumulative and the more you have the better things will be. Don't we even say, that person has a lot of faith or is really faithful? Jesus says that faith is not like money. It is like food coloring in water; a little changes everything. A little faith is powerful stuff, because it opens us up to a world beyond ourselves, our limited minds and senses.
The slave analogy is hard to hear from Jesus' lips. Namely because he suggests that his followers are like slaves, called to be obedient to their master. I'm not sure how to deal with this right now. But we must acknowledge it as troubling and perhaps archaic. Is it a word we ought to forget now? Slavery is never right. The thought is, faithful people are called to obey God's commands.
People are crying out for mercy. Where have you heard their cries? Yesterday, I heard the cries of a father and a mother whose children attend toxic public schools, where asbestos and lead threaten the health of their children. How does Jesus respond to cries for mercy? He stops, listens, acts, and sends them on their way to receive healing and rejoin the community.
Gratitude is a bold announcement of faith! God has shown mercy. God has provided. God has protected. God has rescued. God has healed. God has saved. God has intervened. God has spoken words of love and forgiveness. Thanks is the natural response.
God is nearer than we see or think. We are always looking somewhere else to some other place or time. The grass is always greener, we say. Jesus says God is present immediately and completely in the present moment, here and now.
Surrender. Let God be God. Learn to trust. How hard it is for us to do these things. We are self-sufficient lovers of security. We have fooled ourselves into thinking we protect ourselves with our wealth or homes or relationships or jobs or insurance policies or elected leaders. We have been hurt by being vulnerable and trusting. Self-protection is human, too. To trust God is to give up on all the false securities. It is to stay vulnerable. This is not easy. It is a lifetime of internal work. We are all in recovery after all.
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