This gospel (Luke 17: 5-10) seems like a puzzle; there are 2 pericopes that at first view, do not go together. What is the link between faith and service? Maybe we can try to look further, higher than the message.
Increase our faith, beg the disciples. They have it already but want more. Strange request which Jesus does not answer to. Faith is not a package than can be increased. It is a living attitude of confidence between two persons. It can only grow by living this trust. Jesus leads the apostles towards the fruit of this trust: everything is possible, even for a tree to be uprooted and be planted in the sea. Let us imagine a redwood doing this!
Then we hear about servants. Servants who after a hard day work, are invited to serve the master, not to complain but rather think of them as “unprofitable, useless, good for nothing”. Harsh words: especially after what we read in Luke 12: 37: the master himself will serve the vigilant servants, one after another. These two passages seem contradictory. Unprofitable, useless, we do not like hearing this about ourselves; I look at the Greek word, achreioi: the a is privative ; it means an opposite of the root of the word; so we are useless, God does not need us; this is the good news. Blessed Uselessness! It means that God makes us exist gratuitously, without reason, by and through his love. If we were useful, God would not have created us by love but by interest. Being useless, unprofitable unfolds our liberty; faith and love are lived only through freedom. And then we can reconcile our 2 texts on service; for God to serve the humankind is to make it live; for the humankind to serve God is to welcome life, to live, to extend this life to the others and to acknowledge where our life comes from.
It is what we live in the Eucharist and maybe it is why the two texts speak about setting the table and eating and drinking; they lead us to the core of the Eucharist.
So let us be grateful to be useless because we are created free, not by interest and that we are unconditionally loved.
And let us pray with Sainte Claire at her death bed:
“Blessed are you, my Lord, to have created me”
Sr. Claire Bouttin, Superior
