TREASURE BEYOND OUR PRAYER

SUNDAY, TWENTY SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Habakkuk 1:2-3,2:2-4; Ps 95:1-2,6-9; 2 Tim 1:6-8,13-14; Lk 17:5-10

Entrusted with Heavenly Treasure

We cannot easily understand the physical and spiritual realms on the same measure. They are incommensurate in a certain sense. The implication is that we cannot apply the same standard we use for human life and actions to divine actions. We understand physical things with material measures and spiritual things or reality with spiritual measures. In the physical universe, within our world or on Earth, everything material gravitates towards the Earth’s centre because the Earth is the largest material thing and the primary reference point for them all. When we extend our measurements to other planets, the Earth ceases to be a reference point for masses or weights. The weight analogy can be applied to the spiritual realm to understand our relationship with God. God is the centre of the spiritual realm and draws all things to himself, for he made them all for his holy purpose. Thus, our birth into the spiritual realm gives us a new standard of measurement and a lens for seeing and understanding spiritual things and events. The development of our spiritual life requires us to use these new faculties of perceiving and judging things and events of life. The difficulty of spiritual life and growth stems from our inability to develop the needed faculties for our spiritual life and journey.

A typical example of such difficulties we encounter in our spiritual life is what we see in the first reading. The prophet Habakkuk could not understand the events of his day in the light of God’s word to Israel. So, he cried out and complained to God. “How long, O Lord, am I to cry for help while you will not listen; to cry ‘Oppression!’ in your ear and you will not save? Why do you set injustice before me, why do you look on where there is tyranny? Outrage and violence, this is all I see, all is contention, and discord flourishes.” The prophet expresses what we feel and our bewilderment as Christians witnessing injustice and evil in our days. We have a similar kind of embarrassment for our faith because we do not properly make a distinction between the temporal realm and the spiritual realm. The operations and manifestations in the temporal realm, while anchored in the spiritual, follow the laws governing temporal reality. They involve time and space; they obey the laws governing the events in time and space. Our choices and actions need time and space to evolve and bear fruit. God is not wont to put aside these laws that represent divine operations of wisdom within our temporal realm to manifest his presence, which they are already doing. Thus, Yahweh replied to him, saying: “‘Write the vision down, inscribe it on tablets to be easily read, since this vision is for its own time only: eager for its own fulfilment, it does not deceive; if it comes slowly, wait, for come it will, without fail.” The word of God manifests in time and space by obeying the spatiotemporal laws.

The spiritual occurrence of the word of God, which is without time or space, happens in the spiritual aspect of us, that is, in our spirits. Thus, a spiritually dead person cannot receive the effect of the word of God non-physically or spiritually. Thus, we must make a distinction between the immediate and spiritual effect of the word and its physical and temporal effects. The former is immediate, while the latter is mediated. So, God bids us wait in faith for the right time for the temporal effects of his word in our lives. The only means of assuring both aspects of the effects of the word is by faith. Thus, the Psalmist asks us to open our hearts to receive the immediate effect, which would assure the temporal effects. “O that today you would listen to his voice! ‘Harden not your hearts’” The immediate effect of the word of God in us is the gift of a spiritual life or its reenergization. Listening, believing, and acting by the Spirit make us cooperate with God in bringing about the temporal effects. Our faith expedites the time for the effects of the word of God we have received. Our faith creates a medium for the mediated temporal effects of the word.

Subsequently, Saint Paul urges Timothy, and all of us, to live by the spiritual gifts we have received from the word of God. “I am reminding you to fan into a flame the gift that God gave you when I laid my hands on you.” These spiritual gifts from the Lord are spiritual effects that are like prompts for our temporal lives and actions. Because they are immediate, we can use them simultaneously to bring about temporal effects. To fail to use them is to leave them fruitless. “God’s gift was not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power, and love, and self-control. So you are never to be ashamed of witnessing to the Lord, or ashamed of me for being his prisoner; but with me, bear the hardship for the sake of the Good News, relying on the power of God.” Profession of faith makes us spirits for the manifestation of the presence of God in the temporal affairs and events. We are not only the medium or spirit, but the receptacles or containers of heavenly life and treasures. For the graces we cooperate with gradually become resident in our souls. “You have been trusted to look after something precious; guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.” Living through the spiritual gifts familiarises us with the divine realm.

Based on this understanding, the Lord explains that our faith is not the prerogative of God to increase or reduce. But faith is ours to grow by the practice of living by it. “The Lord replied, ‘Were your faith the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.” By faith, we connect to the divine realm, which makes us transmit God's essence and power. What we have already established in the spirit would need time and space to manifest through the continuity of the faith that professes the divine will. If our faith correctly connects to God, then what is uttered would be God’s will and not ours, for everything in the spiritual realm follows the will of the Father of spirits. Our mistake is to plug into our disordered wills and present them as God’s. The effect will not follow because it lacks divine origin. Thus, Our Lord continued that we must work as servants of the divine will and not as our own masters. “Which of you, with a servant ploughing or minding sheep, would say to him when he returned from the fields, “Come and have your meal immediately”? Would he not be more likely to say, “Get my supper laid; make yourself tidy and wait on me while I eat and drink. You can eat and drink yourself afterwards”? Must he be grateful to the servant for doing what he was told?” We carry out the will of the Father and worship Him in spirit and truth. The Father’s will is our heavenly treasure, which is beyond every expectation and prayer we can make, and our faith possesses it.

Let us pray: Almighty ever-living God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.