Faith Is About God, Not Us: Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Gayle Somers

By Gayle Somers, Catholic Exchange, Oct. 3, 2025

Gayle Somers is a member of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Phoenix and has been writing and leading parish Bible studies since 1996. She is the author of three bible studies, Galatians: A New Kind of Freedom Defended (Basilica Press), Genesis: God and His Creation, and Genesis: God and His Family (Emmaus Road Publishing). Her latest book, Whispers of Mary: What Twelve Old Testament Women Teach Us About Mary is available from Ascension Press. Gayle and her husband Gary reside in Phoenix and have three grown children.

This Sunday, the apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith.  More faith sounds like a reasonable request.  Jesus doesn’t think so.  Why?

Gospel (Read Lk. 17:5-10)

What prompted the apostles to ask Jesus to increase their faith in this reading?  In the verses preceding ours, Jesus had been talking about forgiveness:  “Take heed to yourselves, if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him” (see Lk. 17:3-4).  No wonder the apostles ask for more faith!  They knew how hard it is, humanly speaking, to forgive the same offense over and over.  They thought they would need much more faith than they had to be able to follow Jesus’ teaching.

They must have been surprised by His answer:  “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”  Jesus makes it clear that it is not the volume of faith that makes impossible things happen, because faith “the size of a mustard seed”—very tiny—can accomplish the impossible.  What did He mean? …

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