The passage taken from the Book of Habakkuk may be broken down into two distinct parts. The first one is sort of a lamentation that the prophet delivers to God for he must live at a time filled with evil, injustice, violence and oppression, and the prophet cannot understand why the Lord forces him to see all that. The prophet feels hurt, not only for all that is taking place but also for God’s apparent passive attitude. Perhaps his true pain and the cause for his complaint is really God’s apparent restraint before all the injustice; it almost looks like God doesn’t care. Deep inside the prophet demands God’s intervention to put an end to all the evil.

The second part is God’s oracle as his answer to the prophet’s complaint, but the answer is nevertheless disturbing; it is as if he would say “friend, you ain’t seen nothing yet! It gets worse before it gets better.” For God is letting loose a cruel and violent nation that will strike against all the lands of the earth, imposing their will and taking over their lives for their own use. Their might is stronger than the Assyrians’ that now is fading away. Their strength is their god.

What is the history behind this passage? No sooner than the peoples from the near east were jubilant, applauding the fall of the Assyrian empire and celebrating their liberation, they began to suffer the effects from another more powerful invader; that is, the Babylonian Empire.

In biblical times, men perceived everything coming from God, good as well as evil, and the prophet wants God to confirm to him whether he will judge evil and the injustice and the violence that exists in Israel brought about by a cruel and vicious people. By appealing to God he wants to “wake him up” as if saying “come on! What’s going on? Why do you allow this? Is this what you created us for, to end up in the hands of totalitarian powers? Is this the destiny of your creation?”

Through all times, questions such as these have been asked of God. It has been said that human suffering is the basic cause of atheism, or at least, of religious indifference. Why believe in God after the destructions brought about by brutal invasions from ancient times up to the most recent events we now live through? In the midst of such horror: Where is God? It is not easy for the prophet to answer such questions. He is limited by historical, cultural and religious facts that won’t allow him to answer as we would like to hear today. He acknowledges that he is in a state of guard, of silence, and interior desolation and awaits God’s answer.

We still wait for the answer. In effect, God answers. The Lord points out what awaits the unjust and the oppressor. Not only to those in our time and to those who are to come, but also to those in the past. It is a fact that those giants felt humbled in the hands of others more powerful than they. Habakkuk is living it: while the mighty Assyria is fading away; another power is rising in its ruins. For the prophet, this rising and falling is a design from God. He determines who will fall and who will rise up taking the place of the one who fell. In the middle of all this, the prophet laments the fate of the just and the innocent: why is it that they must suffer the worse part? God’s answer is simple, although not immediate, it won’t fail: “the arrogant will fail, but the just, by his faithfulness, will prevail.”

It is a difficult dilemma for the prophet to explain to his generation and for us to ours, this answer that shows characteristics of injustice. All the prophet can say is that some day, even if it is far away, the just will prevail, if he remains faithful. And, while waiting for the time to come, WHAT? The only thing that the oppressed can do is to sing songs of hope, play satires, and make witty comments against the oppressor. It is obvious that there are situations when, without losing these, we cannot reduce the resistance to injustice to only these. More than twenty centuries after Habakkuk, the expectations of the oppressed continue in force: they expect a new world order, a life of peace, of harmony and of justice, but in this world, not in the beyond where we continuously preach their fate will end.

From the first reading we receive a great challenge: to trust in God and maintain our fidelity based on our faith. And that is precisely what the disciples ask of Jesus according to Luke: “increase our faith”. Jesus gave them very simple teachings, teachings that must be radically founded on faith; otherwise, they won’t go anywhere. Jesus taught them that there shouldn’t be any reason for scandal and, besides, he put as a condition for a new relation and a new society the need for fraternal correction and the permanent attitude to always forgive any offense (Lk. 17:1-4). The disciples are aware that this simple teaching goes beyond their grasp, their mentality and the preconceptions set in their consciences by an out of focus religion that won’t allow them to understand what Jesus is trying to point out with his words. Therefore, they humbly ask: “Lord, increase our faith.”

Jesus confirms the disciples’ attitude affirming their lack of faith: “If you had 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”. The parallel passage that we find in Matthew made the question more difficult because it doesn’t speak of a mulberry tree, but of “a mount”. Nevertheless, the essence remains the same. For the Jew the mulberry tree, as is the fig tree, are symbols of fertility; but the fig tree and the mulberry tree, even though they are green and abounding with leaves, if they have no fruit, they are worthless. In this sense, either tree represents for Luke the reality of Israel; a people expected to bear fruit because of their relation to the Lord; yet, despite their long formation with love and patience, when the time came to harvest the fruits, there were none. In the image of the “mount” in Matthew, Jesus referred to the holy mount of Jerusalem where the temple was to be found; here we find a religious system that was reactionary, unmovable, legalistic, and oppressive of the people in collusion with the political powers of the times. Having the smallest amount of faith would be enough, according to Jesus, to transport that mount or rip out that mulberry tree that would end such system.

The purpose is, under both images, to teach that some faith would be enough to carry out the cleansing that will bring about the removal of the mulberry tree or throwing the mount to the sea. It is understood that for Jesus, having faith is more than “seeing is believing”, as the traditional approach trained us through centuries. For Jesus, faith is to concentrate all one’s strengths, all one’s understanding, all one’s being, all one’s life in service to God’s plan, that is, his kingdom in this world.

The religious leaders of Israel taught for centuries a distorted image of God; so distorted that the people were convinced that nothing would be able to change because God had predisposed life to be this way; some enjoying life as in last Sunday’s parable, the rich man and Lazarus, and others, in absolute poverty, excluded, disinherited and to top it all, declared cursed and illegal by the religious class who really thought they controlled God. The worse of it all is that the poor and the isolated themselves, as it happens today, believed that the god of the rich and famous was the real God. The same God that revealed himself to them in the past as the one who could free the nameless and the voiceless, the one who would assume their cause and their defense to liberate them from the oppression of Egypt! So, it is justifiable that the disciples appealed to Jesus with: “Lord, increase our faith.”

Jesus' proposal, his words and actions, were meant to reveal the real image of God, making the people see that the god they were duped into believing was not even the shadow of the true God who is Father and Mother; a historical being in his revelation in history and one who opted for the poor and the excluded. He revealed a God who has no tolerance for and diverges from injustice. Even though his image may be trampled on by the powerful, the politicians and the religious fanatics, his true option remains for those who are “nobodies” in society.

Jesus then invites his disciples, as he invites us today, to change the image of this false god brought about by the malicious and self serving, and to bring out the real and genuine God; no matter the amount of faith of the disciples compared to the Teacher’s. A tiny bit is enough, even if it is only the size of a mustard seed. It is enough the intention to eradicate the lifeless faith, childish and immature, to be filled by the presence of the friendly God, close-by and sensitive to the pain and the injustice that validates and gives sense to all struggles for justice and for the efforts of those who seek equality of life for all. That false god that continues interfering in the world and even in our congregations won’t see us as his children, but sees us as his slaves. That is something Jesus wants to correct in his disciples. The religion they inherited did not permit the experience of sensing themselves as children of God, but rather as worthless slaves.

Consequently we have a dual possibility; we either maintain our faith, or rather that bundle of superstition and false beliefs that taught us things that were not even in God’s mind, or we throw ourselves in faith to live an adventure in a new life of renewed faith, a life based in the proposals of Jesus, tearing away the false image of a god who eats and drinks and shares with the powerful. Let us seek then the real image of God, an image of God Father and Mother, an image that Jesus revealed to us and still we have difficulty in finding, and that is because we still lack the necessary disposition, and a greater need for humility, to ask Jesus from the bottom of our hearts “Lord, increase our faith”. Amen.