Monday of the Thirty-SecondWeek in Ordinary Time
The faith to the square power
Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.” And the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” The Lord replied, “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. Lk 17,3-6
Our faith tells us that God drives the history of the salvation, which disentangles among the human events, some guided directly by the Lord, others by the spirit of the evil and only allowed by the Lord, due to a mysterious right of the devil to hamper the human journey in the history. If then also the workers in the kingdom of the heaven, working to implement the projects of God, can afford, as the today reading tells us, to say to a mulberry tree to move and it moves, how is it possible for God, with the little freedom left to him, to give direction to the facts of the history towards the universal plan of salvation? The fact is that the man of faith, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, to some extent has – as Paul says – the thought of God, so his actions spontaneously are oriented in the direction of the plan of salvation. However, when the determination of an event is over the capabilities of the man, those who have faith appeals to the power of God, which normally hears their prayer. This occurs usually, but not always, because also the man of faith, both because he is subject to temptations and because of his partial view of the plan of salvation, often makes requests for intercession which, although heard, are not satisfied. The temptation, however, not always spring from the desires of bad events, which indeed often are good, but they have the defect of not going in the direction of the God’s plan, which passes for roads – such as the pain, the tests and the death – which the man rejects because of his nature. Therefore, our intercessory prayer sometimes is not satisfied because, at that time, our paths do not coincide with the roads which God wants for us to go. This spiritual dynamic, as we have already had the occasion to point out, is explained very well by John in his letter: “And we have this confidence in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours” (1Jn 5,14-15). It’s easy! When our prayer is not answered, it means that his will is different from ours and that is the moment when a faith to the square power is required to us, because we have to believe that the Lord’s plan is brighter, bigger, more comprehensive and most forward-looking compared with ours.