[This Sunday, we are gathered once again for a solemn service, a lovely family celebration: here are these young people, this time 33 young men and women, who are making a profession of faith and a vow of allegiance to Jesus. Our love and our prayers are now focused on them, and our hearts are filled with the same desire for them as the disciples asked of Jesus in the passage we read: that the Lord may increase their faith! For this is what the word confirmation means: to strengthen or confirm in faith. We wish this for them all the more, because we ourselves, older believers, know well how much we need every day to strengthen the little flickering, stumbling faith that we have. The eternal longing of almost every worthy believer is expressed in this petition: Lord, increase our faith! Let us all now stand before our Lord, who is invisible but real among us, with this request.We can better understand the reason for this request if we first look at what motivated the disciples to make this request. Earlier, Jesus had told them that if your brother sins against you seven times a day, and comes to you seven times a day and says, "I repent, forgive him. These were the high moral standards the disciples always heard from Jesus, and it became clearer and clearer to them that he was asking them to do more than they could do. For it is a great thing to forgive someone who has hurt us badly, who has offended us; and if he repeats the offence, who can forgive him a second time, in his heart? But Jesus does not say to forgive him the first time or the second time, but to be ready to forgive him the fifth, sixth, seventh time in the same day, and the next day to begin again, again! Once or twice it's hard to do it somehow, but then you feel guilty, you run out of patience and you fight back. What am I, that I can be insulted with impunity...?! Unforgiveness is rooted in our souls like a tree in the ground. Who can always, again and again, overlook offence and forgive? This must have been the way the disciples thought when Jesus' words urging forgiveness burst out of them, "Lord, increase our faith! It was as if they were saying: Lord, this willingness to forgive that you want us to have is not in us, we are not able to do it. To reach such a high moral standard is impossible for us!
And yet this is just one example of the many moral demands that Jesus places on His followers. Wherever we open the Bible, we find that Jesus' commands are humanly impossible to carry out. For example, when he says: Do not be anxious, or: "Do not be afraid" - who can fail to worry in a worrying situation, or not be afraid in the midst of life's many perils? Or when, for example, he asks us to keep even our eyes and our thoughts pure and free from sinful desires; or to love even our enemies and do good to them; or to deny ourselves and put other people's interests before our own; or, like the Good Samaritan, to be always ready to help those in our way, and to root out even the root of all anger and resentment from our hearts; or to receive adversity from the hand of God with a peaceful heart: all such requirements as the best-intentioned man could say are impossible! I cannot do it! Anyone who would be really serious about the Christian life, the Christian way of life, must realize that it is as impossible for him as telling a strawberry tree to break off its thorn and be plucked into the sea!
To live a Christ-following life is a task beyond human strength. Especially to persevere with Jesus throughout one's life - which is what these young people are taking a vow to do here - is an undertaking that one can only truly say: my faith is not enough, too little! To live a life truly following Christ, I would need much more, much greater faith! "Lord, increase our faith!" Jesus says: "If you had faith as much as a mustard seed..." With this strange statement, Jesus is first of all correcting our whole understanding of faith. We are used to the idea that a man can perform as much as he has the strength to do. He collapses under burdens that exceed his spiritual or physical strength, he fails in tasks that exceed his capacity. If this conception is applied to faith, our whole Christianity will very soon be bankrupted. For if someone says: Well, yes, if I had more faith, if I had stronger faith, I could forgive seven times over, I could keep my heart pure for a lifetime - then it follows that: But I don't have more faith, unfortunately I don't have that much faith, so I can't accomplish what Jesus is asking me to do! From here it is only a step to say about oneself: unfortunately, that's how I am, I can't help it! And he becomes a half-Christian - half-pagan, neither a true believer nor a true unbeliever...
Well, Jesus says: you don't need more faith, you don't need more faith, even if you have as much faith as a mustard seed, that's enough! So never measure yourself or the task you have to accomplish by how much faith you have, but how much God you have! It is all right if your faith is small, if with that small faith you believe that God is great! It's okay if you feel your faith is weak, if with the weak faith you have, you believe God is strong! It doesn't matter how little your faith can do, it only matters what Jesus can do! Never believe in your faith, but in Jesus! In the Jesus who has been given all power in heaven and on earth! For this is the very essence of faith, that man, turning away from himself, looks to Jesus and is united with him. Faith is precisely to establish contact between you and Jesus. Faith is like an electric wire that conducts the heavenly "current". It does not produce it, it conducts it. The energy-centre [power station] is Jesus, to whom one is connected by faith. And with the electric wire, it is not a question of whether it is thin or thick, but whether it is a good conductor. So do not trust in the power of your own faith, but in the power of Jesus! You can expect nothing from your faith - but everything from Jesus!
A young man once came to me and sadly confessed that he was in the bondage of a sinful passion and that he was being dragged down again and again by evil desires against his will. I said to him: Would you still be carried away by your desires if, for example, I were always there for you? - "No, surely not!" he said. Well then, if the presence of a man can keep someone from sinning, is not the presence of Jesus more able to do the same? So, with that mustard seed of faith, never look to yourself, who are so weak, nor to the greatness of the sin you have to overcome, nor to the moral standards you feel are too high, nor even to the faith you feel is too little - but to Jesus alone and always, who is there beside you, encouraging you: 'Do not be afraid, I can do what you cannot do, I will give you the strength to do what I want you to do! - And then - even if some bad quality, passion, desire, thought has taken root and grown in someone's life like a big branchy-branched mulberry tree in the ground - say boldly: break free from the thorn and enter into the sea of God's forgiving grace! And he will see that he will yield! For he must yield - to Jesus!
Yes, if you had as much faith as a mustard seed. There's a reason Jesus said mustard seed. If he wanted to express his smallness, he could have said a grain of dust - but he said a seed! The seed of a plant is a living thing. The question of greatness or smallness is negligible when it is a living, animate thing. In the seed there is germination, in the seed there is movement, action. The seed sends its thin, weak root fibres down into the soil and absorbs the life force from there, then germinates and becomes visible in the plant, which sprouts from it. - The mustard seed faith is a faith that sends its roots down into the depths of the Bible and draws its nourishment from there constantly; a faith that moves and becomes visible because it can show itself in the smallest thing: it begins to do what Jesus says, it actually contributes to the carrying out of Jesus' commands, his will.
Our faith must also be used, practised, not just carried inside us as a kind of spiritual experience. The healing of a certain man with dry hands is a particularly good example of this in the Bible. This man had a lame arm, he could not lift it, he could not move it. Jesus stood in front of him and urged him: "Stretch out your hand! - It is an impossible command! That's exactly what he can't do! The man just looked at Jesus, then tried to obey the command... and suddenly he found himself doing what Jesus had said: stretching out his hand! Yet he did what he could not do on his own, and his hand was healed, as sharp as the other. He could have said: "Lord, I have not the faith to do this! - But he didn't say it, he simply obeyed the command, and in doing so he experienced the power of Jesus. We want Jesus to pour faith, more faith, into us through some spiritual funnel, and then we would be able to do more. And Jesus expects us to take what little we have - and then we will see what we are capable of! Because as we obey the word of Jesus, we receive the power of Jesus. It is up to us to lift up our hands, it is up to us to love with our hearts, it is up to us to witness with our mouths, to encourage, to comfort people - it is up to us to uproot the strawberry tree! it is up to us to act, but with the mustard seed-hat that never counts on its own strength, but on the power of Jesus!
Do you know how small a mustard seed is? Smaller than a grain of wheat. And Jesus says that's enough. That's all you have, isn't it?! Just look to Jesus always with as much faith as you have, and start acting, obeying with as much faith as you have! Leave the rest to Jesus! That is how we try to live the Christian life, the Christian life, because that is how we can live the Christian life!
Dear brothers and sisters, young and old! Jesus is here now, invisible though he may be, but he is here in person and in reality. Let us now turn to Him and ask Him:
Lead us, Jesus,
We go for you.
Life calls us to fight,
Let us follow you;
Take our hand,
Till we arrive.
Give us a strong heart,
That we may be believers.
And if we have burdens to bear,
Yet our tongue will not complain;
Though our path be bumpy,
We come to you.
Our wounded hearts will
When it sighs,
Or when sorrow burns for another,
Give me patience and peace,
Full of hope
Looking to You.
Follow in our footsteps
To the end of our lives,
And if we walk in ruins,
Let us find support in you,
Till the road runs out,
And you open a door in heaven.
(Canto 434, verses 1-4)
Date: 27 April 1969 Confirmation.