A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to his disciples, scandals will inevitably arise, but woe to him through whom they come. It would be better if he had been thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck than giving scandal to one of these little ones. Be on your guard. If your brother does wrong, correct him.
If he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times a day and seven times a day turns back to you saying, I am sorry, forgive him. The apostles said to the lord, increase our faith. And Jesus answered, if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this sycamore, be uprooted and transplanted into the sea, and the tree would obey you. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I don't know about this matter of having this faith and moving the sycamore into the sea. Of a more practical consideration, I think, might be a thought contained in the Responsorial Psalm. It ties in with this. It's a matter of faith.
Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face. Where do you find the face of Jesus Christ? Where do you find the face of God almighty? Where is your faith that Christ says if it was the size of a mustard seed, you could talk to an oak tree and tell him to jump into the Chesapeake Bay and it would do it. In the opening prayer of this mass, we pray that we would do the work of the lord.
Well, what's the work of the lord? Going into foreign missions, that used to be exactly what people would think. In the time of Saint Jerome, if people were converted, the first thing Saint Jerome told them was to get rid of all their possessions and really become a recluse. And many fled into the Nile Valley. There were thousands and thousands of hermits over in the Nile Valley.
In other words, it was to turn away from from life, from daily living, from marriage, from having children, having a family, to to withdraw. I'm not talking about going into a convent at all. And that was their of course, this is the fourth century, fourth and fifth century, and down the century down the down the ages. How often? If you say John or Mary has a vocation, what do people think of immediately?
Priesthood or the convent or we used to when people were going into the seminary to the convent? You see, this is this is crackpot thinking. I don't know where it all began. I but what do we mean by praying to see the face of the Lord? Are we actually praying for what are what do we mean when we say we wanna see the face of the Lord?
What do we mean when we say, I want your help, god, to do your work. Where's your work? Getting into a convent, into the priesthood, going into foreign missions, going down into the ghettos, going down to Mexico, into South America, what does this mean? A lot of people will think of it in those terms, and it's wrong. Some people will be called to that, and I hope they listen to that call.
But we are all called. Now another word for call is vocation. That's all the Latin word means, vocovocari, vocave, vocatusum, to bring you back to your first year high Latin. So we got that vocation the day, the moment we were baptized. We were given the white garment and we were given a light to carry.
Where? Where do we expect to see the face of God? What is his work that we intend to do? I think they're the same thing in many instances, but we have to have the light of faith to see it. We have to have that little grain of mustard seed of faith to see that in the slightest event of our life is the face of God.
Now of course this is a metaphor. I'm not expecting to see God's face. You see you can easily get so anthropomorphic, but the thing that I do expect is that God is with me, that God is around me. I can't avoid him. I can separate myself from him in a way.
But in far as his love for me is concerned, I can't separate that at all at all. This is something we ought to get into our heads that God loves me, and he loved me long before I ever thought of loving him. And whatever I do, he still loves me. The only issue is, do I remain in love of him? And what does this mean in practice, in the nitty gritty day in and day out living?
Not running away to some foreign field because most of us are only going to do that in dreams, in imagination. It's like the person who say, Oh yes, I'm just after they have neglected their correspondence for six months, they meet somebody and said, Oh, I was just waiting for an opera for a moment when I could write you a decent letter. The decent letter never gets written. But you see we can William James brought this out so well how we can get feeling so good about what we would do if circumstances were different. Of course, is completely unrealistic.
And to be a follower of Jesus Christ is to be a realist. A realist with your feet on this earth and your head in the sky. And so I think the message today is we are praying to see the face of God. Let us pray that with that faith of a mustard seed, we will see God in our daily living, in our daily fulfillment of our obligations, that in our daily effort, which aren't going to succeed a 100%, all we can do is to try a 100%, percent, is to live in the presence of God and to see God's hand in all of life, to see ourselves as an instrument of him, to see ourselves that we have a work to do as Newman says, unless it's done, unless that mother and father do their job with their kids, it won't be done. If I'm a bookkeeper, if I don't keep a good books, who's gonna do it?
And just because I'm doing it for God doesn't mean I do sloppy work. Just the reverse. And so I think in this matter of praying to do God's work, remember it's not tomorrow, it wasn't yesterday, it's the job in hand today. And there we pray for that little bit of faith of the mustard seed that in this daily job, we will see the face of god. In the name of the father, and of the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.