Don’t back down

Jubilee Preaching Aid for October 5, 2025

What does faith look like for Jubilee people?

In Luke 17:5-10, Jesus offers his disciples some teachings about faith, and we can learn from these teachings too. But first, to understand this passage, we have to consider its context.

In the section directly preceding this one, Jesus had been teaching about forgiveness. “Mistakes happen,” Jesus says, “but don’t be the reason for someone else’s sin.” And after someone has messed up (as people will), then, if they ever want to change their hearts and lives, Jesus says we must forgive them – every time! Even if they come back seven times in one day (Luke 17:4).

This is a difficult teaching for the disciples, as it is for us. Many of our social assistance programs require means testing. “Do you really need this support? Prove it.” Those seeking aid are made to show that they deserve financial assistance: that their income is low enough, that they have exhausted all other avenues, that they have not wasted their money. How many times are we willing to forgive the same person on the same day before we say, “enough is enough”? Maybe once each week?

Clearly troubled, the disciples ask Jesus: “Increase our faith!” “Give us enough strength to follow your challenging way.”

But Jesus rejects the premise of their request. Faith is not something that we can possess in greater or lesser quantities. You either have it or you don’t. Even the smallest amount of faith – an amount the size of a mustard seed – would be enough to have the “mulberry tree” (literally, “sycamine tree”) uprooted and planted in the sea.

Ched Myers suggests that the reference to a “mulberry tree” (Gk sukaminō) is not insignificant.1 The tree’s high, spreading branches tower over the people, just as two chapters later the tax collector Zacheaus will raise himself above the crowd by climbing another “mulberry tree” (Gk sykomorea). The tree’s deep spreading roots make it seem intractable, just like the systems that prop up injustice today.

Many English translations render verse 6 as a hypothetical suggestion: “If you had faith… you could say…” as though this is one option that might be possible. But the original Greek is written in the present tense: “If you have faith… you say (repeatedly, continuously) to this mulberry tree.” Here, Jesus is teaching his disciples about a faith that doesn’t quit. It commands the tree continuously to be uprooted and “planted” in the sea (a symbol of primordial chaos), and it obeys.

Verses 7-10 elaborate on the type of obedience Jesus has in mind using images from a world of work familiar to his audience. In this world, those who are in charge expect complete obedience from their subordinates. For us, it is unremarkable when an employee does their job, and Jesus encourages the disciples to exercise a similar obedience to God.

But if these verses belong to the preceding teaching about faith, perhaps there is an additional implication. Both passages are linked by the theme of obedience, so perhaps Jesus is still illustrating what faith “the size of a mustard seed” is like. This faith commands the mulberry tree and expects results. The obedience of the “mulberry tree” to the person of faith is unremarkable, it’s “no big deal.” It is simply the way the world is meant to work.

2 Timothy 1:7 puts it this way: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

As Jubilee people, then, let us “rekindle the gift of God” that is within us and receive God’s spirit of power and love and self discipline. With faith and conviction, let us speak to the mulberry trees of injustice until they are planted in nothingness. And let us forgive all who ask for it – every time!

Kevin Guenther Trautwein is a member of KAIROS Prairies North who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, subject to the promises and commitments made in Treaty 6, by the grace of God, by the gifts of the land, and by the faithfulness of the First Peoples who have kept and cared for this land since time immemorial.

1 Ched Myers, “Salvation as Wealth Distribution” (October 28, 2022). https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2022/10/28/salvation-as-wealth-redistribution/