Luke 17:5-10 Commentary

When I was a teenager, a well-meaning adult wanted to encourage me in the faith with a small gift. Obviously bought at the Christian bookstore, it was a dark blue pen on a matching dark blue lanyard and it had an actual mustard seed encased in the cap with verse 6 written in mustard yellow cursive on its side. I think I was meant to write my prayer journals with it, and to wear it so that I could see the mustard seed during the angsty times that come with being a teenager and therefore remember that I just needed faith to get through.

It was a lovely gesture, to be sure, but one like so many other uses of this verse that fail to meet Jesus’s actual meaning. All summer long, those of us who followed along the road with Jesus through the lectionary gospel texts in Luke have not been able to avoid the calls to action that Jesus has given those who want to be like him. This is very likely why the lectionary has paired the encouragement to faith in verses 5-6 with the picture of servanthood in verses 7-10. The disciples ask to have their faith increased and Jesus tells them to just do what they are supposed to do as God’s slaves; they do not have a faith supply problem; they have an internal motivation problem.

Why are they struggling to think that they are up for the challenge? To be fair, the challenge that Jesus has laid for them is difficult and daunting for anyone who has a smidgen of self-awareness about their sinfulness. Along with everything else Jesus has taught and modelled to them, he has just specifically spoken about not being a stumbling block to others as well as the necessity to forgive repeatedly and regularly. (17.1-4) It is to these two things that the disciples cry, “Increase our faith!”

All part of Jesus’s answer to their cry, verses 6 and 7-10 aren’t actually separate ideas at all. Jesus is saying that it doesn’t take much faith—that it’s the use of that faith in doing what we ought that we should really be focusing on. In other words, the disciples hearing yet again how difficult and challenging the call to discipleship is, ask Jesus to increase their faith so that they will feel more confident about their chances of being obedient. God’s response is to tell them, “Just get on with it!”

Jesus uses a real-world example from their time and culture to make his point. Who keeps rewarding their slave for doing their job? Who holds their slave to an easier standard than they hold themselves? Who thanks their slave for doing their job? Nobody. What Jesus is teaching his followers about how to live out their faith makes for an extraordinary life, but it is the bare minimum of what it means to be his slave. “Just get on with it!”

Stop asking for more faith and practice the Jesus way. Stop expecting recognition and recognize all that God has given you (see the textual point below). The gift of faith given to each of us is accompanied by God’s very self as the Holy Spirit abides with us. Having God with us, we might think of it this way: instead of asking God to increase our faith internally, we can pray that God will increase our faith externally as we grow in obedience and faith in action. This prayer gets us wondering about how God is calling us to be his servant today, and allows us to build on the sure foundation of faith he has laid for us in our hearts. Our vocation as Christians is to follow Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, but that requires being willing to start practicing before we feel ready or want to do what he is calling us to do—because it is “only what we ought to have done” in his name.

Textual Point

In verse 10, Jesus says that his disciples will reach a point of knowledge about their obedience and call themselves “worthless slaves” who have done “what they ought to have done.” That word, “worthless” (achreios in the Greek) is often translated as “being of no use or profit, worthless.” But, as Kenneth Bailey points out, its root word is chreios—having the prefix a– added to make it a negative. Chreios is less about profitability and more about need: “that which should happen or be supplied because it is needed.” When this word is made a negative—as in our passage—it can be translated as “without need.” Jesus could be telling his disciples, therefore, that they are grateful because they know their purpose and are equipped for it: “We are slaves without need, we have only done what we ought to have done.” Like we’ve heard throughout this summer, God gives us all the good we need in order to be part of his Kingdom; we can live those Kingdom values as though we had no other option—like it was the only viable way we saw to fulfill our vocations.

Illustration Idea

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell uses real world examples of successful people like The Beatles and Bill Gates to argue for the “10,000-hour rule.” Gladwell posits that in order to become a master at something, it’s less about talent and more about discipline: you need to be purposeful in practicing and doing it for thousands upon thousands of hours. We hear a similar sentiment from Jesus as he tells his disciples that theirs is not a problem of faith but of doing. I’m not sure there is any end to our pursuit as disciples, but it does underscore that our lives are made up in the trying with Jesus by his Spirit.