Start at the first four words, because everything after them gets read as though they were not there.

Have the faith of God.

The Douay keeps what the Latin has, which is a possessive. Fidem Dei. The faith of God. Not faith directed at God, though that is true elsewhere and not in dispute; here, grammatically, the faith is described by whose it is.

And that is the only description the sentence offers of the faith of God. Read the three verses again and look for a quantity. There is not one.

The faith of God has no size in this passage.

No measure appears. No amount is named, nothing is weighed, nobody is compared to anybody, and no threshold is set that a person might reach or fall short of. Three verses hand over a mountain, a sea and the whole of prayer, and not one word in them tells you how much of anything to bring.

There is no dial anywhere on the faith of God.

Now look at the single condition that is attached, because it is not what the popular reading needs either. Shall not stagger. It is a negative. It is a thing not done.

You cannot grade an absence upward. Nobody has ever been commended for the impressive scale of something they refrained from. If the condition on the promise were a quantity, it would have been possible to fall short of it by not having enough; as the verse actually stands, the condition is that you do not trip, and the faith of God is what you are not tripping over.

The mountain, next, is addressed rather than assessed. Whosoever shall say to this mountain. The mountain is given a hearer’s part in the sentence, not an obstacle’s.

Nobody in these verses is instructed to face the mountain, take its measure, and work out whether they are equal to it. That whole exercise, which is what most of us actually do, is absent from the text. The faith of God is not an estimate of the gap between you and the thing in front of you, and it does no arithmetic about mountains at all.

The verbs in the last verse run the wrong way for a lever. Believe that you shall receive; and they shall come unto you. Two verbs of arrival, and neither of them is a verb of production.

Nothing in verse twenty-four is manufactured by the person praying. The traffic runs toward them. That is what the faith of God looks like in a sentence: a person with their hands open, and the movement coming from the other direction.

And notice, twice, where the passage locates its own reliability. Amen I say to you. Therefore I say unto you. The guarantee is twice attached to the speaker and never once to the hearer’s inner condition.

The faith of God is therefore underwritten by the one making the promise, which is the only place a promise can safely sit.

Which brings me to the use these verses get put to, and I am going to name it plainly, because vagueness here helps nobody. Verse twenty-four is one of the most weaponised sentences in the Gospels. It gets used to convert a non-event into a verdict.

You asked, and it did not come, and therefore something is wrong with the way you asked. That is the argument. Sometimes it arrives kindly and sometimes it arrives as a demand for more effort, and either way it takes an outcome nobody controls and reads it backwards as a measurement of the person who prayed. The faith of God is precisely the phrase that makes that impossible, because it puts the faith in a hand that is not yours before the promise is ever spoken.

I want to name who this has been used against hardest, because the text is what makes the naming necessary. There are trans people, and gay, lesbian and bisexual people, who spent years asking for one thing, which was to be made different from what they are. They were taught to ask. They were taught that asking with enough conviction would settle it, and when the mornings kept arriving unchanged they were handed verse twenty-four and invited to work out the arithmetic themselves.

The arithmetic is not in the verse. Nothing in these three lines authorises anybody to read an unchanged morning as a report on the asker.

The faith of God will not sit still for that reading.

On Saturday this offering was about being instant out of season, and about a teaching that says wanting a thing makes your account of it untrue. Today’s is a different claim and it needs saying separately: not your report is inadmissible, but your outcome is your evidence. The first one refuses to hear you. The second one hands you a result and tells you it is a mirror. And the faith of God, sitting four words into this Gospel, refuses both, because a thing that belongs to God is not available as a measurement of you.

Apply the fruit-test where it belongs, which is to Christianity’s own record with this verse. What has the lever grown? It has grown people who concluded, quietly and for life, that they had been personally refused. It has grown people who stopped asking for anything at all, on the reasonable ground that asking and receiving nothing had become unbearable. And it has grown people who went away without ever making a complaint, because the teaching had already told them whose fault it was.

None of that is a small harm, and none of it was necessary, because the text never said it. The faith of God had said the opposite, in four words, before the promise was even spoken.

If you do not believe there is anyone at the other end of a prayer, the ethical shape still holds and it holds cleanly. Outcomes are not readouts of the people who wanted them. A wish that did not come true tells you about the world, not about the wisher, and any system that trains a person to audit their own interior every time reality declines to move is not teaching hope, it is teaching self-suspicion. The faith of God translates without any theology at all: the thing you are relying on was never yours to produce.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman four months out of nine years of drinking, working nights in a parcel warehouse because the shift was the only one she could get and because three in the morning was the hour she used to be awake for other reasons. She had stopped praying for herself entirely. She had said the same sentence nightly for nine years and had got into the habit of reading the answer off her own hands each morning, and the answer had been no often enough that she had retired the question.

A man on the same line, twenty-two years sober, never once asked her whether she believed anything. He asked her to hold the bay for him while he went for the scanner. He held it for her. And every night for eleven weeks, clocking out, he said the same thing on his way past: I will say one for you, and you needn’t.

She never agreed with him. She also never asked him to stop. Eleven weeks of somebody else carrying it, out loud, with her agreement not required and not requested, which is the faith of God performed on a concrete floor under strip lights.

I am not going to tell you it worked out, because I do not know that it did. She was off that shift by February and nobody on that line heard from her again. Nothing in this story gets fixed.

What she got was eleven weeks in which the believing was not her job. That is not a lesser arrangement than believing hard by yourself. According to the Gospel it is the only arrangement there has ever been, because the faith of God was never a quantity anybody was asked to raise.

Which is roughly what the Church is doing with today’s saint, if you look at what it actually claims about him. Gregory was born at Neocaesarea in Pontus about the year 213, into a family that was not Christian, and his father died when he was fourteen. He and his brother Athenodorus set out to study law at Beirut, and while escorting their sister to Caesarea in Palestine they met Origen and abandoned law for seven years of study with him. He went home, and was made bishop of his own town by Phoedimus, Bishop of Amasea.

Here is the figure the Catholic Encyclopedia records, and it is the one worth carrying. When he was consecrated, at forty, the Christian community of that town numbered only seventeen souls. And the same article records that whereas he began with only seventeen Christians, at his death there remained but seventeen pagans in the town.

Seventeen to seventeen. It is a very tidy number and I am not going to pretend the tidiness is not part of why it survived, but that is what the record says, and the encyclopedia is careful elsewhere about what it will and will not stand behind. Of the biography that carries most of the accounts of his miracles, it says that the imaginative element is very active. He is called the Wonderworker because of what was told about him, and this offering is not going to tell you any of it as history.

What can be said, and it is enough, is that the man who is remembered for wonders is given a Mass in which he does not perform any. He gets a Lesson where every verb belongs to God, a Collect that asks for our devotion rather than his powers, and three verses in which the faith of God is named as God’s before a mountain is mentioned.

The Mass built around him credits nothing to him at all, and names the faith of God instead.

That is the calendar making the same argument the Gospel makes. On Thursday this offering stood on a single sentence in which one subject governs both verbs and God is the one who has begun a good work and undertaken to finish it. The eleventh of this month gave us a Collect confessing that we rise by no power of our own. Three texts in a week, all saying the same thing from different directions, and the faith of God is the shortest version of it.

Go back to the Gradual’s verse one more time, because it makes the point in four words of its own. Thou art a priest for ever. In the psalm that sentence is preceded by an oath: the Lord hath sworn, and he will not repent.

A sworn thing is not an earned thing, and neither is the faith of God. It does not go up when the recipient improves or lapse when he flags, which is why a Mass about a sworn priesthood is the right frame for a Gospel about a mountain.

So take the mountain as Mark gives it. You are not asked to look at the thing in front of you and calculate whether you can shift it. You are asked to have the faith of God, which is a possession before it is a performance, and then to speak.

And if this morning you are somebody who asked for years and did not receive, hear the one thing this passage will not let anybody say to you. It will not let them say that the not-receiving was the measurement. The faith of God is not on trial in your life, because it is not yours, and it never was, and that is the good news in it rather than the loophole.

↑ The order resumes below.