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Hb 1:2-3; 2:2-4
2 Tm 1:6-8, 13-14
Lk 17:5-10 The prophet Habakkuk expresses what many believers say in the face of the culture of death: “How long, O Lord? I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene.” The Lord says to us what he said to Habakkuk. “The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint.” We have even more reason than Habakkuk to have hope, because the foundational event of the fulfillment of the vision has occurred – the death and resurrection of Christ. We live now in the “in between” time, when the kingdom of Christ has been inaugurated on earth, but not yet brought to its full manifestation. The power of sin and death – revealed in evils such as abortion – has been destroyed at its roots. Yet we still struggle, in and through Christ, to bring about a Culture of Life. The passage from Habakkuk concludes with the familiar line “The just man shall live by faith.” It is that faith that the apostles, in the Gospel passage, ask the Lord to increase. To “live by faith” is not only to have our lives guided by faith. It means that through faith we have life in the first place. Our faith rescues us from the grip of death, from the kingdom of death, from the covenant with death that is brought about by sin. As Paul declares, “he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). That’s why he can write to Timothy in today’s second reading that “The Spirit God has given us is no cowardly spirit.” In other words, as we live in the world and fight for what is right, we do not look at the world’s evils and the culture of death and wonder how we are ever going to overcome them. Rather, we look at them and renew our conviction that they have been overcome in Christ. We stand before these evils in a stance of victory and say, “You no longer have any place here! Your kingdom has been overcome! Therefore we will work with courage to change this world and to apply the victory of life that has already been won!”
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