Habakkuk opens his book by accusing God of doing nothing. That’s the actual content of the prayer: how long am I going to shout at you before you listen? Most of us have prayed that prayer and then felt guilty about it, as though the honesty were the sin. And today the Church gives us a Gospel where nine apostles, men who had already been handed authority over unclean spirits, stand in front of a suffering boy and accomplish exactly nothing. His father has to say it out loud in front of the crowd: I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.

So we get two failures on the same day. God appears to be silent, and his men appear to be powerless. Underneath both is the same quiet suspicion we carry around, that prayer is a mechanism, and that when the mechanism produces nothing, either the machine is broken or we aren’t worth the trouble. Habakkuk refuses both of those conclusions. He does something stranger. He climbs the watchtower, plants himself there, and waits for God to answer back. Today the Church also gives us Saint Dominic, a man who spent 10 years preaching to people who mostly didn’t listen. He’s a good companion for a day like this.

The Readings

First Reading: Habakkuk 1:12—2:4

Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, thou hast ordained them as a judgment; and thou, O Rock, hast established them for chastisement. Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on wrong, why dost thou look on faithless men, and art silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he? For thou makest men like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. He brings all of them up with a hook, he drags them out with his net, he gathers them in his seine; so he rejoices and exults. Therefore he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his seine; for by them he lives in luxury, and his food is rich. Is he then to keep on emptying his net, and mercilessly slaying nations for ever?

I will take my stand to watch, and station myself on the tower, and look forth to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain upon tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end, it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith.”

Gospel: Matthew 17:14-20

And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and kneeling before him said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.” And Jesus answered, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly.

Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from hence to yonder place,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.”

Scriptural Analysis

Habakkuk prophesies in Judah in the last decades before the exile, with Babylon rising in the east. His book runs in an unusual direction for a prophet. Most prophets speak to the people on God’s behalf; Habakkuk speaks to God on the people’s behalf, and he doesn’t soften it. The whole message of the book is packed into the opening dialogue.^[1] He complains that the law is slack and justice never goes forth (Habakkuk 1:4). God answers that he is raising up the Chaldeans, a bitter and hasty nation (Habakkuk 1:6). And that answer makes everything worse, which is where today’s reading picks up.

The prophet’s second complaint works as a piece of theology. He begins by conceding everything: God is from everlasting, God is the Holy One, God is the Rock who ordained this judgment (Habakkuk 1:12). He grants that the chastisement is deserved. What he can’t reconcile is the method. How does the God whose eyes are too pure to behold evil hand his people over to a nation more wicked than they are (Habakkuk 1:13)?

Then he describes what the invader actually does, and the picture is deliberately dehumanizing. Men become fish. Hooked, dragged out, gathered into the seine, with no ruler to protect them (Habakkuk 1:14-15). And then comes the sharpest line in the whole reading. The fisherman sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his seine (Habakkuk 1:16). He worships his own equipment. Herodotus records ancient peoples offering an annual sacrifice to their sword, taking it as the symbol of their war god, and Scripture keeps returning to this pattern.^[2] Power seduces, and the seduction always ends in worship. The Catechism names the same thing: idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God, and a man commits it whenever he honors a creature in God’s place, whether that creature is a demon, a nation, money, or his own strength (CCC 2113).

Habakkuk doesn’t get an explanation. He gets a posture. “I will take my stand to watch, and station myself on the tower” (Habakkuk 2:1). Saint Bernard preached on that verse and told his monks to do the same thing, to become watchmen, to go down into the depths of the heart where Christ lives and waits for us, and to keep guard there without trusting our own strength.^[3] The prophet doesn’t stop believing and he doesn’t stop asking. He just stops demanding an answer on his own schedule.

And God answers. Write the vision plainly, so a man can read it on the run (Habakkuk 2:2). The vision has an appointed time and it hastens toward it. “If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Habakkuk 2:3). The delay is part of the design, and it’s a test of fidelity.

Which brings us to the line the whole Church has been chewing on for 2,000 years: “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). The Hebrew word behind “faith” is ’emunah, which carries the sense of stability and faithfulness as much as belief. It’s a quality of God himself (Deuteronomy 32:4) and a quality of those who honor him.^[4] Saint Paul quotes this verse twice to ground his teaching on justification (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11), and Hebrews quotes it to keep discouraged Christians from shrinking back (Hebrews 10:38). Saint Jerome read it with both audiences in view: the just man who believes God’s word and never doubts his promises receives eternal life as his reward, and the whole difficulty in the verse is resolved by Christ’s coming.^[5] So when a Catholic hears “the righteous shall live by his faith,” he should hear a whole life of clinging to God, tested over years and proved in the waiting.

Now the Gospel, and notice where it sits. Jesus has just come down from the mountain of the Transfiguration. Peter wanted to stay up there and build tents. Instead the Lord walks straight into a crowd and a scene of human helplessness, which echoes Moses coming down Sinai to find Israel worshipping the golden calf.^[6]

The father does everything right. He kneels, and this is the first time Matthew uses that word, and he addresses Jesus as Lord and begins with “have mercy on my son,” which is how the Psalms ask for divine help.^[7] He calls the boy “moonstruck,” from the Greek selēniazetai, an ancient belief that the phases of the moon caused seizures; the Latin luna gives us our word lunatic. The symptoms match what we would call epilepsy. Preachers should say plainly that the Church does not teach epilepsy to be demonic possession, and the Gospel text shouldn’t be used to suggest otherwise.^[8] In this particular case the evangelist tells us the cause directly, because the demon comes out (Matthew 17:18). Saint Thomas takes up the question at length and concludes that demons sometimes attach their work to natural conditions precisely so that men will blame the stars and never look for the real agent.^[9]

Then comes the rebuke. “O faithless and perverse generation” is Moses’s language from the Song at the end of Deuteronomy, where Israel in the desert is called a perverse and crooked generation (Deuteronomy 32:5). Saint Jerome catches the tone exactly: the Lord doesn’t say this in anger, he says it the way a physician speaks to a patient who refuses to follow his orders, asking how long he has to keep coming back.^[10]

The disciples ask their question privately, and Aquinas thinks they ask privately because they were about to hear something great, and great things aren’t spoken to everyone.^[11] Jesus answers, “because of your little faith.” Matthew has a specific word for this, oligopistia, and he uses it for the disciples who panic in the boat and the man who worries about tomorrow’s clothes (Matthew 6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8). Little faith in Matthew is the faith of a man who believes God exists and still doesn’t trust him to provide.^[12]

Here’s where the mustard seed gets misread. Many people take it to mean that a tiny amount of faith is enough. Saint Jerome rejects that, since Saint Paul says it takes “all faith” to move mountains (1 Corinthians 13:2). Aquinas follows him and reads the seed as a picture of faith’s quality. A mustard grain has three properties. It has fervor, because the grain has no heat until it’s crushed, and a believer looks unimpressive until he’s ground down by testing (1 Peter 1:6-7). It has fertility, because the smallest of seeds becomes a great shrub where birds nest (Matthew 13:32). And it has littleness, which points to humility, since a man shows himself humble in faith when he simply agrees with God’s word.^[13] Small, hot, and fruitful. That’s the faith that moves mountains.

Aquinas raises the obvious objection too. No apostle is recorded moving a mountain. He answers that miracles happen out of necessity or usefulness, and the occasion never came; Saint Augustine reads the mountain as the spirit of pride, which is the mountain most of us actually need moved.^[14] And “nothing will be impossible to you” doesn’t make the apostles omnipotent. Only the one who acts by his own power is that. A king commands in his own name and his servant commands in the king’s.^[15]

Daily Application

Put the two readings side by side and you’ll see the same question asked from opposite directions. Habakkuk asks God why he does nothing. The disciples ask Jesus why they could do nothing. Both get the answer “faith,” and both are being told that the delay itself is the test.

So start with the honesty. If you’ve been praying for a marriage that isn’t healing, a child who won’t come back to the sacraments, a diagnosis that hasn’t changed, you’re allowed to say so to God in the words you actually mean. Habakkuk did, and God put his complaint in the canon of Scripture. What you’re not allowed to do is walk away from the tower. The interior movement being asked of you here is perseverance, and perseverance means surrendering the timetable while keeping the watch. God told Habakkuk to write the vision down and make it legible, so do that literally. Put the intention in writing, keep it where you pray, and bring it back to him daily. Then let him choose the hour.

The second movement is littleness, and today’s saint lived it with unusual clarity. Dominic came face to face with the Albigensian heresy in southern France and watched the Church’s preaching campaign fail. He diagnosed it fast. Ordinary people were following the Albigensian teachers because those men looked poor and austere, while the Catholic preachers arrived with horses, retinues, and servants, and stayed at the best inns. So Dominic and three companions got rid of all of it and went out on foot. He preached that way for 10 years and won the ordinary people, though never the leaders. His whole ideal was contemplata tradere, to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation, which means everything he gave away had first been received on his knees.

That’s the mustard seed in a life: small, crushed, and fruitful.

If your prayer feels barren right now, Dominic points you toward the humbler road. Get the pride out of the way. Keep the practices that put you in front of God, and stop grading your faith by what it produced this month. Get to Mass and Confession. Pray the Rosary, which the Dominicans have carried to the whole Church. Sit with the Lord for 15 minutes without asking him for anything, which is harder than it sounds and does more to the soul than most of what we call prayer.

And when it seems slow, remember what God told his prophet. The vision has an appointed time and it’s already hastening toward it.

Take your stand on the tower and keep watch. The vision will not delay.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Minor Prophets (Dublin: Four Courts Press), commentary on Habakkuk 1:2—2:4, 237. ↩
2. Ibid., commentary on Habakkuk 1:12—2:1, 239-40, citing Herodotus, History, 4.62. ↩
3. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones de diversis, 5.4, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Minor Prophets, 240. ↩
4. The Navarre Bible: Minor Prophets, commentary on Habakkuk 2:2-4, 241. ↩
5. St. Jerome, Commentarii in Abacuc, 2.4, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Minor Prophets, 241-42. ↩
6. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 220. ↩
7. Ibid., 220. ↩
8. Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 260. ↩
9. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, ch. 17, lect. 2, no. 1458. ↩
10. St. Jerome, cited in Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, ch. 17, lect. 2, no. 1462. ↩
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, ch. 17, lect. 2, no. 1465. ↩
12. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 221. ↩
13. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, ch. 17, lect. 2, nos. 1468-69. ↩
14. Ibid., no. 1470. ↩
15. Ibid., no. 1471. ↩