Jesus knows that telling people to have faith doesn’t do all that much. He knows that only when we have exhausted our own capacities will we look in faith toward the horizon. Only when we have been unburdened of our illusions about what we feel we “deserve” will we appreciate what we have been given.
In other words, we require a crisis of capacity to direct us “where true joys are to be found.” Jesus confronts us with our limits, not to discourage us but to engineer a situation in which the phrase “what is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:27) might find traction. Faith in God begins where faith in oneself ends.