If there were no pandemic, this would be vacation
season for many. This year, sensible people stay home and don’t try to go anywhere.
But, in other years, this would have been the season to head for the water,
which, where I come from, mainly means the ocean. Yet, while frolicking on or in
the water has always had a broad appeal, there has also always been a certain
dimension of danger associated with water. Jesus and his disciples undoubtedly
understood that. and I am sure they took their local waterway very seriously
indeed. The great lake we call the Sea of Galilee was, after all, where the
disciples had, until very recently, been making their living as fishermen; and
it was still, the Gospels seem to suggest, serving as their main base of
operations. And, like anyone who has ever been caught in a boat in a storm,
they knew how very suddenly things can change and suddenly go very wrong on the
water; and they certainly also knew how limited was the security that their
seafaring skills could guarantee.
Today’s suggestive image of the disciples in the
boat, being tossed about by the waves, with Jesus miles away praying on
the mountain, has often been seen as an apt image for the Church. In the 3rd
century, the Roman martyr Hippolytus (whose commemoration comes up later this
week) described the Church as a boat in a storm being tossed about by the
waves of the world. Not much has changed! That still seems a very apt image
for a Church forever struggling to hold its own amid the many stresses and
dangers the world throws up at it, a world where even ordinary storms can pose
serious challenges. And this, to repeat Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous line, “is no
ordinary time,” and the pandemic is no ordinary storm!
If we remember back about 4½ months ago, at the end
of March Pope Francis celebrated what was called an “Extraordinary Moment of
Prayer” in Saint Peter’s Square, flanked by the famous Crucifix from the Church
of San Marcello that had been carried in procession during the plague of 1522
and the familiar image of Mary, Safety of the Roman people. In the pouring
rain, the Pope read Mark’s account of of the disciples getting caught in the storm.
Like them, he said, we have been “caught off guard
by an unexpected, turbulent storm. We have realized that we are on the same
boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and
needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the
other. … Just like those disciples … so we too have realized that we cannot go
on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.”
The ultimate solution
to the storm-threatened disciples’ dilemma is Jesus himself, who, as the Pope
put it, “saves his disciples from their discouragement.” During the fourth
watch of the night, Jesus, in the
Gospel which we just heard, came toward them walking on the sea.
In the midst of so much turbulence, Jesus stands with us, calmly overcoming the
chaos that threatens us, saying again and again: “Take courage, it is I; do
not be afraid.”
Matthew’s account, as it often does, focuses on one
of those in the boat in particular – Peter, the one Jesus appointed to be the
leader of his Church. “Lord, if it is you, Peter says, command me to come to you on the water.” In
highlighting Peter’s special status and unique relationship with Jesus, Matthew
also shows Peter at his most endearing. Peter always blurts out the first thing
that comes into his head, without first prudently considering the costs and
benefits. But then, all of a sudden, he loses his focus, forgetting for the
moment who has just called him to come, and instead imagines he is relying on
himself, thinking the way the world thinks. And, when that happens, then the
world starts to win. In his illusion of self-sufficiency, Peter becomes
frightened and so starts to sink. Peter’s faith is real, but it is what Jesus
calls “little faith,” a fearful faith, a faith that still lets itself get
distracted by false ways of being and thinking.
Like Peter, like Elijah in today’s 1st
Reading, we are all susceptible to the illusion of self-sufficiency. And so we are
constantly caught somewhere between walking in faith and forever sinking in
fear. So we are perpetually in need of that outstretched hand, which catches us
in spite of all our fears, the hand of the Risen Christ, who has promised to
remain in the same boat with us forever.
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