12th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
Often with all the challenges we may be facing we might feel like getting into our own little boat and heading off into the middle of the lake where no one can disturb us. However, once we are out in the lake, we are not guaranteed serenity. I remember once picking up a small poster which read, “Dear God, help me; the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.” The size of the lake itself can be overwhelming, and then storms whip up so that the serenity for which we went in search is replaced by fear.
Nowhere, then, is entirely safe, and perhaps that is very much our current experience. The Gospel story we hear this Sunday can be read within this context. For the people of the Scriptures, the ocean was a symbol of chaos more than of anything. It was the place of darkness and uncertainty – the place of hidden monsters. The Hebrew people were not seafaring; they were people of the desert and although they involved themselves in fishing, they retained a deep ambivalence about the uncertain power of water. The writer has Jesus calm the storm. It is a dramatic portrayal of how Jesus is Lord over the waters, i.e., of how Jesus has power over, and in the midst of, chaos and turbulence. Jesus is Lord even over the uncertainty of our time in history.
The story leads us to reflect about our reaction in the midst of turmoil and chaos. All around us ‑ as the Scripture prefigures ‑ there might be earthquakes, howling winds, raging fires – all metaphors of that with which we have to contend. But, deep within us there can be a sense of peace, a sense of calm, a sense of resolve, a sense of gentleness. As Lord over all that threatens to swamp us, Jesus brings us to a point of stillness. The writer is trying to illustrate to us that faith in Jesus opens a still point ‑ a place of deep calm and peace. At the heart of the story is the teaching that the Christian disciple is the one who finds peace even in the midst of conflict. For the disciple, it is in the turbulence of life that peace comes, not in the absence of storms. As one English writer observed:
“Much modern spiritual writing it seems to me holds out a false ideal of wholeness and happiness, as if we could on this earth anticipate the blessedness of heaven and that something is seriously wrong if we don’t. But though some Christians may be called to be neat and clean and well-advised, others may have to glorify God as slobs, freaks, duffers and muddlers of every kind and variety. As the psychotherapists love to say, “The physician heals by his own wound.” And perhaps for many of us our inadequacy is the only road to wisdom and charity, the most healthy outlook one that accepts our own unhealthiness, the best way of making the most of life a tough-minded recognition that much of it is thought. Peace in the Christian scheme of things is not a comfortable absence of conflict and stress. We have to pluck tranquility out of pain and suffering, tension and confusion, learn to hear in the heart of the storm the voice that says, “Peace, it is I.””[1]
Was this not Pope Benedict’s own experience upon his resignation in 2013? He turned to this very part of the gospels to underscore his thoughts and feelings at that time:
“. . . the Lord has given us so many days of sun and of light winds, days when the catch was abundant; there were also moments when the waters were rough and the winds against us, as throughout the Church’s history, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping. But I have always known that the Lord is in that boat, and I have always known that the barque of the Church is not mine but his. Nor does the Lord let it sink; it is he who guides it, surely also through those whom he has chosen, because he so wished. This has been, and is, a certainty which nothing can shake. For this reason my heart todays overflows with gratitude to God, for he has never let his Church, or me personally, lack his consolation, his light, his love.”[2]
Christian peace comes not from the absence of conflict in life, but in the recognition that precisely in the conflict and storms, someone is holding us, providing us with the assurance that we have a sense of identity larger than the conflict by which we are encircled. When we feel overwhelmed, not sure where to place our steps – when we feel as if we are sinking – the Gospel that invites us to receive a gaze which comes to us from beyond our own confusion – a gaze which steadies us, assures us, invites us.
[1] John F.X. Harriot in The Tablet (17 March 1990), 334.
[2] Benedict XVI, General Audience, 27 February 2013, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2013/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20130227.html