19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 9 August 2026
For the people of the Scriptures, the sea was much more than simply a body of water. Israel was not essentially a seafaring people. The sea represented something much deeper: chaos. It was the place of darkness and uncertainty, the place of hidden monsters, the place where the familiar disappeared and where human beings discovered how little control they really possessed. And Matthew deliberately places Jesus there. Jesus does not wait for the storm to finish. He does not wait on the shore until the disciples have navigated themselves safely home. He comes to them across the water. It is Matthew’s dramatic way of saying: Jesus is Lord even here.
Jesus is Lord not only when the water is calm, when the diagnosis is good, when the family is happy, when the parish is flourishing, when the economy is strong and when the world seems relatively peaceful. Jesus is Lord in the storm. And there are plenty of storms around us. There are the ones we know only too well, but there are also the storms which never make the news: the anxiety of parents about their children; the loneliness of someone returning each night to an empty house; the uncertainty of employment; the tension within a marriage; the deterioration of someone we love; the disappointment we carry privately; the question about our future that we cannot answer. And sometimes the storm is simply within ourselves. We can look perfectly composed to everyone else and yet privately feel that the wind is against us. And we ask, Where is God?
It is the question of Elijah in the first reading. He stands on the mountain waiting for God. There is a mighty wind. But God is not in the wind. There is an earthquake. But God is not in the earthquake. There is fire. But God is not in the fire. And then comes what our translation calls “the sound of a gentle breeze.” Other translations render it even more beautifully: “a sound of sheer silence.” And there Elijah encounters God. This is one of the great paradoxes of faith. Around us there may be wind and earthquake and fire. Around us there may be argument, accusation, uncertainty, violence and fear. Yet deep within us there can be another place. A place of stillness. A place of peace. A place of resolve. A place in which we hear again the quiet voice of God saying: “Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.”
Christian peace does not mean the absence of storms. It means discovering that the storm does not have the final word about who we are. It is opposite to a way of living in which we spend our lives measuring the wind. How bad is it? How much worse could it become? What will happen next? What are people saying? What does the latest headline tell us? What might happen to the Church? What might happen to our family? What might happen to me? Before long, the storm has become the entire horizon of our imagination.
Peter reminds us that faith is not pretending that the wind is not there. Faith is learning where to look while the wind is blowing.
This too is the lesson given to us by our memory of Mary MacKillop of the Cross which we celebrated yesterday. Mary knew storms. By the time she was twenty-four she had lived in some sixteen different places. Her family life was frequently unstable. Her relationship with Fr Julian Tenison Woods – brilliant, charismatic, visionary, but also complex and unpredictable – brought both inspiration and pain. The early years of the Sisters of St Joseph were filled with difficulties: misunderstandings, eccentric personalities, ecclesiastical politics, suspicion, gossip and opposition. And then, extraordinarily, came excommunication. Add to all of this Mary’s fragile health, the burdens of leadership and the constant uncertainty about how her young congregation would survive.
There were moments when Mary wanted simply to escape. Her letters reveal not some plaster saint serenely floating above the difficulties of life, but a very human woman who sometimes felt exhausted, bewildered and profoundly alone. And yet she did not sink. Why? Not because the storms disappeared. But because, somehow, beneath them Mary discovered that still point which Elijah discovered on the mountain and Peter discovered when the hand of Jesus reached down into the water. Gradually, beneath all the competing voices around her, she learnt to recognise the quieter voice of God.
Her sanctity was not the sanctity of certainty. It was the sanctity of trust. She did not always know what would happen next. She knew only where to place her next step. And perhaps that is all faith ever really gives us. We sometimes want God to give us a map of the next ten years. God gives us enough light for the next step. We want God to explain the storm. God says, “Come.” We want certainty. God offers relationship. We want the waves removed. Christ stretches out his hand.
This brings us to perhaps the most beautiful moment in today’s Gospel. Peter cries: “Lord, save me!” And Matthew says: “Jesus put out his hand at once and held him.” At once. That is Christian faith in one image: the hand of Christ reaching into the chaos and holding the frightened disciple.
But the Gospel does not ultimately depend upon the strength of Peter’s grip upon Christ. It depends upon Jesus’ grip upon Peter. And there is the source of our hope. We do not believe that somehow, by trying harder, we can make ourselves strong enough to walk upon every turbulent sea. We believe that when we sink, there is a hand stronger than ours. When we lose sight of Christ, Christ has not lost sight of us. When our faith falters, his fidelity does not. And when the wind is against us, he continues to come towards us across the water.
This was Mary MacKillop’s hope. It enabled her to keep going when circumstances suggested she should give up. It enabled her to remain open when she might understandably have become bitter. It enabled her to continue loving the Church even when members of the Church wounded her. It enabled her to keep seeing possibilities when others saw only obstacles. And it enabled her to remain centred upon the needs of those before her especially the poor, the forgotten and those deprived of opportunity.
That remains particularly poignant as her feast coincides with our annual attention to homelessness. At a time when the cost of housing can itself feel like a storm for Australian families, Mary reminds us that Christian peace can never mean retreating into a private sanctuary while others drown. The hand that Christ extends to us must become our hand extended to another. The one who has discovered the stillness of God does not withdraw from the storm. We become capable of entering it differently: more peacefully; more courageously, more compassionately.
Perhaps then the familiar saying is right: we should not spend our lives waiting for the storm to pass; we must learn how to dance in the rain. But actually the Gospel takes us further. The Christian does not dance in the rain because the storm does not matter. We dance because we are not alone in it. Somewhere through the darkness Christ is coming towards us. Somewhere beneath us there is a hand waiting to catch us. And sometimes, with our eyes fixed firmly enough upon him, we may even discover that we are walking on water.
