“What manner of man is this, for even the wind and the sea obey Him?”[1]
Ordinary of the Mass
Latin Text
English Text
There is a relationship between the Sundays after
Epiphany and those after Pentecost. If Easter comes early, a few of the
Sundays after Epiphany must be omitted—but then there is some extra time
before Advent, so the Masses that were omitted are added back toward the end
of the liturgical year. Actually, it is the collects, Epistles, and Gospels
that are added back. If you look in your missal you will see that all of
these Sundays have the same chants as the Last Sunday after Pentecost.
Today these readings added back are from the fourth Sunday after Epiphany.
Today’s Gospel picks up almost where it left off on the
third Sunday after Epiphany, in Saint Matthew’s eighth chapter, when our
Lord healed the Centurion’s servant, and compared the faith of that Roman
officer to many of the “children of the kingdom” who would not feast
with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. There was a brief
stop at the home of Peter, where our Lord cured his ailing mother-in-law,
and, later that evening, healed a large number of the possessed and the
sick.
As our Lord made his exit, he was stopped by a scribe –
a lawyer of the Mosaic law – who wanted to go along with Him. Our Lord was
frank with Him: “The foxes have dens, and the birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of Man has nowhere even to lay His head.” Another man, already
a disciple, who asked for time to go and bury his father, received the
classic answer: “let the dead bury the dead.”[2]
There is an air of urgency in our Lord’s voice – time is short – some
divinely appointed deadline begins to loom in the unspecified future.
They got on a boat and left Capharnaum for the “other
side” of the Sea of Galilee; in fact they were to cross its longest
dimension. But among the Apostles we know there are at least four
experienced fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James, and John—there were not yet
twelve of them—and virtually all of them were from somewhere around the
sea. The Gospel doesn’t say, but it is easy to imagine Peter taking charge
of the voyage, and telling Jesus, who was from the hill country of Nazareth
to just go below and relax— “I’ll take care of it; we’ll let you know when
we get there; nothin’ to worry about.” When Jesus went to sleep, there was
probably a good deal of discussion among the Apostles about the things they
had seen in the past weeks and days since their calling to become “fishers
of men.”
They were a ways out into the deep when, all of a
sudden, the wind picked up, and began to remind them how frail a craft they
were in when compared with the crashing of the waves. If we use our
imagination once again, perhaps it is the young John who suggests to Peter
that: “Maybe we ought to wake Jesus, and see what He wants us to do?” To
which Peter might have replied: “Jesus is a carpenter … and a great
preacher … but we’re the sailors here.” (The ladies here understand this:
it is almost as though John had told Peter to stop and ask for
“directions.”) But it didn’t take very long before these experienced
fishermen began to realize that they were in trouble beyond their abilities
to deal with it. “Lord! Save us! We are perishing!
“And He rebuked the wind, and there was a great calm.”
Imagine that … you can rebuke a man who intends to harm you; you can
threaten him, or appeal to his mercy, or even reason with him … sometimes
you can even get an animal to back down if you make enough noise or
wave a big enough stick. But Jesus rebuked the waves and got the
wind to back down! In a sense, this was more than just healing a few
sick people – physicians healed the sick often enough – but this was the
ability to command the overpowering forces of nature: the wind, the waves,
the rain, maybe even some lightning! “What manner of man is this that such
things obey him?”
At was a sufficient demonstration of
divine power that, on a later, similar occasion, when the Apostles were
alone in the boat, and Jesus came to them walking upon the water, our
impetuous Peter asked Jesus for an invitation to join Him in His walk. And
of course, we know that Peter did walk upon the water—at least until
he began to think about what he was doing—and faith gave way to fear—when,
of course, Peter began to sink. When Jesus calmed the water on that
occasion, it seems to have dawned on Peter and the others – as it had never
dawned on them before – “Truly, Thou art the Son of God!”[3]
In commenting on this Gospel, the
fifth century doctor, Saint Cyril of Alexandria reminds us that there are at
least two ways in which we can interpret these great miracles of our Lord.[4]
In one way, we should be inspired with holy fear. He reminds us that in the
Old Testament, through the Prophet Jeremias, God reproved the almost
universal corruption of Jerusalem:
Will you not fear Me,
asks the Lord?: and will you not repent at My presence? I have set
bounds of the sea, … and the waves shall toss themselves, and shall
not prevail: they shall swell, and shall not pass over it.
But the heart of My
people has become hard of belief, and provoking, and they have
revolted and gone away. And they have not said in their heart: “Let
us fear the Lord our God, who giveth us the early and the latter
rain in due season: who preserves for us the fullness of the
harvest.”
Among My people are
found wicked men, that lie in wait, setting snares and traps to
catch men.… their houses are full of deceit … they have most
wickedly transgressed my words. Shall I not visit for these things,
saith the Lord? or shall not my soul take revenge on such a nation?
The prophets
prophesied falsehood, and the priests clapped their hands:
and my people loved such things…. Will you not fear Me, asks
the Lord?: and will you not repent at My presence?[5]
We ought to be terrified by the
notion that all of our sins take place in the presence of God Himself. God
sees everything that we do.
But Saint Cyril closes on a hopeful
note:
The sea is a figure
of the visible world, and the Church is the little ship. And the
rowers are the Just, who because they have received the Faith, have
Christ always present with them.
The Church is
assailed by violent storms, and the waves of many persecutions beat
against the Holy Bark. And countless trials agitate It. The
cruelty of unclean spirits rages against It, and fills It with the
fear of death.
But Christ is among
His chosen servants. And while in His holy wisdom He permits them
to suffer persecution, and He seems to sleep – when the storm is at
its fiercest and we can endure it no longer … He will awaken without
delay and take away all our fear … and He will change our mourning
into the joy of a shining and untroubled sky.
He averts not His
face from those who trust in Him.
Remarkable, isn’t it? The presence
of God can—and should be—terrifying to those who act wickedly, and preach
falsehood, and judge unjustly. But that very same presence can change
“mourning into joy” for those “who love one another” and keep His
Commandments. Our Lord’s miracle, today, is a wonderful consolation in
these troubled times, when our very civilization seems to be falling around
us. Let it be for us a consolation, pray that for none of us it will
be a justifiable warning.
“God averts not His face from
those who trust in Him.”
NOTES:
[1] Gospel: Matthew viii:
23-27.
[4] Homily 6 on Saint
Matthew,
