Jesus Can Rebuke The Waves That Rise Up Against You

By Fr. Dexter Brereton.

[simpleazon-image align=”left” asin=”0829441700″ locale=”us” height=”375″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51mxIQrRNAL.jpg” width=”249″]“And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Quiet now! Be calm!’ And the wind dropped, and all was calm again.”

According to scripture scholars, the background to this Sunday’s Gospel reading may have been that Ancient Near Eastern idea of the sea as symbol of the powers of chaos and evil that fight against God. Jesus, in his calming of the storm, does something that only God could do; he defeats the powers of evil in a decisive way. In fact, some find in this miracle, an allusion to Old Testament passages such as this one from Psalm 74: 13-14, which says of Yahweh:

By your power you split the sea in two,

And smashed the heads of the monsters on the waters

You crushed Leviathan’s heads,

Gave him as food to the wild animals.

In this powerful miracle, Mark gives the answer two the question asked by the disciples at the end of this reading, “Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.” He is none other than the Word made flesh, God-with-us.

This story is of particular relevance for followers of Jesus today, since we too often find ourselves in the midst of a raging sea, in a time of stress and confusion.

This is the time of the year that I go for my annual physical exam. In my recollection, these tests used to be so simple a few years ago.  Now, with advancing age I find them increasingly complicated and expensive. I have now done them so often that I now know the names of some of them by heart: CBC, Lipid profile, PSA, DRE, HBA1C etc. As a Catholic priest I have often had to anoint people dying with some truly horrible diseases, so that this extensive series of tests is often a time of deep disquiet for me.

 I can relate my feelings using the words of today’s reading. As I sit in the Doctor’s examination room ‘It begins to blow a gale’….as he takes out his stethoscope, waves break into my boat so that it is almost swamped. As he wraps the cuff around my arm to check my blood pressure I say to the Lord (in my mind of course) ‘Master, do you not care? I am going down!’ Of course the worry is that somehow my health has deteriorated over the last year or that my body is carrying some kind of hidden anomaly.

There are however, two stories in today’s gospel reading. There is the fearful experience of the disciples but there is also the story of Jesus who is ‘fast asleep’ during the storm. Going back to my own medical exam, I have found that over time, there has certainly been a buildup of experience and wisdom when it comes to these annual medical examinations. These are my ‘inner resources’ my ‘Jesus’ who during these storms is often in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep. This reading invites me to ‘activate’ this part of myself, this inner wisdom and experience of mine and cry out: ‘Master, do you not care? We are going down!’ In the reading I can hear the voice of the Lord saying to me and indeed to all of us ‘you have that ‘Jesus’ in you and you can say to the wind and the rough seas now plaguing your life: “Quiet now! Be calm!”   And indeed the wind will drop.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, forgive our lack of faith when the rough seas and the wind cause us to get frightened and to cry that ‘we are going down’. We lose a significant sum of money, a daughter becomes pregnant, we go through a rough phase in our marriage or in some intimate relationship. Lord we pray in solidarity with all those who find themselves in a violent sea. We think Lord of the parishioners of that Church in Charleston U.S.A. where 9 persons were murdered by a gunman, we also think of all the other persons in that country who find themselves under siege by racism or by gun violence. We pray for our own communities here in Trinidad and Tobago reeling under violent crime. Help us Lord to activate that ‘Jesus’ in us, the one who is in the stern, his head on a cushion, asleep. Help us to believe that we have the inner resources as individuals and communities to say to the storms in our lives “Quiet now! Be calm!” Amen.