19TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
This week we in Ireland and especially in Northern Ireland we said goodbye to John Hume who died at the beginning of the week. He was the man who took risks for peace when he began the Hume Adams dialogue in the 1980’s which in turn led to the IRA and their political wing Sein Fein leaving violence behind. This engagement eventually led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement which gave us the imperfect peace that we have today that continues to be a work in progress. We thank god for John Hume and his life in which he was a man of peace who took risks that paid great dividends for all of us who live in Northern Ireland today as we live in a society that is more peaceful. We also pray for the people of Lebanon and Beirut in particular as they begin the recovery from the explosion at the docks.
The gospel reading this weekend is all about Jesus walking on water but if you look beyond the walking on water this story is really about trust in God. We have no problem identifying with Peter he is so like ourselves . He is confident one moment and then, when things get difficult and he has bitten off more than he can chew, he falls apart. By then it is too late and he needs help. Life is like that, we start at something like a new job, college, marriage, or a project to help others, but then it gets complex and beyond what we are capable of. We didn’t realize it was going to require so much time and effort! We are sinking, we are drowning. Not an uncommon experience in so many situations of life and in the way we deal with them. God doesn’t always give us an immediate cure or a fast solution when we bring ourselves in prayer for others as well as the problems of the day to God. God, through Jesus, is not a distant God aloof from our problems. Jesus shows us that when he reaches out a hand to Peter and to us he is companion with us in the storms of life. At times we may well be floundering, like Peter, but Jesus reaches out to help us, to rescue us. What better image of salvation could there be than Jesus reaching out to Peter to save him from drowning. What better analogy could there be of our own lives and relationship with Jesus. We live messy lives, we doubt and we lack faith but nevertheless we are still moving towards the Lord.
For us, too, there is a necessary lesson in this incident. It is that we must continue to trust in Christ and his loving Father, even when God seems to have deserted us. Most of the troubles and trials of our lives are caused by the injustice and lack of charity of our fellowmen. The remainder can be attributed to our own defects and sins or to some weakness in our mental and bodily make-up. But God foresees all these misfortunes, and can prevent them. Instead he lets them take their course, because they can and should be the means of educating us in our knowledge of life’s true meaning and they should draw us closer to him.
Christ foresaw the storm and the grave risk His Apostles would run when He sent them off across the lake. But that trial and the grave danger they ran was for their own good, because they learned to realise that Jesus was from God and they could always trust Him. Our trials and our earthly ailments are also foreseen by God and permitted by him so that they will draw us closer to Him and help us on the road to heaven.
When we find ourselves breaking into a cold sweat over the latest storm we find ourselves in we should remember when Christ comes, the storm becomes calm, the tumult becomes peace, and we pass the breaking point and we do not break this is what trust in Jesus really means it means that he will be with us through all the storms of life no matter how big they are.
Fullerton T 