22 April 2023
Saturday of the Second Week of Easter
It is dark, it is storming; their little boat is being tossed about miles from the nearest shore. It is a terrifying and perilous situation. The world around them is heaving and dropping, roaring and crashing about them: they are at the mercy of the forces of the world.
But then everything changes: Jesus comes walking on the sea. The chaos, the power, the overwhelming forces threatening to destroy them are put beneath His feet as though the violent seas were as timid and harmless as grass. They were afraid of what they were seeing: how can this be, that He can master the sea, which in the ancient world was so feared precisely because it could not be mastered?
When our lives mirror this Gospel passage, when it seems the little boat of our own equally little world is being tossed about by forces beyond our control, we must look for Jesus, we must strive to see Him walking upon those forces, and be unafraid. We believe in a God who forgives sins, who took on human flesh to become human, not to experience or enjoy the pleasures of human existence but precisely to endure and embraces its pains as a means of proving His love for us. We believe in an invincible God who became vulnerable, an immortal God who became mortal, an undying God who died and then rose from the dead. What is more is that this same God tells us that we, too, may rise if we but believe in Him and follow Him.
If we need not fear death, then even if our lives are in tumult…what have we to fear?