What can the 1st Reading and the Gospel this Sunday say to us?
In the 1st Reading, Job’s experience reminds us that even at a personal level, God is present. As a rule, it does not feel so, otherwise Job would not have felt utterly abandoned which occasioned his anguished questioning of God. The answer supplied by God, we all know, does not really sit too well with many of us. We are, after all, proud of our “Enlightenment” pedigree and rightly we firmly hold “Reason” to be the foundation of a framework in which science and technology are tools in the shaping of nature and everything in it. There is barely space for “magic” left in this new world order, let alone “mystery”. Yet despite our celebrated capability and capacity, nothing much has changed in the arena of total dominion. We are at the mercy of mother nature whereas death is still very much our fate, no matter the effort to avoid or overcome it.
If Job’s personal encounter with God does not satisfy us, perhaps, the Gospel can give us a better indication of how close God is to us.
For a nation with a coastline, there is no love lost between the Israelites and the sea. The Old Testament nourished them with the epic saga of Noah who nearly got swept off by a raging deluge. Annually, they recount the watery woes of the Egyptians consumed by a raging sea. All these washed down by Jonah and his nautical travails, tossed, turned and finally swallowed by a whale from the dark and deep. For the Jews, the sea belongs to the realm of the untamed. However, this uneasy relationship between man and water is not the context for the disciples. Many of their contemporaries would have crossed the Sea of Galilee with nary a concern. But, on this fateful day, as is frequently the case for the unpredictability of life, they sailed into a savage storm. Immediately, the disciples were throw into a disarray. Ironic though that amongst them were experienced fishermen that only made their fear even more existential: “Master, do you not care? We are going down”.
Jesus’ response to the situation was “radical” because He carried them back to way before the “Great Deluge”. In fact, they were transported to the beginning of time. There to witness that whatever destructive and menacing power the “primaeval” waters had, it has always been under the sway of the Creator Himself. How much more intimate can the disciples get of their Creator and Saviour? He is at centre of whatever storms they may have.
One can derive that the primary message in the Gospel and the 1st Reading is to assure us that God is always the Emmanuel. Therefore, we should trust in Him. But why does this entreaty not seem to impress us?
Firstly, it could be that the invitation to trust God is a bit trite. Not tried and tested but rather a banal or hackneyed phrase we bandy about when we no longer have any control especially when we are faced with a peril that is now threatening us systematically. Secondly, a reason for our dissatisfaction could be that trusting in God feels very much like the attitude some may take with regard to faith which we have heard before. “Faith begins where reason ends”. Thirdly and more likely, perhaps, our ennui arises because we are responding with a faculty that has been impaired. A reason the appeal to “just trust in God” does not satisfy us may tie in with an ingrained awareness that that our ability to trust needs purification. It is not that we do not want to trust in God. We are unable to trust Him and that is not because He is untrustworthy. Rather our faculty has been impaired.
Thus, our notion of trust may require a little more purification than we are prepared to sacrifice or to let go of. In the first place, just like the definition of faith, our trust seems to be defined by a lack of choice, as if, we were expected to trust God simply because we have no choice. We are supposed to grit our teeth, suck it up, and get on with whatever curved balls life throws at us. It may be true that we have no choice, but that is not how trust functions. Life’s vicissitudes are not meant to be punishments. Instead, trust resides in the realm of freedom and not the lack, thereof.
Trust in God is strengthened the more we liberate the faculty or the ability to choose from the many distractions and attachments we have in life. One example to illustrate how distracted or attached we have become can be gleaned in the simple chore of cleaning. In an epoch long gone, we have dedicated laundry days. The washing machine was invented to free time for higher pursuits, like quality time for the family. Or even for God. But we seem to have less chance for the family whereas engagement with our devices through electronic connexions has increased exponentially. This is just one glaring example of our many distractions and attachments. Like sin, they impair our ability to freely choose.
Two words that frame the experience of the disciples in the calming of the sea are “radical” and “primaeval”. Both connote a return to the primordial past, to the very beginning of creation when the cosmos recognises its place as well as God’s. In other words, nature remembers its creaturehood. More than that, God is at the heart of all that He has created, and trust must be located within the centre of this “unequal” relationship. The path to radical trust treads through the trial of purification and sacrifice so that when God is returned to the top of our priorities, then our choosing becomes freer.
Whether or not the seas are troublesome or that there is a raging pandemic are immaterial. When our choice places God in the midst of all we are, we know that He will never let us be damned. When we acknowledge His sovereignty, then we shall rest in the peace that He will never betray our trust. It is this kind of trust that allows saints to function. Saints are able to carry on even when everything is in doubt because they trust that in God, they will always have a future.
Our experience is less than stellar. Even without a war or before the full blossoming of this pandemic, we were already embracing an uncertain future as evidence by the offerings on Netflix. We have been bombarded with one dystopian movie after another—a future replete with wars between lycans and vampires, zombies ravaging cities and countries and of course the many movies centring on the theme of contagion. Recently, at a vaccination centre, the public address was blaring out “Thriller”[1]. There is no God and in His place, we have Ironman, Thor and Superman. Our prosperous and advanced civilisation believes that it can exist without any reference to God. Any future without God will always be bleak and that may explain our present despair that God is distant.
Trust in God implies more than Him being on our side—fulfilling our bidding. It means placing Him at the top of our priorities. The 2nd Reading points us in that direction that “we live no longer for ourselves but for Him who died and was raised to life for us”. With Him as our focus, then whatever comes our way will be peripheral as they should be. This is trust in God which elicited for St Paul the joyful acclamation that “in all things, we endure tribulation, yet we are not in anguish. We are constrained, yet we are not destitute. We suffer persecution, yet we have not been abandoned. We are thrown down, yet we do not perish. We ever carry around the mortification of Jesus in our bodies, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies”. (2 Cor 4: 8-10).
God is in the boat of our time, and we are in His loving care. Let us trust in Him.
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[1] If you are interested. Here is the link to Michael Jackson’s Thriller - https://youtu.be/sOnqjkJTMaA
