Happy Fathers Day to all our dads. We'll have a blessing for you a little later.
Have you noticed how much we want to trust in ourselves even at the expense of common sense? You know the old saw about how men trust more in their own internal sense of direction rather than ask for directions. Well, it’s not just men who want to trust in themselves rather than ask for help. We all are slow to ask for help, especially when the One we should be asking is the Lord.
In our Gospel we see the seasoned fisherman in a state of terror as they try to cope with a storm at sea. Surely, they know how to handle this! They have been storm tossed many, many times in their career as fishermen. And since they were so seasoned, they would have early on recognized the signs that a storm was brewing. Just as we can tell when the sky becomes threatening, even more so would the apostles have recognized the signs.
Perhaps they didn’t awaken Jesus because they wanted him to get His rest. But, men don’t think that way. Maybe they didn’t awaken Him because they were full of confidence that “We can handle this and any storm that comes our way.” Ah that’s much more like us men. Only when things turn into a disaster do we call out for help.
There is a serious theological issue here. It’s our slowness to recognize the divinity of Jesus.
It’s very understandable that the apostles were very slow to believe that Jesus was not only human, but divine as well. But the divinity of Jesus is the lesson for today.
We are in Chapter 4 of Mark’s Gospel. So, by this point the apostles have already been chosen by Jesus, they have seen Jesus cure a paralytic, forgive sins, reinterpreted the true meaning of such laws of the Torah as the one about Sabbath rest, made a man’s mangled hand whole and expelled demons. They were slow to believe that Jesus is God as well as man.
Now comes the storm at sea. Because they did not yet grasp yet the divinity of Jesus, they didn’t think to ask for His help until it was almost too late. The boat was taking on water and was in danger of sinking.
Isn’t that just like us? We face our own storms, our own crises, as if we can handle them ourselves. We don’t ask for help until it’s very late in the game. We get ourselves into terrible trouble because we leave the Lord out of our plans, our endeavors, our problems and our crises. We try to handle things on our own.
Like Job in the first reading. He’s been wrestling with torment over why he, an innocent man, should have to face such suffering. It takes a long time for him to surrender enough to give in to the Lord. In the midst of an internal storm Job encounters the Lord in such a compelling way, that he simply has to surrender to the obscure will of God.
What human being wants to surrender to trust in God while dealing with circumstances that seem impossible? Most want to fight God, or be bitter, or blame God, or desert God because: “He wasn’t there for me.” “He didn’t answer my prayers.”
What a shortcut we could take if we learned how to surrender to trust, how to be in such a close relationship with the Lord that we could call upon Him at the first sign of trouble instead of waiting until we’ve gotten desperate. What a blessing it is if we believe that the Lord is in our lives in such a daily, dynamic way, that we can begin our day asking for the Lord to nudge us into recognizing His hand at work in all the day’s events.
So, let’s today make a commitment to the Lord: if we face a crisis, let us hear Him say to us: “Why are you so terrified. Do you not yet have faith?”
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