TWELFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - JUNE 23, 2024

TWELFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

When we experience the difficulties of life, our initial reaction is to blame God or to question His benevolent presence in our lives. More than anything, we as humans desperately want control of each moment, but so much of life is uncontrollable. Naturally, we consider that God must be in control of even the uncontrollable, and when those moments cause obstacles for us, we look for Him to solve them. It takes a while for a faithful believer to learn this, but this is not how God operates. Rather, He desires that we live according to the statement made famous in the serenity prayer - that we accept the things we cannot change, and the courage to change the things we can.

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READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE

At the heart of the message of Christ, his teachings, his public ministry, and especially his miracles, is that we are entirely dependent on God, even for our salvation. However, this does not mean that we are entirely helpless or hopeless poor souls incapable of lifting a finger to make our lives better; God has given us the ability to move either towards Him or away from Him through the use of our free will. In a well-known moment in the life of Christ such as the calming of the storm that we hear about in this Sunday’s Gospel, Christ is attempting to teach his disciples a lesson. He does not calm uncontrollable storms for the sake of proving or showing off his authority over nature, but instead as a response to the despair of his disciples. They come to him, while he is calmly asleep in the stern. They don’t necessarily come to him out of humility or a desire for him to save them and protect them. They place a demand, even a blame, on Christ: “do you not care that we are perishing?” Christ’s calming of the storm is not a capitulation to this demand he do something, but a terse rebuke of their own faith. They were so concerned with their own safety in the middle of a frightening scene that they forgot something so simple, yet so important - Christ was in the boat with them. Had they perished, so would have Christ. If they had faith in him and in what he had been preaching up to this point, they would know that the Son of Man would not meet his end as a result of a natural event, which he can control. This is why he challenges them, by saying, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” This is the same message God gave to Job: why do we despair? Why do we blame God when the storms of life cause us to lose hope? Do we not know or remember that God is in control, that He wants us to trust Him, and that He is here with us in the midst of all turmoil?

The focus of Christ’s lesson in the calming of the storm, and even in God’s reassurance to Job, is written by Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians. Christ loved his followers. His death, the one reason he came into this world, was a death for the sake of all. Therefore, all of us, from those such as Job to the disciples to Christians today, have died to our old selves. No longer are we concerned with the fears of the unknown and the uncontrollable when their power is exclusively over our bodies. We are so much more than that; Christ was in the boat with his disciples out of solidarity so that we might be in glory with Christ in an elevated solidarity into which he invites us. We are now in his boat. The uncontrollable is only so for us, not for him. What an immense weight to be lifted off our shoulders, to let go of what we cannot control and to trust in the Lord. As we rest calmly in his boat, we become a new creation, free from the anxieties of this world. As Paul says, the old things have passed away and new things have come.