The Lord With Us In the Midst of the Storms, 13th Thursday (II), June 30, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Augustine Institute, Florissant, Missouri
Missionary Preaching Academy of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA
Thursday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
June 30, 2026
Amos 3:1-8.4:11-12, Ps 5, Mt 8:23-27

To listen to an audio recording of today’s presentation, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s Gospel about Jesus’ calming of the winds and the seas is much more than a demonstration of the Lord’s power over the forces of nature. He who with a word created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all they contain, with a word could calm them. And, as we see in the Gospel, he did. Neither is today’s Gospel a manifestation of the failure of the apostles to believe in this power of Jesus. They knew that he had the power, which is why they woke him up in the first place. They had already seen him cast out demons, cure Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and others who were ill, heal lepers, forgive the sins and paralysis of a crippled man, and straighten a man’s withered hand. There were no doubts about Jesus’ omnipotence. The point of today’s Gospel is that, even though they knew Jesus had the power to calm the seas and the wind, they began to doubt whether he would do so. It is a display of their failure to believe in Jesus’ love for them. In St. Mark’s version of the same scene, as they startled Jesus from what must have been a very deep and long-overdue sleep on an uncomfortable and rocky boat, they asked, “Master, do you not care that we are perishing?” Do you not care?! They had begun to doubt whether Jesus gave a hoot whether they drowned in the lake. They had begun to question whether he was indifferent to their plight, as if he didn’t care whether they died.
• Jesus’ whole life, of course, is an answer to that question. He did care that we were about to die and that was the reason why the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, took our human nature and was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He cared enough that he spent himself to the point of exhaustion teaching, healing the sick and comforting the afflicted. He cared enough ultimately to take our place on death row, giving his life so that we might survive. Like Jonah, who was tossed into the sea in order to calm the ferocious storm of the sea, so Jesus tossed himself overboard to quell the tempests that were causing us to die. As he hurled himself into the abyss from the Cross, he calmed the storm of sin so that we might reach the eternal shore. He did care!
• The problem was that the apostles doubted in his loving concern. In this the twelve were like the twelve tribes of Israel 1300 years before. After they had witnessed God’s hand in the ten plagues of Egypt, after they had seen him part the Red Sea, after they had seen pharoah’s horsemen and chariots perish in the sea, after they had witnessed Moses’ strike the rock to provide them water, after they had been fed miraculously with manna and then quails from heaven, after they had seen the thunder and lightening of Moses’ conversations with God on the top of Mt. Sinai, the Jews continued to doubt in God’s love for them. They obviously knew that God had the power — he had already shown them this power on all these occasions — but they doubted whether he would continue to use that power to help them. “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt,” they complained to Moses, “that you have taken us away to die in the desert?” (Ex 14:11). Whenever anything got difficult, they grumbled. They doubted. They began to whether God’s solicitude had an expiration date. His past actions didn’t factor into their equation.
• The same thing was happening with their descendants in the boat. They had witnessed Jesus’ power and his goodness on so many occasions, but they began to wonder whether his love — not his power — had a limit. They began to question whether he was indifferent to their plight. It was, simply put, a lack of faith in who he was, based on a failure to grasp the meaning of all he had done up until then. That’s why Jesus, as soon as he had awakened turned to his followers and said, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”
• The same lack of faith that happened to the Jews in the desert and to the apostles on the Sea of Galilee can happen to all of us. Generally, few of us question whether God has the power to work a miracle, but very often we begin to wonder whether he has the will. We, too, can begin to think that he is indifferent to our plight. When we’re assailed by the storms of sorrow, the downpours of doubt, the twisters of uncertainty, the hail of anxiety, and the blizzards of loneliness, we can start to imagine that he is having sweet dreams while we’re experiencing nightmares. We can start to reckon that he’s snoring while we’re screaming for help. This happens when we, like the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles, begin to forget all that the Lord has done for us up until now and what that shows about who he is and how loved we are by him. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, “If God didn’t even spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, would he not give us everything else along with him? (Rom 8:32). If God the Father was willing to allow his Son to be brutally killed so that we might live, he is going to respond with love in every circumstance, by giving us what he knows we need. But we need to have faith in him and in the power of his love. The apostles were anxious in the boat because they were paying more attention to the waves and to the winds around them than to the presence of Jesus with in the boat. The same thing happens with us. We need to focus more on Christ than on our problems. This is the mark of a life of faith. Jesus turns to us in the midst of whatever hardship we are experiencing and says, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” To believe in him means not just to trust in his power, but to have faith in his goodness and love and that that goodness and love perdures.
• In today’s first reading we see an instance of God’s continued goodness and love when his people lose their faith. He intervenes to help them rediscover it. Through the Prophet Amos, God reminds the children of Israel that he brought them out of the land of Egypt, that he favored them “more than all the families of the earth,” but they forgot that that privilege had a purpose, namely so that through their fidelity they might become a light to the world. That’s why God then says, “Therefore I will punish you for all your crimes.” When we hear a phrase like that, we can think that God is like us, taking vengeance on people who didn’t obey his rules; but what God was saying, rather, would be that he would bring them repentance by allowing them to suffer things that will remind them of how much they need him   and his mercy and how when they live by sin rather than by faith they eventually weaken such that opposing powers like the Assyrians will triumph over them. The Prophet Amos goes through a list of things describing the principle of cause and effect: two people walk together because they agreed to do so; lions roar because they’ve caught pray; birds fall to the ground when they’re caught by a snare; trumpets sound to announce a battle cry. All of these point to the fact that “the Lord God does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants, the prophets,” and just as people take fright when they hear a lion roar so when someone like Amos hears the Lord God speak, he must prophesy! That’s what he was doing. God caused him to come to proclaim his merciful castigation. They hadn’t learned the lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah, they had “not retuned to me,” the Lord said, and so now, he said, “I will deal with you in my own way, O Israel! … Prepare to meet your God.” They would suffer. They would long for a redeemer. And eventually one would come in his Son. God cared for them enough not to write them off but to redeem them. But everything, like storms, like the fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, are meant to help us grow in faith, and God wants us to act on this care and trust in it rather than take it for granted and forget it.
• This truth is also illustrated in the feast we celebrate today, that of the first martyrs of the Church of Rome. After Nero had set fire to the city of Rome in order to rebuild it to his own glory, destroying 10 of the 14 sections of Rome and killing many of the inhabitants, the Romans blamed him and he needed a scapegoat. He found one in the first Christians who had a reputation of being an atheist, cannibalistic, promiscuous sect: atheist because they didn’t believe in the pagan gods and would get the gods angry at everyone; cannibalistic because when they got together to worship God they were said to eat someone’s body and drank his blood; and promiscuous because after that worship they would have a big “agape” meal, a love banquet, which was interpreted as an orgy. They wouldn’t have many defenders. And things got stormy for the Christians right away, the equivalent of a hurricane, a tornado and an earthquake all at the same time. On October 13, 64, a few months after the July 19 fire that destroyed Rome, Peter and the first Christians were rounded up in the Circus of Caligula and Nero for a game in which they would be killed as arsonists supposedly for destroying the city of Rome. They had prayed and it might have seemed God was asleep, but through their testimony, and that of martyrs after them, God was going to help convert the Roman empire. We have an eyewitness account of what they suffered from the Roman pagan historian Tacitus, who was a 7 year old boy there in the circus when the Christians perished. A few decades later, he wrote down what happened: “To get rid of this rumor, Nero set up [i.e., falsely accused] as the culprits and punished with the utmost refinement of cruelty a class hated for their abominations, who are commonly called Christians. Christ, from whom their name is derived, was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. Checked for a moment, this pernicious superstition again broke out, not only in Judea, the source of the evil, but even in Rome…. Accordingly, arrest was first made of those who confessed [to being Christians]; then, on their evidence, an immense multitude [elsewhere in his writings he used this expression to refer to 3,000 to 5,000 men] was convicted…. Besides being put to death they were made to serve as objects of amusement; they were clothed in the hides of beasts and torn to death by dogs; others were crucified, others set on fire to serve to illuminate the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open his grounds for the display, and was putting on a show in the circus, where he mingled with the people in the dress of charioteer or drove about in his chariot. All this gave rise to a feeling of pity, even towards men whose guilt merited the most exemplary punishment; for it was felt that they were being destroyed not for the public good but to gratify the cruelty of an individual.” With Peter, they followed the Lord Jesus as others stretched out their hands and dragged them to places where according to the flesh they would never want to go. But immediately after their torture Christ’s plans for their salvation were brought to fulfillment. Rather than conquering the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire from heaven, God overcame the evil with good, irrigating the soil of Rome with what it would need for the Church to grow. And their example led to the salvation of many others.
• We invoke their intercession today so that we may know that the Lord is always with us in the boat of Peter so that we may be rooted on Christ the Cornerstone and on Peter the Rock even if the storms should blow and buffet against the house. The Eucharistic Lord is with us always even when he seems asleep. He sometimes allows us to endure the difficulties as well as his seeming lack of response so that we can become great in faith. In the Eucharist, he shows us how much he cares.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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