The Lord’s Desire and Actions to Save, Thirteenth Tuesday (I), July 2, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
July 2, 2019
Gen 19:15-29, Ps 26, Mt 8:23-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we see in the readings just how far God will go to save us and how we need to be open to how he saves us even when it seems that we’re perishing.
• In the first reading, in the encounter between the Angels of God and Lot, we see God’s will to save us from destruction. It’s a scene that is one example of the entire plan of God. The Angels tell Lot to get up and get on his way, together with his wife and daughters, prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sins. When Lot hesitates, the Angels “by the Lord’s mercy,” took him, his wives and daughters by the hands and led them out of the city, telling them to flee for their lives and not to look back with affection toward what they were leaving. We know what was happening in Sodom and Gomorrah and God’s saving Lot and his family from the destruction is an indication of how he tells us to flee from sin, to get out of near occasions, to get out of the conflagration of lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh and pride that lead to self-destruction, and not to look back. When Lots’ wife disregarded the angels’ instructions and looked back, with curiosity or affection, to what was being left behind, she was turned, Genesis tells us, into a “pillar of salt,” a Hebrew idiom that basically means she died, being reduced to the salts carried in the human body. Yesterday, we heard Abraham’s pleading with God not to destroy the cities if he could five 50, or 40, or 30, or 20, or 10 just people there. The fact that he couldn’t find even ten says how bad things were. And we’re not really even sure that Lot and his family would be numbered among the good, because they were being saved on account of Abraham. Ultimately, however, God acts in the world because he was able to find one just man, his Son, who had taken on our humanity, and for that reason saves the whole world from a destruction symbolized by the fiery furnace that became Sodom and Gomorrah.
• In the Gospel, this salvific will of the Lord seems to be in question. While the apostles — the early Church — was being attacked by waves such that experienced fishermen thought they were about to die, Jesus was asleep in the boat. It’s a sign of just how tired physically he must have been: can you imagine sleeping in a situation like that? In St. Mark’s account, when the disciples awaken him, they ask, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” Their essential lack of faith was that they didn’t believe God cared for them, that God was listening, when they were perishing. But Jesus’ whole incarnation is a response to that doubt. The Father sent his Son into the world not to condemn it but so that it might not perish but have eternal life. But he waits on his response, he appears to be asleep, precisely to help us grow in faith and come to the fulfillment of faith in eternal life with him.
• Like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 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, as 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 the question of how much he cared. He did for us far more than he did for Lot and his family. The fact that we were about to die 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.
• The way he adjusts our vision is each morning at daily Mass, when he speaks to us and then unites himself to us in the Word-made-flesh. This is the way that, no matter what storms we face, we recognize that he not only cares, but acts. As we prepare to behold the Lamb of God, we pray that God will give us the faith never to take our spiritual eyes off of him, to continue to look ahead unlike Lot’s wife, and become his instruments so that others may see him more easily in us and come to find in him the same loving, eternally caring, Redeemer.

The readings for today’s Mass were: