Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 22, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
June 22, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The text that guided the homily was: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday. Last week, we recall, Jesus gave us two parables about the growth of faith. This Sunday he puts the disciples in a boot camp experience on the Sea of Galilee to test their faith and help it to grow.
• The Gospel of 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 this Sunday’s Gospel, he did. Neither is this scene 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 in the first place. In the days immediately preceding this miracle, 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 Sunday’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. We see this in the question they asked as soon as they startled Jesus from what must have been a very deep and long-overdue sleep on an uncomfortable and rocky boat: “Master, do you not care that we are perishing?” 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. “Teacher, do you not care that we are about to die?”
• 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. Yes, he did care! Like the prophet Jonah was tossed into the sea in order to calm the ferocious maritime storm, 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, seen him part the Red Sea, watched Pharoah’s horsemen and chariots perish in the sea, witnessed Moses’ strike the rock to provide them water, been fed miraculously with manna in the morning and then quails at night, seen the thunder and lightning 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 question whether God’s solicitude had an expiration date. All of 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 present 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 and calmed the seas and the wind, turned to these soaked followers and said, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no 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 who believe in God question whether the Almighty has the power to work a miracle, but very often we begin to wonder whether he has the will. We, too, can start 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 drought of loneliness, we can start to imagine that he is having sweet dreams while we’re experiencing nightmares. We can 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. This is what Pope Francis reminded us of on March 27, 2020, when he prayed for the world suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic from an empty St. Peter’s Square. He preached on this Sunday’s Gospel and said, “Like the disciples in the Gospel, we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm. We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented.” He said that we needed to learn from the disciples’ lack of faith and to grasp that, more than anyone, Jesus cares about us and that “with him on board there will be no shipwreck.” The apostles were anxious because they were paying more attention to the waves and to the winds around them than to the presence of Jesus with them. We, like them, need to focus more on Christ than on our problems. To believe in him means not just to trust in his power, but to have faith in his ever-present goodness and love.
• I’d like to make two applications of these truths. The first is to the Eucharist. This morning I am in Steubenville, Ohio, on day 37 of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage’s Seton Route on our way to Indianapolis for next month’s National Eucharistic Congress. The Eucharist is the greatest reminder of God’s perpetual love and care. The early Christians, as soon as they started to build churches, used to call the body of the Church the “nave,” from the Latin word navisfor “ship.” And in the bow of that ship we place the tabernacle where Jesus abides. This illustrates that just like 2,000 years ago, Jesus is in the boat, symbolic of the Church, even if at times he is quiet and seemingly asleep. Every day he wishes to do more for us than he did even for his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. He not only speaks a word to calm the seas around us, but says, “This is my body… This is the chalice of my blood… Take and eat … Take and drink,” so that from the inside he can feed us to calm the storms within. During this Eucharistic Revival, we’re all called to grow in our awareness not just of Jesus’ presence with us, but to grasp how that witnesses to his everlasting merciful love. To paraphrase St. Paul, if God the Father didn’t spare his own Son, if he didn’t just hand him over for us all on Calvary, but gives him to us every day as our spiritual food, will he not give us everything else besides?
• The second application is to the priesthood, and, more personally, to me, as this Wednesday, June 26^th, I will be celebrating the 25^th anniversary of my priestly ordination. Though I am a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, because of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, I will be celebrating my silver Jubilee in North Pickerington, Ohio, at the Parish of St. Elizabeth Seton, at 6 pm. If you happen to live in the Diocese of Columbus and would like to come, you’re most welcome. Throughout these last two and a half decades, God has shown me time and again his faithfulness and care as he’s summoned me, like he does every priest, to be an image of God’s solicitude as we help the Church, Jesus’ Mystical Body and Bride, care for all those weathering storms as well as to strengthen those experiencing favorable winds. I ask you to please pray for me and for the 404,000 brother priests across the globe that we may be men of great faith, not little faith, trusting in the Lord full-time and helping all of Christ’s beloved trust in him more.rrrrr
• As we prepare to receive Jesus this Sunday in Holy Communion, Jesus who is the fullest response to our prayer to the Father to give us what we really need, we ask him to take away all our fears and to increase our faith, so that we may rejoice in the gift of his abiding presence in the boat of the Church, believe in his power, trust in his love, and with the other members of the Church be strengthened to continue his rescue mission as his spiritual coast guard all the way until we land triumphant and joyful at the eternal dock. God bless you!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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