The story 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 He did.
Neither is the story about 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. 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 this account 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?” 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. “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 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!
This same lack of faith that happened 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 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 within 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 afraid? Do you still have no faith?” To believe in Him means not just to trust in His power, but to have faith in His goodness and love.
Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, ordained in 1999. After receiving a biology degree from Harvard College, Fr. Landry studied for the priesthood in Maryland, Toronto, and for several years in Rome. He speaks widely on the thought of Pope John Paul II and on apologetics, and is currently parochial administrator of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. An archive of his homilies and articles can be found at catholicpreaching.com
This article is adapted from one of Father Landry’s recent homilies.
