Gustave Brion, 1863
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (14:22-36)
Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went up into the hills by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, while the boat, by now far out on the lake, was battling with a heavy sea, for there was a head-wind. In the fourth watch of the night he went towards them, walking on the lake, and when the disciples saw him walking on the lake they were terrified. ‘It is a ghost’ they said, and cried out in fear. But at once Jesus called out to them, saying, ‘Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.’ It was Peter who answered. ‘Lord,’ he said ‘if it is you, tell me to come to you across the water.’ ‘Come’ said Jesus. Then Peter got out of the boat and started walking towards Jesus across the water, but as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink. ‘Lord! Save me!’ he cried. Jesus put out his hand at once and held him. ‘Man of little faith,’ he said ‘why did you doubt?’ And as they got into the boat the wind dropped. The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.
Having made the crossing, they came to land at Gennesaret. When the local people recognised him they spread the news through the whole neighbourhood and took all that were sick to him, begging him just to let them touch the fringe of his cloak. And all those who touched it were completely cured.
Transcription of Sermon
The feast today is called Our Lady of Snows. In the first centuries of the Church, a patrician couple, John and his wife, who had no children, approached Pope Liberius and said, “We have all of this money. We don’t have many years left. We want to give it to the Church in honor of the Blessed Mother. How shall we do that?” And the Pope said… Liberius said, “Let me think about that.” And they all had a dream that on Esquiline Hill, a sign would be there. And they went on this day. –If you’ve ever been in Rome in August, you know snow is usually not forecast.- And there they saw snow in the outline of a cathedral… of a basilica, better said. And so, that was the outline they used to build St. Mary Major, and it came from that miraculous apparition of snow, and that’s why it’s called the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows.
The Gospel that was chosen for today is this rather eventful scene in which Our Lord forces them into the boat. So, in that they had just had some miraculous doings and, for whatever reason, Our Lord forces them into the boat there. He hurries them up, so there was probably something He didn’t want them to see, or to experience, and he puts them in the boat, and it says that He went on His own to pray. And that was really the first test.
He sends them away without Him. And it says that this happened “at evening.” So, this is around 6 p.m. And a “Storm wells up,” and the word that Matthew uses βασανίζω (basinatzo) is a verb that means to torture or to beat mercilessly. And so, these waves are beating the boat and the Apostles mercilessly. It’s the same verb that’s used to describe the suffering of the centurion’s servant, who is languishing on his deathbed. And this depiction of the sea is almost a personification because of the active verb of torturing them, beating them, and later we’ll see that Our Lord doesn’t rebuke the sea as it says that the sea “grew weary.” It doesn’t say it calmed… in here, it says “it calmed down,” but the verb is it “grew weary,” it tired of this torture.
And this entire episode is something of a theomachy, this existential primordial struggle between good and evil. And the Jews had a rather pejorative view of the sea. They didn’t like it. It seemed to be a place of chaos and death. The word in Hebrew is ים (yam) for sea, and ים (Yam) is this evil entity lurking under the sea, this agent of chaos and death, and destruction.
And so, they were in this horrible situation until it just skips one more line. It says, “the fourth watch,” which makes us think that, okay, there’s a storm, and then Our Lord came, but the fourth watch is 10 to 12 hours later. And so, they went through this beating by the winds and the waves for 10 to 12 hours before Our Lord ever showed up.
We see Our Lord do this with Lazarus, who lies languishing, and He makes them wait. He doesn’t go as soon as He’s called. He allows Lazarus to go through his pangs of death and death itself. We see this in those who are afflicted by the evil one, how Our Lord allows them to languish and suffer over long periods of time, not because He’s cruel, but because we’re not Protestants. We don’t understand suffering as a curse. We see it as a currency that Our Lord gives us in order to pay a debt, in order to be configured with Christ.
The despairing Job said, when he addresses God, God responds to him. “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth from the womb? When I made clouds, its garment in thick darkness, its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors? When I said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed?’”
And so, Our Lord puts them in this horrible situation precisely to exorcise from them every sense of self-reliance, to put them in this existential fear for 10 to 12 hours, non-stop.
And if that weren’t bad enough, then this seeming ghost comes towards them. He must have been alight, must have had some light on Him, emanating from Him, so they could see Him, because they had no lights. And the Jews thought of ghosts as spirit seeking revenge. And so, ‘Who… who of us incurred this wrath of this person who died on the sea? and must have ticked them off in this life, and now he wants revenge.” That’s how they saw. We understand ghosts as souls in purgatory. They understood them as spirits of the dead seeking vengeance. And so, they all let out this, ἔκραξαν (ekraxan) as it says in Greek, this cry. They’re all screaming in the midst of this apparition of Christ walking on the water towards them.
And He doesn’t come as some sort of a deus ex machina, this solution outside of the plot. Rather, He is the plot. He is the Logos. He is the context for all of this. He is the master of the seas, of the stars, of the earth, of the entire cosmos. He’s the Lord of history. And then, He says to them, ἐγώ εἰμι (ego eimi) “I am.”
Now, if you have your new Jerusalem Bible, you’ll see a really horrible translation that said, “It’s me.” Sounds like a five-year-old playing peek-a-boo. Well, it’s not, “It’s me.” That’s not only poor English. “It’s me.” “Me” is not nominative. Okay, that is “I.” That corresponds to the verb “it’s.” Okay, that’s… that’s just really horrible on every single level. Grammar, maturity, and, above all, theology, because Our Lord is saying, “I AM.” He’s revealing His own divinity. He’s not saying, “It’s me.” It’s not peek-a-boo. And this is a profound moment that’s completely lost in certain translations: “It is me.”
And then, the logical consequence of this is, “Have no fear.” Μὴ φοβεῖσθε (Mè phobeîsthe), and it’s not even given as an order. It’s an indicative verb, which is open-ended, which means He’s stating a fact. There is no place for fear now, and it’s open-ended just like the words of consecration that Our Lord says, when He says, “Do this in memory of Me.” It means in Greek, with the indicative mood, means do this now and keep on doing it. In other words, this, in this case, the forbidden fear starts now. It’s no longer a part of the program and may not be. This is the beginning of all prohibitions of fear.
What does John say? That true love casts out all fear. And so, we have to treat fear, we have to treat anxiety, like we would an impure thought, to let it die of neglect. Not engage it, not pursue it, not become a puppet to it, but to not give it legs.
Some writers and preachers, I think, superficially mock Peter, who makes this request: “If it is you, tell me to come to you, walking on the water.” This is not born of bravado. This is born of great love for Our Lord. This is a man who loves Our Lord so much in the midst of his human weakness. And in fact, his trust and his love were so great that that impelled him to be impetuous. This is not a vice. And so, he gets out of the boat and indeed walks on the water until he stops.
Teresa of Avila says about this, even though he later faltered, his first impulses were a great thing, and he lost nothing in what came next. And so, he made this profound act of faith, hope, and love in Our Lord, faltered along the way, but that faltering doesn’t have the last word.
In our own lives, in the lives of the people that we seek to help in ministry, storms and chaos, all these unknowns, sufferings, the insanity we see in the Church, and in the world, our own littleness and weakness, our own past, news, the stupid screens that we put in our own faces throughout the day, and they clamor for attention. All of these things are not Christ. All of these things keep us from configuration with Christ. And so, when Christ eventually saves Peter, the storms and the waves they’ve had nothing more to give, and it says they wearied.
And then He says, “Why did you doubt?” “Why did you doubt?” Εἰς τί ἐδίστασας. Ἐδίστασας (edistasas)is to be double-minded, ἐδίστασας . If we are to love Our Lord with all of our heart, mind, and strength, doubt is also not part of the program. Anxiety is not part of the program. St. Francis of Sales says that after venial sin, the greatest evil that can befall us is anxiety. It’s impossible to love Our Lord with all of our heart, mind, and strength if we entertain doubts, if we have a double mind.
And so, this passage is simply that. It reveals to us a God who demands from us, not because He needs it, because we do, absolute faith, hope, and charity, so that extracting that from us, He may truly belong to Him and be configured with Him.
~Fr. Ermatinger