Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19,9.11-13; Romans 9,1-5; Matthew 14,22-23.
Matthew’s gospel throughout this year serves as guide to an in-depth reading of the Christian life. Having revisited in the past Sundays the basic teachings on the parables of the kingdom and on how God operates in our lives as a seed that slowly yields fruit, now the gospel turns to Jesus as agent of the impossible, first feeding the crowd with just five loaves and two fish and today with Jesus walking on the lake.
The message is clear: believing is seeing and it makes miracles happen. What is impossible for the logical mind can become possible for the believing heart. Of course, we are tempted to be disheartened and not to believe that someday the seeds of hope, love, respect, integrity and honesty will prevail on corruption, ‘will to power’, contempt for the other, and organised crime.
For God, everything is possible. Perhaps not the way we normally expect it. Christianity has been duly tested in time. Historically there are the black patches that continue to be object of scandal for many, but alongside there have also been glorious unwritten pages of ancient and modern-day saints who continue to witness to the God of the impossible and to the credibility of the Gospel.
Believing is an in-depth experience that of its nature is transformative. Today’s Scriptures narrate the faith history of Elijah and Peter, both demonstrating how faith is a ‘luminous darkness’. The first reading tells of Elijah when “he went into the cave and spent the night in it”. It was his night of faith when he feared for his life at a time when the powers-that-be were systematically killing the prophets. His night was only a prelude to a refreshed memory of the God he believed in.
In like manner, Peter and his colleagues battled fiercely with a heavy sea and a headwind, with their belief in the Lord shattered. Peter believed he could automatically follow Jesus even walking on the lake. His frailty reminds us that to venture on what is extraordinary, we need to be resourceful people. Following Jesus is an extraordinary feat that illuminates our darkness and heals the mental anguish that so often blocks our ability to let God be God.
Today the hardest questions posed to us believers are not those coming from a secular world which we consider Godless, but those deeper questions that dwell in the depths of our heart. The battleground where our belief evolves and matures is not the social milieu where we live but the personal dark nights that shake our foundations and moorings.
At the time of Elijah, prophets were being killed. Our prophetic strength can die out when we choose to become complicit by tolerating injustice or by simply failing to speak out when dissenting voices need to be heard. The soul of a nation can only be redeemed by ordinary people with extraordinary visions.
This may sound out of reach. But there are still such people on this planet. One of them, John Lewis, a civil rights leader and member of the US House of Representatives, died last month. He was one of the promoters of the1963 March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr gave the historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
Shortly before his death last month, Lewis wrote an essay which, according to his wish, was published on the day of his funeral. “Though I am gone,” he wrote, “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe”.
God is not a manageable idol, author Paul Crowley writes. Faith is not simply a message about God. It can open wide our shutters, allowing us those instant glimpses of the divine that give us eyes to read reality as it is and extraordinary strength to lead as visionaries.