Friends, our Gospel for today is Mark’s account of the stilling of the sea. We know the basic structure of the story: Jesus is in the boat with the disciples; when a storm kicks up, he’s asleep in the stern. The disciples are panicking and wake Jesus up, and once he’s awakened, he calms the storm. Then he says, “Do you not yet have faith?” What I'm going to do is give you three separate interpretations of this story, all of which have come up out of the ancient Church, and all of which shed light on the spiritual life.
Watch Peace in the Storm - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon
GOSPEL
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 4:35–41
Friends, the story at the heart of our Gospel for today is the storm at sea. Karl Barth said that the stormy waters in all of these cases stands for das Nichtige, “the nothing,” that which stands opposed to God’s creative intentions—difficulties both interior and exterior, difficulties physical, psychological, and spiritual.
The disciples in the boat are, as I’ve often said, evocative of the Church, making its way through time and space. And those waters are symbolic of everything that besets the members of the Church. To stay within the emotional space of the story, this must have been an awful storm to have terrified experienced sailors. This is no small problem, no minor difficulty.
Do you know the de profundis prayer? It comes from Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I call to you, Lord; Lord, hear my cry!” It is the prayer we should offer at the darkest times of life, when we find ourselves lost and in the shadow of death, when, in our desperation, we feel utterly incapable of helping ourselves.