Third Saturday in Ordinary Time
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Third Week in Ordinary Time
Heb 11:1-2, 8-19/Mk 4:35-41 (Lectionary #322)
It is one thing to trust and keep working when the Kingdom doesn’t seem to be coming very fast. It is another to stay peaceful when everything is falling apart.
In the previous passage Jesus shared his own feelings of concern with his disciples. Now Mark shows us the disciples feeling a concern that Jesus doesn’t appear to share. The boat they are in is sinking, and Jesus is sleeping right through it!
Mark undoubtedly meant us to see in this incident an allegory of the Church’s experience after Jesus ascended into heaven. (An allegory is a literary form “in which the characters and events are to be understood as representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper, often spiritual… meaning.” Encarta World English Dictionary).
In this case the boat is a symbol of the Church. The storm is a symbol of the opposition the Church was experiencing: so great “that the boat was already being swamped.” (Mark was probably writing for Roman Christians undergoing persecution). Jesus “asleep” represents Jesus apparently absent and inactive, ascended into heaven and seemingly unconcerned about what is happening to his Church. The words the disciples say to Jesus when they wake him up may express exactly what the Christians in Rome were feeling when Mark wrote: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
Mark’s point, however, is that whether Jesus appears to be present or absent, awake or asleep, he always has things under control. When Jesus woke up he “rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then “the wind fell off, and everything grew calm.”
But Jesus wasn’t finished. He looked at his disciples and said, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” He is teaching us through them that fear is contrary to faith, and that if we have enough faith we will fear nothing. Note that he is not talking about the emotion of fear, over which we have no control, but about fear we give intellectual assent to. To affirm an ultimate reason to be afraid of anything is to deny that Jesus is Lord of everything.
The disciples were apparently catching on to this. “They were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’” Mark’s identification of Jesus is adding up.
Initiative: Rebuke fear in yourself as Jesus rebuked the storm. That won’t make it go away, but it will keep it from hurting you.
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