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“Let us cross over to the other side” (Mark 4:35).
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jas 38:1, 8-11; Ps 107; 2 Cor 5, 14-17; Mark 4:35-41
Long ago, before it was politically incorrect to find humor in people suffering from binge drinking and natural disasters, a comic film imitated a drunk person during an earthquake walking straight while everyone else was scrambling and falling. His natural gait was seemingly corrective in a world out of control.
The late Paul Hinbusch, the Dominican spiritual writer and writer, once pointed out that the word used for storm at sea in the Bible is also the word for earthquake. More than a speck of bad weather, the stormy crossings of the Sea of Galilee were existential turmoil, an opening to every sense of reality at the deepest level, and a cause of true terror. But these were also apparitions. The disciples met God in Jesus when their presence and threat was revealed.
The disciples learned through faith to trust that Jesus was with his church in crisis because they had experienced the earthquake and storm and the appearance of his death and resurrection. He taught them to navigate through every storm, and walk through every earthquake in an upright position to make the crossing to freedom and a new life. The resurrected Christ was not sleeping (dead), or just a vision or a ghost story. They knew he was with them because they went through every crisis with renewed faith and a blessed assurance that only God can give.
St. Paul survived three times from shipwrecks. When he described life in Christ as baptism that brings us down to the waters of death and raises us to a new life, he knew what it means to be saved. His paschal sacrament, the essential spirituality of every Christian, invites believers to make the same crossing and give everything to the crucified and risen Jesus. In the sixth chapter of his Gospel, Mark will relate another dramatic lake that intersects with the multiplication of loaves. Baptism and the Eucharist are one miracle of conversion by faith.
The strong theological meaning of these stories touches every freedom movement. As the country adds “Juneteenth” to its national holidays, we see the biblical echo of the abolitionist case, the underground railroad of heroic women like Harriet Tubman helping slaves “cross” in mass migration to achieve their promised emancipation.
Earthquakes occur when deep tensions form in the Earth’s infrastructure. Storms form when broad forces of current, temperature, air mass, and wind converge. The complex crises of our time have always been under construction and will pose fundamental challenges to our world in the future. Facing them with courage and faith rather than coercion and fear will define this generation. Saint Paul urges us to trust in God’s power to guide us through every crisis. He says if we are in Christ, we are already part of a new creation. “Old things pass away; behold, new things are coming” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
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Picture Credit!