XII Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year B

Our Life Between Two Shores

“Let us cross over to the other side!”
Mark 4:35-41

Last Sunday we heard two brief parables from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, dedicated to the parables of sowing. Today, the gospel presents us with the episode of the calming of the storm, which concludes the chapter. Jesus, the Sower, at the end of His day of parables, entrusts Himself to the work of the fisherman apostles. This account by St. Mark is of great symbolic richness that risks escaping us if we read it only as one of the many miracles performed by Jesus.

Let us start from Jesus’ invitation: “Let us cross over to the other side”. This invitation can be a key to understanding our human and believer’s life. We pass from shore to shore until we reach the eternal shore. I would like to touch on three of these “crossings” as a stimulus to discern which shores await us today.

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Let us cross over to the other side”:
From our shore to the other shore!

The crossing to which Jesus refers in today’s gospel is quite specific. It involves leaving the familiar shore of believing Israel to go toward the shore of pagan peoples. It is the passage toward the mission of the Church. Such a passage has never been easy and serene. Crossing “to the other side” has meant facing a sea of obstacles, persecutions, prejudices, risks, and unknowns.

An emblematic example is the case of Paul and his companions on a mission, invited to cross from the eastern shore to Europe: “During the night Paul had a vision: a Macedonian stood before him and begged him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” (Acts 16:9-10).

Jesus’ invitation, however, is a metaphor for life and our existence. Life demands great flexibility from us. One does not grow without crossings. Sometimes these crossings happen naturally, without trauma. Other times, they are painful and require crossing a stormy sea, in the dark of night and with contrary winds, risking shipwreck. Life requires great mental, psychological, and spiritual readiness for change. Often we resist, preferring to stay in the known and tranquil “here” rather than move toward an unknown and uncertain “beyond.” But we often say, those who stand still are lost or even already dead.

Life does not like immobility, both in natural life and in that of faith. Sometimes facing the challenge of change is imposed on us by life itself: a bereavement, an illness, a marital crisis, a broken relationship… It takes courage to face certain dramatic situations and find a new balance. Other times it is the Lord Himself who invites us to leave our mediocrity, to go towards “the other,” to welcome the poor and the stranger, to open ourselves to life, to take on a new commitment…

Let us ask ourselves: what crossings is life asking of me and how am I facing them? To what crossings is the Lord inviting me? Am I perhaps trying to avoid them?

“Master, do you not care? We are going down!”:
From the shore of doubt to that of trust!

In the crossings, we often face the storms of life. Then in the midst of the storm, doubt assails us: is it really true that the Lord is with me, is with us? This has always been the Great Temptation: “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). If there is something the Lord cannot tolerate, it is precisely this: doubting His presence. Because this means doubting His essence: Emmanuel, God with us (see Psalm 94 and Hebrews, chapter 4). This temptation can come to us both personally, especially in some dramatic moments of existence, and socially and ecclesially, in this time of epochal changes, that is, thinking there is no future for this society or that the church’s boat is about to sink.

This doubt will never completely abandon us. Some psalms comfort us because they give voice and expression to this doubt of ours, which perhaps, out of shame, we would have preferred to keep silent: “Awake! Why do you sleep, Lord? Rouse yourself!… Why do you hide your face?… Rise up and help us!” (Psalm 44). Yes, we often have the impression that He falls asleep. Perhaps He falls asleep because He trusts us! Indeed, He entrusts to us the continuation of His mission. This sleep of Christ, moreover, is a post-Easter allusion to His death and His “distance” after the resurrection, when the hurricane of persecution will rage against Christians, threatening to wreck Peter’s fragile boat. However, Jesus’ sleep is not that of the prophet Jonah who “had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep” (Jonah 1:5), indifferent to the distress of his travel companions who faced the storm. Jesus’ sleep is that of the Psalmist’s trust: “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:9). Jesus also has the heart of the lover: “I sleep but my heart is awake” (Song of Songs 5:2). He, Jesus, sleeps at the stern, that is, at the helm, but His heart watches over His travel companions.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Our entire journey of faith will be a permanent crossing from doubt to trust until we reach the shore of the serenity of filial abandonment.

“Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?”
From the shore of unbelief to that of faith!

Unbelief leaves God out of the boat. One relies only on one’s own strength. Sometimes we do not even rely on others because “every man for himself!” says the proverb. It is a Promethean, voluntarist, and individualistic logic of life. This can also happen to us, so-called believers. We think we are sailing on Christ’s boat but, in reality, we have boarded another boat, that of materialism or worldly spirit, of power or well-being. On Christ’s boat, the logic of risk and giving life prevails, while on the world’s boat, the law of “save yourself!” dominates.

So let us ask ourselves if we are on the right boat when we face certain crossings or decisive issues in our lives. One thing is to travel with Jesus, even if He seems to be sleeping, and another is to have forgotten Him on the shore. This is the temptation to set faith aside when we face the concrete problems of life. Worse still if we have domesticated a Jesus to our measure! Christ must be taken “as He is”: “They took Him, just as He was, in the boat”. And “as He is” will always surprise us: “Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him!”

Fr. Manuel João Pereira Correia mccj
Verona, June 2024

“Let us cross to the other side”

A Commentary on Mk 4, 35-41

To cross boundaries
Last Sunday we saw Jesus by the Sea of Galilee teaching to a large crowd about the Kingdom of God in an inspiring language. Today we read how Jesus, on the eve of the same day, invited his disciples to get into a boat and cross to “the other side”. It is quite evident for me that this expression –“the other side”- has in the gospel a deeper meaning than just a geographical one. We know that the other side of the lake was populated by people of different culture and religious practices. As a matter of fact, several times in the gospels Jesus appears pushing his disciples to walk to other villages and towns and to go and meet Samaritans, sinners, pagans an other kinds of “different people”.
This missionary attitude of Jesus was assumed by the Church from the very beginning, after Resurrection, till our times. Paul, for example, was “forced” by the Spirit to cross the border from Asia into Europe (Macedonia); Francois Xavier expanded the Gospel to the Far East Asia; Daniel Comboni, with others, opened the borders of Africa to the Church… And son many other missionaries.
In our days, the Church cannot remain locked in a glorious missionary past. Also today the Church is invited by the Spirit to cross new geographical, cultural and religious boundaries to share the treasure of the Gospel with XXI century humanity: with refugees and migrants, with young people who look for a new future and old people who feel abandoned, people who move around as seep with no shepherd… We all should ask ourselves: To which side does Jesus invites us to cross today? Where are the boundaries to which that my family, my parish, my community should move now?

To get into the sea and resist the squalls
We know that in the Bible the sea is an image of the evil that we can meet in the world, with its dangerous waves and violent storms, that can destroy the small boat of our personal life or even the fragile community we belong to.
In fact, when we leave the small “protected world” of our routine, where we have everything under control, surely we face obstacles and problems that we are not sure how to overcome. When we leave behind the “existential walls” of our parish, family or community, most surely we will have to confront a hostile world, opposed to our way of life. The outside world can become a formidable threat to our weak faith and fragile community.
A moment like this is what Mark describes in todays’ reading, reminding us of the disciples lesson: they did not act as super-heroes; they acknowledged their fear and prayed very sincerely from their anguish. That was the moment to shout out to the Lord with great sincerity and conviction: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

And the Lord was with them
Mark’s story brings to us the experience of those first members of the Church. They experienced persecution and strong oppositions; in those circumstances they doubted and were afraid, thinking that the Lord was sleeping and absent, but at the end they experienced that the Lord was very much alive and full or power over evil, in spite of their little faith.
For us, as for the first disciples, it’s very important that, in any missionary initiative, we carry the Lord in “our boat”. We should not go on mission only with our enthusiasm, strength and creativity. If the mission is just our own initiative, when the wind blows, most probably we are going to sink. But if we take the Lord with us (in his Word, his sacraments, his community, his Spirit…), when the difficult time comes, surely we are going to feel his presence, we will be able to shout out to him, He will answer and we shall reach the other side ready to spread the Good News.
Fr. Antonio Villarino,
Comboni missionary