August13, 2017 | 19th Ordinary Sunday
We’ve all heard at one time in our lives that we have to focus. Parents say that to their children; teachers to their students; coaches to their athletes/players. If you want to be good at something, you have to focus on what it is that you are learning/practicing/training for. Focus gives us discipline and discipline is the process of being a disciple.
If you want to learn God—learn Jesus—you have to focus on him and undertake the discipline of being his disciple (student, learner, follower). This is what both Elijah in the first reading from the 1st book of Kings and Peter in the gospel are trying to do.
The context of the 1st Kings reading is that Elijah has run from his prophetic duty because things have become tough—Jezebel and her minions are seeking his life. He flees to Horeb—the mountain of the Lord, where another prophetic figure, Moses, had a divine encounter in the burning bush of Exodus 3. Though Elijah’s life outside has turned into a type of a heavy and strong wind, an earthquake, and a raging fire—after all he just murdered the prophets of Baal and was calling king Ahab back to true covenantal loyalty with the Lord (which both Ahab and Jezebel reject)—all those external activities are as nothing to the more important reality which is his focus (or what has become his lack of focus) on the Lord God. He is summoned back to that central point, that quiet place, that sheer sound of silence—that tiny whispering sound, that still small voice—in which God speaks to the heart. Elijah must be retrained—rediscipled—in the ways of God. In fact, twice in the Horeb theophany (1 Kgs 19:9, 13), the word/voice of God asks Elijah “What is it to you here, Elijah?” “Why are you here Elijah? Have you lost your focus?”
And so it is with Peter in the gospel as well. The passage of Jesus walking on the water is meant to convey that Jesus—like God, because he is God—has total control over the elements, even that element which is representative of chaos and disorder: water. Water is hard to control, and people have rightly feared it for millennia. (Think even of the power of water in our own day: storms, tsunamis, floods. Water can quickly take life, as much as we need it for life.) Like the spirit/breath/wind of God which hovered over the primordial waters of chaos and brought order (cosmos) to them in the first creation story in Genesis 1, Jesus brings order to the natural world and the human world.
Peter too wants to be a part of this re-creation story on the part of God in Jesus. He is a disciple of Jesus, or so he thinks. He has seen what Jesus has done; he has learned his ways…or has he? To the extent that Peter focuses on Jesus, he can walk on the water; he has power over even the elemental forces of chaos and disorder. But, as soon as he loses his focus on Jesus, he succumbs to the powers and forces of chaos and disorder and sin. He begins to sink in sin. He focuses on those lies and they, in some sense, become more real than Jesus to Peter. They set the parameters for his existence. And they are always parameters based on fear, not faith. Peter begins to focus on fear, not his faith in Jesus. Like Elijah who forgot his fundamental identity in the Lord God and thus ran, because of all the spiritual storms and earthquakes and fires in his life, Peter forgot his fundamental identity in Christ. He still has much to learn in being a disciple. He must be re-discipled as well.
Though Peter wants to embrace the life of magnanimity as conveyed by walking on water with one’s focus solely and only on Christ, he too quickly settles or falls for the life of pusillanimity as symbolized by the boat and focusing only on the chaos and disorder of life. We too settle for lives lived from fear (our own small, pusillanimous boats) instead of magnanimously setting out in faith with our hearts, minds, souls and spirits fixed only on Jesus.
Peter, though, had the presence of mind to cry out to the Lord when he was sinking, caught up in the fears and anxieties of his life: “Lord, save me!” Perhaps, he had learned something from being a student/disciple of Jesus: we are unable to save ourselves. Only God in Christ can save Peter…can save us. Peter’s ongoing discipleship and rediscipleship is based on acknowledgement that he cannot do it himself. If he is going to walk on water, he is going to have to get out of the boat aware that his focus must be solely on Jesus. It is Christ who will do it in his life and in our lives. May we have the humility and wisdom to cry out “Lord, save me” and the magnanimity of soul to bow down and worship Jesus, saying, “Truly, you are the Son of God.”