Sunday, August 9, 2020

Coming Closer

Exhausted and longing for solitude, Jesus escapes to the mountain and sends his disciples away. And having prayed alone for hours, well into the night, he comes after them in the midst of a terrifying storm. Perhaps it is that having been in prayerful communion with his Abba, he desires with even greater desire to take the “radical plunge” into all the darkness and death that our humanity entails; for this is his mission entrusted to him by his Father. And so, Jesus rushes towards us, towards his disciples, walking right over the stormy waters, the quickest way he can think of to get to those he loves who are in distress. Jesus strides over the waters of the deep where Leviathan and all the sea monsters live. And if the sea was the place of the disciples’ life and their livelihood, it was also a place of terror and of terrifying memories- companions who drowned, never returning home after a fishing trip because of a sudden storm. Probably none could swim; and unlike most of us they hadn’t ever spent a childhood holiday at the beach. The stormy sea represents, all that is wobbly and undefined, all that is strange, baffling, frightening and uncontrollable, even unfathomable; all that is dark, deep and full of mystery within us, in our lives, in our world.  Jesus walks there, treading steadily and resolutely over all of it.

He comes toward his disciples, toward us in this great scene of epiphany- revealing the beauty of his divinity, of his Otherness, expressing in his walk over the waters of the deep that he is Adonai of the Psalms, the Lord of all creation: “Greater than the roar of mighty waters, more glorious than the surging of the sea, the Lord - glorious on high.” But the apostles are scared out of their wits. They think he’s a ghost. “Not so,” says he. “It’s really I, your Lord.” The voice of the Lord “resounding on the waters, on the immensity of waters. The voice of the Lord full of splendor.” Perhaps not so much chiding them, as longing to be recognized, he says, “Please do not be afraid; I’m trying to come closer to you.”

But what about Peter, the Rock; is he just once again comic-tragic in his daring and overconfidence? Doesn’t he always seem a bit too eager, foolhardy, speaking too quickly? And now he wants to walk on the water? He should save himself the embarrassment, for we know well how he’ll put his big fisherman’s foot into his mouth later on - “Though all forsake you, Lord, I will never forsake you.” We cringe just to hear it, don’t we? And this morning he calls out to Jesus: “Command me to come to you on the water,” and soon after begins sinking out of fear. Should we simply say that like Peter we all need to have greater faith and stop here?

Perhaps there’s something more here that deserves our notice - something about desire, blessed desire? What about Peter’s ardent, foolish desire to be with his Lord? Peter calling out to Jesus, his Lord; Peter whose lofty desire trumps all discretion. “Call me to yourself, my Master!” “Come,” says Jesus. “Come.” Jesus does not find Peter’s request pretentious or inappropriate. For he encourages him, cries out to him, to us, “Come then, come to me, walk on water with me. Come to me across the waters of the deep.” And so, God’s desire and our own meet across the stormy waters. And if in the end Jesus reproaches Peter ever so gently, it perhaps comes from his disappointment - at being misunderstood. “Don’t you know I would never let you drown? How long have you been with me? Though the flood waters may reach high, I will always stoop down to save you.”

Jesus walks on the waters of the deep towards us to remind us that he is the Lord, with us in all that is precarious and unfathomable. And he wants to stir up our desire for him, and perhaps most of all to stir up our confidence in his desire to share all that he is, all that he has, with us – stir up our confidence in his desire. The God, who is at once totally available and at the same time altogether beyond our reach, draws us here and now into mystery, the mystery that he is; draws us into himself. For God in Christ is always moving toward us. "His desire gives rise to yours," says Saint Bernard, "and if you are eager to receive (him), it is he who is rushing to enter your heart; for he first loved us, not we him." Jesus enfleshes this towardness of God - going out of himself, rushing toward us as he seeks to captivates us with the “spell of his love and his desire” for us.

Perhaps then this scene is among other things a parable about prayer, the awesome daring of our prayer. Imagine it - we hope, we believe that we can be intimate with the living God - we’ve built our lives around this. And we know that this desire, this reaching out toward God, is possible only because of God’s desire in the first place. If you want to pray, remember always God wants it more than you. Best of all - God’s most tender desire for communion with us has taken flesh, in Jesus our Lord. Jesus is God’s desire for us coming toward us moment by moment across the depths of otherness. Jesus is always using anything at all to get our attention. Jesus is the Bridge, our Bridge to the Father. And to have the gumption to pray at all, we must like Peter allow our foolish overreaching desire to trump the imbalance of reality - our puny humanity vs. his sublime divinity. What prudence would surely caution against, we boldly do when we dare to pray. And that is awesome to say the very least.

Jesus striding on the waters toward us, teaches us confidence, fiducia, for Saint Bernard. For within our very bones, our guts, planted there by the invisible, unfathomable, living God is our capacity, our natural need and longing for God - for an intimacy and union that is our rightful possession. We’re built for it - built for Jesus, Jesus whose name means "God saves, God frees.” In Christ God is constantly giving us himself, his own life, “that life that flows in abundance from his pierced side.”

And so, what Peter longs to hear from Christ Jesus, he does hear. Somehow, we might say, Peter's desire puts words in Jesus’ mouth. Somehow our desire puts words in Jesus’ mouth. Not because we make it up, but because our deepest desire is the echo of God’s desire for us. “Command me to come to you across the waters.” “Come,” says Jesus. “Come to me.” If indeed this is a parable about prayer, then know that what we long to hear, what each of us longs to hear from the Lord, may very well be just what God longs to say to us - “Come to me.”

If God in Christ is coming toward us, constant in his desire, how will we respond? Maybe like the apostles back in the boat - bow down and worship. It is in the Holy Eucharist that we have our best chance, as Jesus rushes toward us, rushing to feed us with his own Body and Blood. For  in this broken bread and shared cup, our desires will meet, collide and become one.