19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a | Romans 9:1-5 | Matthew 14:22-33

Almighty, everliving God, whom taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters that we may merit to enter into the inheritance, which you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin with the image of St. Paul, and in this passage, he is sad, deeply saddened by the fact that the Israelites, the Jews, weren’t really understanding fully who God is. And he’s saying he’d give up his life for them to know that and to see that, and he reminds them, in a sense, or reminds us in this passage that they were adopted in the very beginning as God’s special people. He expressed his glory to them. He made a covenant with them, promised them, if they would trust in him, he would take care of all their needs, and then he says, “You were given the law.” The law is the most important piece of wisdom human beings needed on their growth toward greater consciousness, responsibility, and the most important part of that law was believing and trusting in God. They had the temple to worship in, and they had the promises they were told by patriarchs, by prophets, and yet they were still closed. So what I’d like to do is take that image of how interesting it is, in the Old Testament, that God is always dealing with people with whom he has a hard time establishing fidelity on their part to him.

So it’s interesting, if we go back to the Old Testament reading, we’re looking at something about a person who was one of the great prophets, Elijah. Elijah is one of those figures in the Old Testament that was very, very strong in terms of his power. He did incredible miracles. He even raised someone from the dead, and he has this strange way in which he ceased living on this earth. The story is that he rode a chariot into heaven and did not die. That’s a lot, but one of the things that’s so interesting about him is, like so many of the prophets, they had a sort of violent streak in them. They were really, really ready, as ready to take care of people as to crush and destroy them, and there’s a story that happens right before this passage that I think is important. The Israelites have been unfaithful to God. Some of them have now been worshipping another God called Baal, and that is something that God forbade. “Don’t you ever worship anyone else but me.” The most important thing that God was trying to teach the people throughout the Old Testament is there is only one God. There is no other God, and if you turn to other gods, they will not be there for you. But to make that point ⎯ it was rather, I think, hard for us to grasp, but he would destroy them. If you didn’t believe in God, you would be destroyed, and that’s exactly what happened to Elijah. He had set up a competition between the god of Baal and the God of Yahweh, and they were both asked to do a miraculous event of sending down fire to ignite a fire where a sacrifice was to be offered to them. At the time there was a terrible drought, and so the god of the rain was Baal. And so they were praying to Baal, and that angered God and angered the prophet. And so when God proved that he was the real God, he was the only one who answered the call to send down fire to ignite this offering to God, you would think they all would have converted, but no ⎯ no. Elijah went and slaughtered 850 prophets of false gods at that time, and then he was terrified, and he ran away.

Now, think about that. How serious was God in trying to convince human beings that he was the only God? Why is that so important? Well, it’s clear that human beings evolve slowly over time, and one of the things that God was ultimately revealing was going to be the fullness of the mystery of God entering into us and becoming part of us and infusing his Spirit into us so that we could continue his ministry that he began when he called Abraham. And what’s so fascinating about that is, unless we have absolute, total conviction that this God is real, that he is the one source that we need for us to be able to live in the world as we’re called to live it ⎯ he’s not an option. And when people turned away from him in the Old Testament, he made it clear that he was furious, and he destroyed them. But if you listen carefully to the Old Testament, what you begin to hear ⎯ and it’s so beautiful, and I’m so glad that, since the Vatican Counsel, we’ve been able to preach on the Old Testament every Sunday. That was never done before in the Catholic faith. We always listened to simply New Testament readings. But what we’re learning and what I’m learning is how foundational it is, the Old Testament, and how much in it we need to watch and pay attention to, because what God is doing is not only asking that we believe that there is only one God ⎯ monotheism was the main topic of the Old Testament ⎯ but he also made it clear that, when you do not focus on him, it is death. It is death. In the Old Testament, it was you were slaughtered. It in the New Testament, you are kind of lost, blinded, easily following other things that might seem like they will take care of you, when it’s only the relationship you have with God that is essential to everything you long for.

So we see now in the gospel Jesus doing the same thing that God the Father did in the Old Testament. God in the Old Testament promised, “I’ll be with you to take care of you. Trust in me.” And now Jesus is saying, “I’ve come into the world to invite you into something you’ve never, ever dreamt of. It was never clear in the Old Testament who my Father really is. He’s more than just the God that is dedicated to you, the Israelites, but he’s dedicated to everyone. And the dedication is he is then choosing to be infused into your life to be able to continue a ministry, that was begun with Abraham, that is going to lead to such wonderful, incredible results of what human beings have always longed for: love, peace, forgiveness.

And so there was a miracle right before this miracle. There was the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, and what’s interesting about that miracle, usually Jesus did miracles by saying the word, or somebody just touched him, but they were always kind of instantaneous things. But this particular miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus did not create enough food all of a sudden for 5,000, which is the way I would have thought he would have done it, or just created it in the hands of the people, but then that would have been more than they could handle. But what he did is he blessed the bread, and then in an almost Eucharistic way, lifting it up to heaven and blessing it ⎯ it just seemed so much like the Eucharist, and so what he’s saying is, “What I’m going to do is give you this image of the presence of God in you. I’m going to fill you with that, and you are going to be able to do something. You’re going to be able to feed people in a way that’s so beyond your human nature and your ability, but you can do this.” And he was like inviting them into what they could only understand after Pentecost, the Spirit within them doing miraculous things.

And so you look at Jesus now, the second ⎯ the next miracle is the walking on the water. I want to go back to the fact that, when Jesus is in that boat, he is asking Peter to come out and join him. That’s what Peter wanted. “I want to do what you do.” And the interesting response is not, “Well, you can’t do that yet, because I haven’t returned to my Father. You don’t have any real power in you yet.” No, he just said, “Come. Come, you can walk on water just like me.” And he does walk on the water. It wasn’t that he fell into the water, but it was the wind that frightened him. But the real thing was the fear was like a forced wind that all of a sudden overtook him. He was scared, and he sank. And Jesus looks at him and said, “How is it? Why is it that you doubted?” The same intention in the Old Testament that we see proclaimed through so many of the prophets is, “You’ve got to believe in me. You’ve got to trust me. If you don’t, something awful is going to happen. You’re going to lose life as I intended it to be. You’re going to be slaughtered.” And here is Jesus in an entire different time, and he’s doing something like that. Only instead of any way, shape or form demanding that they have the faith they need and destroying them because they don’t, he understands them, forgives them and just questions them. “Why can’t you let go of the way you’ve been thinking and enter into what I’m inviting you into?” That’s the mystery of this story. It began with Abraham, in a sense, and it was about a miraculous birth that would happen to Abraham. And then that prepared ⎯ that whole story after that brought us to the New Testament where it begins with another miraculous birth, presence of God in your heart. Amen.

Father, when you were with his disciples, you wanted so much for them to receive what you knew you could offer them. It was their fear and their doubt, so free us from these things that rob us of the peace of knowing you and feeling your presence within us and inviting others to experience the joy that comes from you, a joy that the world cannot give. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.