HOMILY: 4th SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY (EF) 2017

In the Gospel we have just heard, St Matthew is doing much more than recording an amazing event in the life of Jesus and his disciples. He is certainly doing that; but in the way he narrates the succession of events – the storm, the fear of the disciples, the acts and words of Jesus and the final calming of the waters – he is to all intents and purposes preaching a sermon to and speaking to the particular condition of the members of his own Church community – 60 or 70 years after the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.

St Matthew’s Gospel is often described as the Gospel of the Church. In it, time and again, matters of Church organisation and discipline and procedure are given a high profile. In the story of the Storm on the Lake, St Matthew is very evidently addressing his own Church community – which is going through a time of anxiety in the face of opposition, a time of failing faith among some of its members and a community much in need of general reassurance. And what St Matthew is saying to the Church in his day is a message that still has remarkable relevance for us in our time in the Church at the beginning of the 21st century.

We can see the particular emphases that are of importance for St Matthew if we compare the way he presents his account with the way the same set of events is related in the much earlier St Mark’s Gospel.

St Matthew right at the beginning of his narrative makes clear that Jesus is the Lord and Leader of the Church. While St Mark tells us that ‘the disciples took Jesus with them in the boat’, in St Matthew, Jesus leads the way and the disciples follow him: ‘when Jesus got into the boat, the disciples followed him’…. And more than that – the boat has now become the symbol of the Church. It is the ‘ark of salvation’ where security against all the storms of the world is guaranteed to those who are willing to follow Jesus.

Also of particular significance is the word that St Matthew chooses to describe the cause of the disciples’ panic: the word used means an earthquake – in St Matthew’s Greek it is ‘seismos’: something much more awesome than what our English version translates as a ‘storm’; and not the normal word for a storm that St Mark uses. St Matthew uses the word again several times, when he is describing the terrors of the time when the world will come to an end. The storm on the lake is in fact a symbol of these terrible ‘Last Times’. The Church, such an apparently frail craft, will have to weather this final storm. There will be great fear – but the members of the Church will come to no harm, because Jesus is with them.

And then, finally, in St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus does not reprimand the disciples for a total lack of faith, as he does in St Mark’s account: ‘Have you no faith?’ – but rather he more gently rebukes them as men who have ‘little faith’ – that weakness and lack of confidence that has dogged and will always dog all of us Christians down the ages.

The Gospel account concludes with these words: ‘And the men marvelled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and the sea obey him?”’ May those words echo now in our hearts, as we prepare to adore Jesus our Lord, who comes to be really present among us to calm us and console us in this Mass.