NOTES for Luk 8:22-25

"God is awesome in the great assembly of the saints; He is awesome to all who surround Him. O Lord God of hosts! Who is strong like You, O Lord? And Your truth is all around You. You rule over the raging of the sea: when its waves rise, You still them." (Ps 88:8-10) This is the text often offered to us as a parallel to the fragment of today's Gospel. But let us look at these words.

Here the Lord appears as a fearsome Judge; He appears in Power and Glory. It is hard for us to judge the original meaning of the word "awesome" among the Jews, but already in the Vulgate and in translations into modern languages we find precisely such words as "terribilis," "feared," and so on, fully corresponding to our "awesome" or "fearsome"; and therefore this is already a fact of our many centuries of spiritual life. Now let us think, by contrast, how much silence and defenselessness there is in this figure of the Lord asleep in the stern. And when He wakes and appears in Power, He is still surrounded not by a host of angels, but standing in that little boat, surrounded by a handful of frightened fishermen.

But people with a more liberal-theological outlook can tell us in response to all this that the close connection of these two texts casts doubt on the authenticity of what happened and makes it look more like some kind of parable. We will not judge who is right. Each person has his own understanding. Yet, if we receive this text so existentially, we can also receive the spiritual interpretation that arises through turning to the prophet Isaiah: "But the wicked are like the troubled sea, which cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and mud." (Isa 57:20)

The image of the sea appears very often in the biblical text, and that is understandable: after all, the culture that became the manger for Jesus and the cradle for us is a Mediterranean culture. But the way the prophet Isaiah suggests reading this image gives us a great deal for understanding today's story about the Lord. The troubled sea is something that carries death within it, and sin is the path to death. But the Lord calms the troubled sea, because He does not desire anyone's death.

But "where is our faith?" Must we always wake the Lord? "Acquire the spirit of peace, and then thousands around you will be saved," said Seraphim of Sarov. These words of our remarkable saint seem to draw the image of today's reading, except that you must stand in the Lord's place. You are as if building a ship on which you lead everyone around you through the raging sea to a quiet harbor.