OUR EXPERIENCE OF JESUS CHRIST IN STORMS OF LIFE

SUNDAY, TWELFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP 

Job 38:1,8-11; Ps 107:23-26,28-32; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mk 4:35-41

Experiencing and Knowing Jesus Christ in our Tempest

There are differences between the old man corrupted in Adam and the new man regenerated in Jesus Christ through our baptismal profession of faith into his death and resurrection. When considered through the principles and objectives of this present life, the old man lives to preserve and conserve his natural life which must surely die because of the sentence of condemnation hanging on him. He is hopeless about the next life for he has no hope of immortality that was lost through sin. On the other hand, the new man, when considered through the principles and objectives of the present life, lives for death and hopes in the life that will follow death, just as Christ Jesus died and rose again. The old man originated from the earth through the power of God but looks forward to the material end and reality by which he was tempted away from God. The new man originated from heaven and looks forward to the heavenly end and reality. These differences in principles and outlooks or goals of the two lives make them distinct and incomparable. The ignorance of these differences between our old man and the new man causes a lot of friction between the two in each of us who have come to be trained for the heavenly life. It is impossible to live a new life with the principles of the old life.

Because the old lacks the knowledge of God he is fearful of death and its operations. This fear arises from his lack of spiritual vision of God which is only obtained through and in Christ Jesus our Lord. Starting with the life of the old man, each of us is familiar with this fear which characterises our old nature. Job represents each of us in this regard. His ignorance of God heightened his pains and sorrows in the face of the storm that came upon his life. His righteousness which came from his faith in God aided him to discern the cause of his tempest to be God alone. But he could not understand the purpose for which God allowed his painful exercise or trial. He is hardly to be blamed for this, because such enlightenment comes only through our Lord Jesus Christ to those reborn in him. God’s address to Job was to enlighten him on the providence of God in all things. “Who pent up the sea behind closed doors when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb, when I wrapped it in a robe of mist and made black clouds its swaddling bands; When I marked the bounds it was not to cross and made it fast with a bolted gate?” Like Job, it is difficult to understand God’s almighty power in our old nature. Our fears remain because we still operate, more often than not, in our old nature.

We look to Jesus Christ in his humanity to see and understand what our new nature would be like when we make the clean switch from old to new nature. The gospel reading contains the disciples’ experience of our Lord’s calmness in the face of the storm. Even more than that, his authority over the storm. “Then it began to blow a gale and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But he was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep. They woke him and said to him, ‘Master, do you not care? We are going down!’” This fear is common to all of us who share in the old nature of Adam. Because the old nature is earthbound, it has experienced ups and downs, fast and slow, beginning and end, life and death. But the new man from heaven and heaven-bound has no experience of such variations and variabilities. It is spirit and has only the knowledge of the divine in all things; for there is no such variations in spiritual reality. Because the spiritual is constant, it controls the variabilities in material things. “And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Quiet now! Be calm!’ And the wind dropped, and all was calm again.”

By our new birth, we have come to share in the constancy of the divine reality that the disciples experience in the humanity of Jesus Christ and accepted his divinity. Because he shared in our human nature which is variable and looks forward to death, he died in our nature so that he may plant the seed of immortality in it. The seed is what has germinated in our new spiritual life. Hence, St. Paul advises us to change from the old man to the new man of heaven through death experience. “The love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died for all, then all men should be dead; and the reason he died for all was so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised to life for them.” Paul gives us a hint on how to overcome our fear of the storm originating from death. We are to see and understand the love which made him die for us; then consider ourselves dead in his death. Subsequently, we are to give him our present lives as a consolation for losing his life for us. When this giving is perfected in love of the Holy Spirit, it drives out fear in us, because we now experience his undying life present in us. “For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new is here.”

Let us pray: Grant, O Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name, for you never deprive of your guidance those you set firm on the foundation of your love.