Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Why did you doubt?

It was Peter who answered. ‘Lord,’ he said ‘if it is you, tell me to come to you across the water.’ ‘Come’ said Jesus. Then Peter got out of the boat and started walking towards Jesus across the water, but as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink. ‘Lord! Save me!’ he cried. Jesus put out his hand at once and held him. ‘Man of little faith,’ he said ‘why did you doubt?’ And as they got into the boat the wind dropped. The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.’

Matthew 14: 28 – 33

I don’t possess the bluster that others do. If it is a difficult conversation that needs to be had, I’m not sure who it is more difficult for – me or the conversee. However well I prepare, as soon as the force of the moment, the encounter approaches, I do, in all honesty, begin to sink. I do have other strengths that will pull me through. I’m not sure I presume faith greater than that Peter’s, but I have been long convinced that the Lord’s hand will indeed save me.

Commentators view the heavy seas that struck Lake Galilee and the great head wind that faced the disciples’ boat as the chaos and turmoil of the early church - after the destruction of Jerusalem c 70 AD. The transition from a Jewish messianic movement to an independent religion was anything but easy. Peter’s tentativeness in stepping out of the boat (the church), his doubt, his panic and flailing in the Galilean water and his salvation by Jesus’ intervention is the experience of that early community as it struggled to find its place outside Judaism, but without entirely resolving the tensions between their adherence to the Mosaic law and the increasing demands of the Gentile converts. The key was the same then and the same now. It is indeed faith.

Since the Romanisation of the Church, the tension between law and culture has never been satisfactory. The Jesuit missionary efforts to Christianise the east met with rebuff after rebuff, and various liturgical innovations are often seen as aberrations (smoking ceremonies in Australia, kava ceremonies on the Pacific islands, the Maori Powhiri) despite the apparent generosity of Sacrosanctum concilium from Vatican II and Varietates legitimae (the 4^th instruction on inculturation and the Roman liturgy).

There is no doubt that the turmoil experienced by the Matthaen community is fresh and naked today: the various commissions and inquiries into sexual abuse in the church, the empty pews, the paucity of vocations, the tendency to the right, the rise and rise of Islam.

If we choose to meet the turmoil head on, we need to do so with faith. Yes, we might end up flailing about in our own doubts, but at its real centre, is trusting – and knowing – that Jesus will reach out his hand to us. And we will be saved.

Peter