LESSON: God's Agenda

My dear brothers and sisters, may you have a question why did Jesus, who is God, and therefore all-powerful, allow himself to fall asleep just when things were getting really tough, really scary, for his followers? This is a question we all have to face sooner or later.

Maybe we won't be on a boat during a storm that threatens to sink us, but each one of us will run up against some kind of storm before we die. In fact, in this fallen world, it is safe to say that the storm is the norm. All of us have our own storm.

It may be the long and painful sickness of a loved one, the death of beloved child, damage caused by a family member's addictions and infidelities, the ravages of war, a debilitating natural disaster, financial ruin, or maybe just intense, heart-sickening loneliness.

Why does an all-powerful God go to sleep in our boats and let these storms rage against us? The Catechism tells us clearly that we will not understand God's ways fully until we meet him face to face on the other side of death. Here I quote the text from the Catechism no 324: "The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit evil if he did not cause good to come from that very evil, in ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life." But we can understand God's ways partially, if we understand God's agenda for our lives. God's agenda for our brief journey through the earth isn't perfect comfort and unbroken pleasure. Rather, he wants us to achieve the wisdom, courage, joy, and inner balance of spiritual maturity. In other words, he wants us to get in shape for heaven.

And that involves learning to trust in him more than in ourselves, learning that we are not all-powerful. That's hard to learn, because it goes directly against the spiritual DNA we have all inherited from original sin. And so, sometimes, God goes to sleep in our boats and lets the storm rage, so that we will come to know and accept the reality of our limitations and the truth of our dependence on him.

Job Gets Schooled

Let us see the classic Old Testament example of someone having trouble accepting God's agenda. The story of Job. In the First Reading, we get an example of God's efforts to teach Job this invaluable lesson in wisdom. Job has been complaining about all the bad things that have been happening to him. And God answers by reminding him that the Lord is master even of those bad things, that he controls and limits them according to his omnipotent wisdom. The ocean, in the Old Testament, because of its mystery, power, and unpredictability, was often used as a symbol of evil and chaos. But God tells Job that he has "set limits for it, and fastened the bar of its door." God doesn't explain to Job all the reasons behind everything he does and permits.

He can't! How can we who are finite, limited creatures demand to understand all of the Creator's infinite wisdom with perfect clarity? And so instead of an exhaustive explanation, God simply reminds Job that he is all-powerful and that he will never abandon his children.

The Psalm takes up the same theme.

It poetically explains how God "calmed the storm to a gentle breeze" and brought the terrified sailors "to their desired haven", even when from a merely human perspective, everything seemed lost. And then the sailors "gave thanks to the Lord for his kindness and wonderful deeds." In other words, through the experience of their helplessness in the face of suffering they discovered more fully God's greatness and goodness. It was a necessary step towards their spiritual maturity. Of course, the greatest example of this is in Christ's own death and resurrection. God didn't will the sins that caused our Lord's immense, painful, and humiliating sufferings. But God's love was powerful enough to turn those hideous wounds into the doorway to heaven, and he can do the same for us - that's his agenda.

Prayer: Antidote to Modern Seductions

My dear brothers and sisters, let us learn how to accept our limitations and dependence on God. It's hard, especially in today's world, which is so technologically advanced that it tends to put an almost religious-quality faith in human potential. There are still some problems that we haven't yet solved, but this myth of scientific progress tries to convince us that it's only a matter of time until we solve them. Not so, not so: we cannot make heaven on earth; we cannot save ourselves. Remember the story of Job. Also, remember why Jesus came to be our Savior. Because we can't save ourselves. This deep religious faith in science is seductive for two reasons. First, because it's so popular in today's culture. It's built into advertising campaigns, movie screenplays, and television scripts. It's even the motivation behind activist groups that promote things like abortion and homosexual marriage.

They try to solve unwanted pregnancies and unwanted sexual orientations not by seeking God's help to follow God's design for human happiness, but by trying to redefine or re-engineer what it means to be a human being. Second, this faith in scientific progress is seductive because it flatters us, it tells what the devil told Adam and Eve: "You shall be like gods." But of course that's just as much a lie today as it was at the beginning of history. And so God continues to give us opportunities - storms - to learn to trust in him, to surrender to him our self-deification illusions. How can we take maximum advantage of these opportunities? The very best way is to learn to pray better. It was by going to Jesus, asleep in the back of the boat, that the Apostles discovered his greatness and survived the storm.

Prayer is how we go to Jesus.

Prayer is the school where we learn the beauty and wisdom behind God's agenda. Prayer is the gymnasium where we exercise and strengthen the faith that allows Jesus, the Prince of Peace, to become the Lord of lives not just in theory, but in practice.

Today, as Jesus renews his commitment to us in this Mass. let's ask him to be our strength amidst the storms of life, and let's promise that this week, we will renew our commitment to becoming experts in prayer.