Dear sisters and brothers:
Today, the Church honors and celebrates particularly the great 13th century Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, bullied by his contemporaries for his brilliance and for his weight, but whose profound and clear thought about the nature of God and that of all of reality has been the starting point for reflection and teaching from his time even up to today. It was Thomas who developed the five proofs for the existence of God, using ordinary, self-evident experience; and, whether one agrees with them or not, his arguments cannot be readily dismissed as outdated or unworkable.
So it’s a kind of irony that, in the face of such rare clarity about matters of doctrine, we should have two readings, the first from the Letter to the Hebrews, and the second from the gospel of Mark, which call us to consider, not the quality of our certainty, but the scope and the power of our doubt.
Looking at the first reading, it took an enormous amount of trust for Abraham to leave everything he knew and to set out, per the Lord’s instruction, for a land yet to be identified. He was given no assurances, except the promise that God would be faithful. So often, life’s dilemma resolves to whether we will only allow ourselves to commit to the slam dunk, the sure thing, the expected outcome, or whether we will allow ourselves to take a leap of imagination, a leap of faith, of trusting the unknown, of, finally, wrestling with doubt and, ultimately, deciding in faith.
And in today’s gospel, as the disciples find themselves on a stormy sea, trying to get from the safety of one port to what’s on the other side, they scream out their terror to Jesus whom they accuse of not caring about the peril they feel; and the disciples have to be reassured that there is a Master of the wind and of the wave, whose power to deliver leaves them asking the most important question of faith: “Who is this man that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Although you and I are most comfortable in life when there is certainty, certainty is, to my mind, particularly in our day, THE great sin. Being sure makes unity so much more difficult, being sure makes tolerance of others nearly impossible. Being sure makes faith superfluous. The need to be sure allows us to develop a “basket of deplorables” into which we can assign those with whom we disagree, those who are different. Being sure, certainty, encourages us to find our safety only in the numbers of those whose thoughts and values mirror and echo our own, and relegate all others to cartoonish stereotype and insignificance.
Abraham trusted that God would be faithful to the promise He made to bring him to a new homeland. Jesus rebuked his disciples for their panic and despair, and left them intrigued by the question which is the only important question of a real and living faith: “Who is this man?”
We are called, primarily, not to certainty but to faith, not to comfortable assurance but to hope, and we are called above all, to love, love for everyone without exception, for everyone without exception. And you will recall that, for St. Ignatius, love “is shown more in deeds than it is in words.”
Until you and I relearn this, until you and I live this, both our Church and our culture will continue to wander in circles, fractured rather than unified, angry and intolerant, rather than loving and hopeful” and, through it all, ultimately, we will continue to watch ourselves self-destruct. God is faithful and God is powerful, and God will not leave us orphans. In fact, God is the only one we can truly trust to calm the storms of life and to lead us to our true home.