Overwhelming Love

Twelfth Sunday of the Year. Fr Albert Robertson invites us to give Christ control over our lives.

Our Old Testament reading and our Gospel today each pose, in their own way, the same question: who is in control? In the midst of his sufferings Job curses the day of his birth, having found no meaning to his sufferings, and no cause for them in any unrighteousness on his part. But in Chapter 38 he is put in his place by the Lord who finally gives answer from the heart of the whirlwind. The Lord’s answer to Job comes in no uncertain terms: He, the Lord, is in control. Job must understand his own place within the created order, for he is a creature, not God. He was not present when the Lord created the world, he did not see the sea constrained in its place, the dry land made. It is the Lord who controls all of these things, and not us.

It is in this context that we can understand the Lord’s actions in the boat as a proof of his divinity, for only the Lord could constrain the natural powers by a mere rebuke. From this powerful action comes their wondered confession: Who can this be? Even the wind and sea obey him. But we notice that their confession is not yet perfect for as well as rebuking the wind and the waves, the Lord offers something of a rebuke to his disciples: Why are you frightened? How is it that you have no faith? The disciples must still, by slow steps, come to know not only that it is the Lord who is in control, but that the Lord stands before them. It is only by calming the stormy seas of death in his Paschal Mystery that the disciples will come to know the Jesus truly is the Lord. Indeed, in St Mark’s account of the Resurrection, Jesus must even rebuke or upbraid them for their unbelief and hardness of heart before he commissions them to go out to the whole world and preach the Gospel (Mark 16:15-16). Job and the disciples both offer us examples of how we must come to know our true place, who is truly in control.

But such control is not that of slavery, for as the Lord tells us, his disciples, No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends (John 15:15). St Paul offer us a clearer sense of what this control looks like in our daily lives. He tells the Corinthians that it is the love of Christ which compels him. But the Jerusalem Bible translates this phrase as The love of Christ overwhelms us…, perhaps a slightly different meaning but one which helps us to see the baptismal connotations of what Paul is talking about. To be overwhelmed is to be overpowered, but in a more literal sense, to be engulfed. The word is redolent of being rolled over by a huge wave. The disciples, afraid of being overwhelmed by the storm, are in the end overwhelmed by love, as each of us is when we are engulfed in the waters of baptism. It is the love of Christ which will drown sin in us, so that we can live for Him. The waves of baptism turn us over so as to live life in a new direction. We are a new creation, …the old has passed away, behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17).

But the verb which the Jerusalem Bible translates as overwhelm has, more strictly, connotations of control, direction, or constraint which brings us back to that original question: who is in control? During the Easter Octave, our Dominican communities in this Province sing the hymn Aurora lucis rutilat at Morning Prayer which has the lines: O gentle Christ, our King most kind, / Possess the heart, control the mind. Perhaps a slightly unfortunate phrase if taken over literally, to be possessed and controlled by the Lord means being taken into his way of life, to live only for Christ, and to live for him means allowing oneself to be drawn into his being for others (Spe Salvi, §28). Being controlled by the Lord, becoming truly his, is to live for the Lord, and to allow the pattern of the Lord’s life to become our own. It is the path of life of the new creation and of perfect freedom.

Readings: Job 38:1,8-11 | 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 | Mark 4:35-41

Image: The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind by William Blake