Scripture Study for
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Job 38:1, 8–11 / Psalm 107:1b / 2 Corinthians 5:14–17 / Mark 4:35–41
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Understanding the Word
By Br. John R. Barker, OFM
God’s creative power is often expressed in the Bible through the metaphor of God controlling chaotic waters. In Genesis 1, God controls by speaking, while in other places, God must defeat the waters, personified as hostile “sea monsters,” in battle (Psalms 74:12–17; 89:10–12). Here God refers to this creative power in response to the demand that he give an account of himself for Job’s suffering. This response includes the assertion that Job is not capable of comprehending the complexity of the world and how it works, because Job did not have a hand in it. It was God, not humans, who “shut within the doors the sea” and “set limits for it,” stilling its “proud waves.” Only God, in other words, is capable of controlling the chaotic waters.
Paul has just been speaking of the need for perseverance. It is precisely what we do with this life that will determine the nature of our encounter with Christ the Judge. But what really impels Paul is the love of Christ. This is true in both senses: the love shown by Christ in dying for all so that we can become a new creation, and our love for Christ in return, which should lead us to embrace the gift of this new creation. Christians no longer live for themselves, but for the one who transformed them. The gift, in other words, can only be received by loving the giver back and living into the larger purpose for which the gift was given in the first place.
The account of the stormy waters of the Sea of Galilee draws clearly on Ordinary Time images of dangerous, threatening waters that represent personal or social chaos (note, for example, that a psalmist regularly cries out to be saved from drowning or from sinking into the deep, an expression of personal distress and danger). In the Old Testament, it is God alone who saves by controlling chaotic waters, and yet the same is true of Jesus here. The fact that Jesus was asleep during the storm reflects his own faith that the chaos will not prevail, and his questions to his disciples are intended to provoke the same faith in Jesus’ saving power.