June 20: 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

My boat is so small

Jb 38:1, 8-11; Ps 107:23-24, 25-26, 28-29, 30-31; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mk 4:35-41

“Thy sea, O God, so great. My boat so small.” These were words on a plaque that President John F. Kennedy kept on his Oval Office desk. They are the opening lines of a poem by Winfred Ernest Garrison, titled “A Breton Fisherman’s Prayer.”

The rest of its first stanza is also striking: “It cannot be that any happy fate; Will me befall; Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me; Through the consuming vastness of the sea.”

Garrison was a devout Christian and taught theology for a time at the University of Chicago. There is no doubt, as the readings for this Sunday testify, that what inspired his poem are the Bible’s own reflections on the vastness of the sea. 

For most of their history, the Israelites did not live along the Mediterranean seacoast. As one commentator wryly noted, the only famous sailor in the Bible is Jonah and his experience at sea was not reassuring. In parts of the Old Testament, the vast and threatening sea was considered the abode of demons and the home of alien storm gods.

Two intertwined motifs about the sea weave their way through the Scriptures. The first is that the vastness and awesome power of the sea is testimony to the unfathomable power and beauty of God’s creative work. 

In the Book of Job, God is presented as making this very point. In poetic images he challenges Job to realize that God’s power extends throughout the universe: “Who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb; when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling bands? When I set limits for it and fastened the bar of its door, and said: Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stilled.”  

What we know — and what the author of Job could only surmise — is that the oceans cover more than 70% of the earth. Only God, Job is told, can set the limits of the sea.

The Gospel reading from Mark gives us another glimpse of divine power and the sea. The Sea of Galilee is an inland body of fresh water only 12 miles long and 6 miles wide, but it is still subject to rapidly developing and dangerous storms. 

Virtually every time Jesus and his disciples cross this sea, they encounter threatening storms. Mark portrays an exhausted Jesus asleep in the stern of the boat while his disciples fear for their lives.

When they awaken him and complain, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Jesus responds with an awesome display of divine power. As if the raging sea was a demon, he commands it to “be quiet!”

The dumbfounded disciples unwittingly express the same note of awe found in Job, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

Mark’s story evokes another biblical motif about the sea and its storms, a note also sounded in Garrison’s poem. Jesus exercises his power over the sea in order to rescue his disciples from death — a glimpse of his entire mission.

This conviction that God’s love ultimately rescues us from the very power of death is beautifully expressed in the responsorial Psalm 107 found in today’s liturgy. The verses describe, in effect, a turbulent sea voyage, in “deep waters,” and in the “abyss” of the ocean.

A “storm wind … tosses its waves on high … mounting up to the heavens” and then “sinking to the depths.” No wonder those in the boat, “cried out to the Lord in their distress.”

As with Jesus in Mark’s account, the psalmist notes that the Lord rescues those engulfed by the storm, “for his love is everlasting,” which is the beautiful refrain for this vivid psalm.

As in today’s readings that focus on the awesome and threatening power of the ocean, the Scriptures are filled with imagery that attempts to name our experience both of the turbulent world in which we live and our trust that God will not abandon us. We sometimes feel we are “at sea” and maybe “seasick.” But though our “boat” may be small, God is with us.