Are We a Faulty Bow in the Hands of God?

 

We are used to thinking of today's gospel reading as a metaphor for the way that God guides and protects us through the various vicissitudes of this life. We see in the storm at sea a image of the various troubles that confront us in this world. The Lord Jesus comes to us in the all the struggles and troubles of our life and invites us, by His power, to confront the wind and the waves, to walk over them, with them under our feet. We are able to do this, but we must do it with complete faith, because without a complete trust in the Providence of God in our behalf we will sink and be overwhelmed by our cares, just as the Holy Apostle Peter was in danger of being overwhelmed in the passage we heard today.

This is certainly a greatly desired message for us to derive from the gospel reading, and yet we must consider that there is more that we must get from this passage, because, although the interpretation here described is perfectly proper and good, nevertheless we should fear that it is too consonant with our cultural laziness and lassitude. Our culture (to the extent that it believes in God) very strongly believes that God is always "there for us," to help us, console us, forgive us, bear us up from every misfortune and evil, etc., without ever asking the serious question, "are we there for God? Being that God is our Creator, He has claims upon us that no one else has. The culture around us does not want to consider the question whether God can rely on us.

Why should God have to rely on us? He doesn't have to. There is no way that the Almighty is reliant upon us in the strict sense, but, nevertheless, He seeks to "rely" on us for our good, not His own. Once again, we can rely upon the Lord's ancestor King David for a description of this very thing. In Psalm 77, after describing the way that God brought Israel out of Egypt and settled them in the Holy Land, he writes: "Still they challenged the Most High God and defied Him, refusing to keep His decrees; as perverse and treacherous as their ancestors, they gave way like a faulty bow." In archery, you have to be able to rely on your equipment, but the Israelites had become like a bow that the archer prepared to use (to aim at the enemy in battle? To aim at a beast needed for food?), he drew back the string, and the bow broke. Similarly, are we a faulty bow in the hands of God?

It is the gospel reading itself that gives to us this added and enriching interpretation. The is passage is not just about God's actions in our lives, strengthening, consoling, comforting us in the winds and the storms. It is also about our obligations to God. Saint Peter proved a faulty bow. When given every reason to believe in the power of Christ, he failed in faith and began to sink into the turmoil of the wind and the waves. In a similar way, more than a year later, he failed in faith again, sank into the turmoil of the plot to kill the Christ and denied his Master three times. 

Just as with Saint Peter, the path for us to becoming trustworthy and reliable in the eyes of God begins with a new resolution. Apparently, after Saint Peter's experience that led to him denying that he so much as knew Jesus, the Apostle decided that such a thing would never happen again. He made a firm resolution, assisted by grace. Many years later, when the Emperor Nero began persecuting the followers of Christ in Rome, the recollection of that resolution arrested the Apostle's desire to flee and preserve his life. Just the same, if there are ways that we have failed in the past, we need to make a firm resolution to do better next time. We can be sure that God will assist any such determination. This contemporary culture is very fond of the concept of God's unconditional love. Quite rightly Christians of all kinds praise God's unconditional love, but, at the same time, we must remember that, even though He loves unconditionally, He doesn't save us unconditionally. He saves us only with our cooperation, because His love respects our autonomy. Just as it is quite impossible for us to believe that the love of a parent or a spouse is sincere if that parent or spouse is controlling and manipulative, in the same way, God's love could not be sincere without a commensurate respect for our free will. He loves us so much He's willing to let us go if we so choose.

So, we need to start making resolutions aimed at positive change (the kind that God will assist with His grace). In addition, we need to start offering everything to Him and remaining with Him as the source of our strength. That's the way we truly make it through the winds and waves of this life.