Come and join for the Cluster Picnic on Sunday in Fifield!
Come and join for the Cluster Picnic on Sunday in Fifield!
The Cluster picnic is a great opportunity to gather as a cluster to celebrate our faith and to meet and greet and have some fun. If it is hot, and if you would like to cool down, a dunk tank will help you. You have just been seated on a dunk tank seat, some of our young people will help you go down. I am sure they will have fun. We will have good music, good food, and a good time. If you are here at St. Anthony or Immaculate Conception for Mass, still consider to come down around noon, and join us for the picnic. It is three blocks east of St. Francis Catholic Church on Balsam Street.
This weekend's reading reminds us that life can face some stormy moments, but God is with us, and with him everything is possible. God is the calming of the storm. The first reading is from the book of Job. The entire book addresses the problem of human suffering. We see Job deal with the agony of undeserved suffering. We can see so many similarities between Job and Christ. In the last chapter (42), Job’s fortunes are restored which prefigures the resurrection of Christ to make us a new creation and promise of eternal life. In this weekend's reading, God addresses Job and questions his right to challenge God, the Creator, and the Lord of the Sea. God speaks about the creation and confining of the sea. We read in the Book of Genesis 1:9, “Then God said: Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear. And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared.” The first reading emphasizes that only God can control the sea and storm. Basically God told Job that he doesn't know anything about how the universe operates, just trust in the Lord, and he will take care of things.
We have the Gospel from Mark and he wrote to the Romans. They were going through persecution and Mark writes all kinds of miracles and shows the power of Jesus. The Gospel from March 4:35-41, talks about Jesus calming a storm on the sea. Mark before this passage talks about the mustard seed, its maturity, and comparison to the Kingdom of God, which is mostly connected to the internal world, then Mark describes the power of Jesus, in the external world, over wind and storm. The disciples are seasoned fishermen; normally they know what to do in those moments of storm. They might have tried, but they couldn’t succeed, so they woke Jesus up and asked for help. Jesus woke up, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” When Jesus cured the demoniac (Mark 1:25) said, “Quiet! Come out of him!” The unclean spirit came out of the man with a loud cry. Jesus manifested his divinity by exercising authority over nature. Several Old Testament passages state that only God has the power to subdue the raging seas. We read in Psalm 89:9, “LORD, God of hosts, who is like you? Mighty LORD, your faithfulness surrounds you. You rule the raging sea; you still its swelling waves.”
The disciples were familiar with Old Testament passages and when they saw the wind obey Jesus’s order, they asked, “Who then is this whom even the wind and the sea obey?” When Jesus cured the demoniac, all were amazed and said, “What is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him. (Mark 1:27)”
While suffering, Job asked, “Why?” In the case of Job, he lost everything. In the second reading from the 2 Corinthians (8:7,9,13-15), Jesus set aside his riches out of love for us. He embraced poverty so that we might become rich. He offered on the Cross so that we might become a new creation.
In reality amid suffering, like Job, we all ask, “Why?” We all ask the question like disciples, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” So many writers try to explain suffering or try to find answers for suffering. Only God can give us the right answer and give us hope. The book of Exodus 3:7 describes the desire of God and his action to rescue his people from Egypt. The LORD said: “I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry against their taskmasters, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them up from that land into a good and spacious land… (Exodus 3:7&8)” Jesus calmed the storm and saved the disciples. But ultimately, he saved humanity through his crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus asked the disciples, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” Today, he repeated the same question. Jesus gave a short prayer to St. Faustina: “Jesus, I trust in you.” Let us trust in his love.