Who’s asleep here?
In the Hebrew Bible we hear the psalm writers of Israel during extremely difficult times calling out: Awake! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Rise up! . . . Why do you hide your face; why do you forget our pain and misery? In today’s Gospel the same desperation overcomes the disciples during a raging storm at sea – so that they cry out to Jesus, asleep in the boat: Rabbi, doesn’t it matter to you that we are going to drown?
But who’s really asleep here? May we not turn this Gospel episode inside out? May it not be saying in a reverse way that it is we who are asleep, unaware and even unconcerned about the storms raging around us – and that it is the ever wide awake, risen Jesus who throughout the Gospel and throughout history has been constantly trying to wake us up?
Within the course of my lifetime there remain the memories of world wars, nuclear threats, economic depressions, one of which killed my father. There have been rapid changes in technology that make one’s skills obsolete before he can reach middle age. Yet judging by the society and entertainment news there persist ever more people who fiddle while Rome burns. There persists also a drug culture – which killed my son. Music is now more beat than melody, anger cascades into our living rooms almost every evening from run down inner cities. The potentially fascinating Middle East is best avoided if you can. Many look upon immigration as an unstaunchable leak that can cause one’s ship of state to list and even go belly up. We’re not talking literally of a storm brewing but of history amounting to a constant whirl that would make us seasick if we didn’t concoct ways of sleeping through it.
Of course not everyone is asleep. There are thinking people, poets, novelists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, journalists and may I proudly add our current Pope Francis, who raise their voices – alerting us to individual and collective behaviors that are killing not only our planet but people in ways ranging from banal to barbaric.
Over a century ago in James Joyce’s story Ulysses Stephen Dedalus, while sitting (figuratively speaking) upon a time bomb in Dublin, remarks in conversation with his quite contented school employer Mr. Deasy that history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Mr. Deasy corrects him, optimistically saying, All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. History, he means, is Progress. Meanwhile some schoolboys who are playing soccer on the field outside Deasy’s window cry out: Hooray! Ay! A whistle sounds: Whrrwhee! Stephen in response to Deasy’s optimism jerks his thumb toward the window and says: That is God. What? asks Mr. Deasy. A shout in the street, says Stephen. A wake up call right outside our window that we are habituated to slumber through rather than notice.
Today’s Gospel is about a storm but, at a deeper level down through the ages, it is not Jesus who is asleep but his own disciples, too benumbed by habit, by platitudes, by catechisms to be anything but ethically, spiritually and intellectually drowsy. Which is maybe why even the early church (as did Pope John XXIII in recent times) felt a need to introduce its members to one of our most simple, precious hymns: Awake, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.