Stormy Weather: Fear and Trembling on Land and Sea

Don't know why
There's no sun up in the sky
Stormy Weather



Rossini's William Tell, Beethoven's 6th Symphony, The Pastorale, Strauss' Alpine Symphony, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Arabian Nights, all contain storms to beat the band. As a metaphor, the storm is as old as the species homo sapiens sapiens itself. Storms are everywhere throughout time.

This Sunday, the lectionary presents Mark's version of a storm at sea.

A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” [Mark 4:37-8, NIV]


Fr. Barron has composed a comforting homily on the biblical passages for this Sunday. He presents as poetic a reading of the pericope as one is likely to find. I think he errs, though, when he presents the Church's sexual abuse scandal as a storm that challenges the pilgrim's course of the barque of Peter.

Though he has it right that the scandal is a great storm, a faith shaking moment in the life of the Church, he runs a great risk of offending the sensibilities of the victims when he externalizes the moment. As I have commented on the Word on Fire website, this storm is not something violent from without being visited upon the Church, but it is rather something violent from within the Church being visited upon the world.

The 'furious squall' results from the disease of pedophilia being visited upon the most vulnerable members of the Church, and from the cover-up of those criminal visitations by the power players, the leaders of the Church, whose short-sighted goal was to protect the integrity of the Church. These are the boat-rockers threatening the barque with drowning. The waves generated by the barque against the sea send repercussions to invade the shores and harbors within the Church's reach.

To the extent that the moral evil in the scandal in not intrinsic to the Church as the Mystical Body, Fr. Barron might still be grounded in a reality worth noting. The pericope, though, is about other business. The sleeping Jesus is one locked away from viewing the idle hands of the princes of the Church. It is a Jesus momentarily bound, closeted, in a futile effort to contain such a saturated phenomenon. When he awakes, he arises as the indefectability of the Church, as the renewing Holy Spirit that quells the storm.

The scandal is a powerful lens through which to read this Markan pericope, but it opens on a logic that inverts the loci of the storm metaphor. Taken as an element of a thorough allegoresis, the storm locates its source from an indefectable but corruptible boat whose rockers will either receive the Spirit or drown. The disciples, whose progeny sit at the table of the greatest challenge to our Church, could hardly have known how their ecclesial descendents would put Jesus to sleep while they convulse the sea of faith. They feared drowning, but could not imagine that their counterparts of today would hold children's heads under water.

Authenticity and Authority

They arrived again in Jerusalem, and while Jesus was walking in the temple courts, the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders came to him.“By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you authority to do this?”

Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin? Tell me!”

They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin’ …” (They feared the people, for everyone held that John really was a prophet.)

So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.”

Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”

[Mark 11:11-32, NIV]

Following Mark's fig sandwich (temple-cleansing between 2 slices of ficus), the evangelist reports this discussion of authority. While the pericope calls into question the prevarication of the elders, we ought not slide past Jesus' interrogation of the authentication of authority. The elders' question is twofold: they want to know what authority, and who is doing the authorizing. Jesus restricts any response he might have to the what, as he poses his twofold query: was John's baptism authentic (of heaven), or not (of human origin).

This is a fascinating rhetorical moment. Jesus masterfully turns the tables on the elders, hinging his own response on theirs. The elders do not reproach him for his impudence, but instead cower under political correctness. We are privy to their dilemma: they cannot say authentic, lest they condemn themselves by admitting to disparaging the power of heaven; then cannot say inauthentic, because the people are convinced of the authenticity of John's baptism. They reach the decision to feign ignorance: ignoramus et ignoramibus. Jesus, sensing their insincerity (or their subterfuge), declines to respond to their challenge. We do not know with what mood the elders leave the scene. Some of them will be more assertive at Jesus' trial.


Jesus' transgressive rhetoric not only reduces the elders to weak argument, but queries their authority to ask their questions in the first place. The immediate antecedent to their questions is, of course, the cleansing of the temple (did they hear of the withered ficus?), but all of Jesus' activity to this point is in play. Perhaps some of them witnessed his authority in action as recorded in the previous chapters. Perhaps they are still licking their wounds after Jesus rebukes them for embracing human tradition over the command of God (Mk. 7:8-9 ff.). Jesus still awaits their response to his questions about their authority, about the authenticity of their traditions vis a vis the authenticity of the divine commandments. Do their challenges to his authority and authenticity arise from their human traditions or from heaven?

The questions about John's baptism are surrogates for Jesus' own authority: and here is Jesus' effectiveness in this pericope--he provocatively asks the elders to answer their own questions; they seem to know the answers. The authority of Jesus has the same authority and author as John's baptism: the divine, of heaven, of God.

Violence stirs in their hearts.