12th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
June 20, 2021

My brothers and sisters in Christ, ¹

So today we give special thanks to God that we can welcome everyone back to Church this weekend because the situation continues to improve in our communities. But let us keep praying for those who have lost loved ones, and those who are ill, and for the souls of the faithful departed.

It’s been obviously a challenging time for all of us, and it’s important that we continue to be careful in the way that we deal with each other and protect each other for the good of our families.

So as I said before, as we all know, today is Father’s Day. So Happy Father’s Day to all our fathers and grandfathers!

To be a father is a great vocation, a calling of service and love — a vocation that is essential in God’s plan for our world and for every child.

In a father’s love, his children see a reflection of the love that God our Father has for all of his children. And this is so important in our world today, to promote that bond between fathers and their children and to strengthen marriage and the family. 

As we all remember, this is also the year that our Holy Father Pope Francis has dedicated to St. Joseph. So we invoke him today and his intercession on behalf of all fathers.

St. Joseph was the man who was the closest to Jesus Christ on earth. And he loved Jesus with a “father’s heart.” So we ask St. Joseph to help all fathers to stay near to Jesus and to love their children and wives with all their heart.

But today I also want to remember our spiritual fathers, our priests! These months of lockdown have been hard on our priests, as they have been hard for all of us. We ask St. Joseph today to help to renew in all priests their devotion to Jesus Christ and their fatherly love for their people.

Let’s pray for them in a special way too.

In our Gospel today we see Jesus asking the disciples to cross to the other side of the lake. As we just heard:

On that day, as evening drew on
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Let us cross to the other side!”
Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat
Just as he was.

My dear brothers and sisters, this passage is a simple and beautiful reminder of how Jesus shared in our humanity. He was tired — he was probably tired every day from the labors of his ministry. Just as we know, we can be tired and worn out sometimes from all our work and our responsibilities.

Jesus was fully human. He shared in every aspect of our humanity. But he was also fully divine, he was God come in human flesh.

So in today’s passage of the Gospel, we see Jesus sleeping deeply in the boat with his disciples. It is interesting because it is the only place in the Gospels where we see Jesus sleeping. And as we heard, Our Lord is sleeping deeply. In fact, there is a big storm and Jesus is sleeping through it. So we can contemplate his humanity.

But then, in today’s passage it is also an important moment in the Gospels. Because it is a moment, an event of our Lord’s earthly life in which he reveals his divinity to his disciples, and of course, we all are his disciples, too. So, he is revealing his divinity to us, as well.  

Jesus is perfect God and perfect man.

So I think we can see how that journey of Jesus and the apostles in the boat is a symbol of the journey of life, a journey that each of us is making with other disciples in the Church. And in our Christian lives, we travel with Jesus. He goes with us, just as he went with the disciples in the boat.

But then, as we just heard in the passage of the Gospel, violence woke him up and waves were breaking over the boat so that it was already filling up.

Jesus was at the stern asleep on a cushion and the disciples were really scared. They cried in their desperation, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

So the apostles were really afraid. They were in the middle of a dangerous storm, and they feel they are going to die. And my brothers and sisters, there are times in our lives when trials and storms come and we feel threatened and overwhelmed — just as the disciples faced that violent storm and watched the waves breaking over the boat and fill it.

And sometimes, I think, we all experience — as the disciples did — this kind of feeling that Jesus is sleeping. And he’s not answering our prayers. Sometimes we can be tempted to think, as the disciples did, that he has stopped caring for us.

But then, we hear the beautiful response of Jesus today in the Gospel. He said: “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”

Beautiful.

Do we have faith? We do, as the apostles did.

So my brothers and sisters, this is a beautiful lesson for us. Never be afraid to tell Jesus how you are feeling, just as the apostles did.

He loves you. He knows your fears. He knows your needs. He knows when you feel vulnerable and weak. He’s always close to you — to each one of us. So we can call him in the difficult situations of our lives.

So today we ask for the grace to have the faith that Jesus wants us to have —for the grace to feel his love and care for us. And to have total trust in him. We are safe. We are secure. Just as the apostles were.

Our lives are in his hands.

When we believe this — when we are living in the truth, we are total free. We can be confident in abandoning our lives to his love, to his plan.

Let us never forget that Jesus goes with us. He shared our humanity and he continued to walk with us in our daily lives, even with the storms and trials of our lives. And his love for us is so strong! We should never doubt it.

So my dear brothers and sisters, today let us ask for that grace to always feel the presence of Jesus in our lives — have total trust that with him we can do whatever God wants us to do.

Let us pray for our fathers. May St. Joseph intercede for them and guide them to be a great witness to the love of God, who is our Father in heaven.

Let us ask our Blessed Mother Mary today to help us to grow in faith and to trust in God’s plan of salvation!

1. Readings: Job 38:1, 8-11; Ps. 107:23-31; 2 Cor. 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41.