The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
One of the most striking lines in today’s Gospel is our Lord’s gentle rebuke of Peter: “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Little faith? How could our Lord call Peter’s faith little? To my mind, Peter seems to have extraordinary faith: a faith (apparently unshared by any other disciple in the boat!) that Jesus could command him to walk on water. And the faith, in the midst of his fear, to instinctively cry out for Christ as he began to sink. If this kind of faith is what our Lord calls “little,” I have to wonder what Jesus would say about my faith: a faith that often forgets to trust Him in my need, and sometimes won’t even let me step out of the metaphorical boat.
Yet I think our Lord wants us to learn something even from Peter’s moment of “little faith,” as Peter shows us what it means to practice the virtue of magnanimity: the “spirit of striving for great things,” as Alexandre Havard defines it. The prophet Elijah, whom we encounter in the first reading, also displays this virtue, courageously challenging the prophets of Baal and trusting that God would overcome them. In both cases, striving for greatness led them into dire straits: Elijah becomes a fugitive for his life, and Peter faces near-drowning as the winds rage around him.
Such distressing circumstances might entice us to despair. Some might be tempted to grow angry with God—“I tried to do what You asked, and now look what happened!”—while others might be tempted to shame—“I am too weak to do what God asked; I can never serve Him well.” But Elijah and Peter, each in their own way, model for us how to respond in those situations when we have tried to act faithfully but seem to be failing. Elijah nearly despairs, but in the end listens for the Lord’s presence in the “tiny whispering sound.” He then lays out his case before the Lord with simplicity as he awaits God’s further command. Peter, for his part, is not ashamed to bare his weakness for all to hear as he cries: Lord, save me!
Peter and Elijah teach us that magnanimity is not about never failing. If we strive for greatness for the glory of God, we are almost certain to face failure. Yet avoiding failure is not the primary goal of the Christian life. Refusing to act out of fear of failure is not prudence; it is cowardice and pusillanimity. To paraphrase Father Gregory Pine as he put it in his book Prudence: “We must resist the temptation to settle for flawlessness over saintliness.” We are called to greatness, as Pope Benedict XVI told us—but that greatness “is made perfect in weakness.” And we know that, if God allows us to fail, it is because He wishes to “manifest His power above all” by saving us. After all, it is by saving Peter and stilling the storm that Christ revealed Himself as the Lord, as the Psalmist says, enabling those who witnessed the miracle to declare in homage: Truly, you are the Son of God.
Our challenge, then, is never to let fear of failure keep us from striving for greatness. To listen to God’s voice, even when what it is telling us to do is beyond our own strength. To get out of the boat, even though we know that eventually we will almost certainly start sinking. And, when our weakness does lead to apparent failure, to cry out to Him to save us, to let Him show us where to go next, and to trust that He can bring a “eucatastrophe” out of even the most dire circumstances.
Karen Celano lives with her husband and children in the Boston area, where she serves as Director of Curriculum at St. Benedict Classical Academy. As an educator, she strives to help her students seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful and so to fulfill their vocations as sons and daughters of God and disciples of Jesus Christ. She finds her strength from praying with the monks at St. Benedict Abbey in Still River, MA, and spending time in nature reading the book of God’s creation.
