The Ghost in the Storm

A reflection on Matthew 14:22–33

It is a night of uncertainty. The Gospel tells us so in the very setting of the scene: a boat far from land, a contrary wind, darkness stretching on with no sign of morning. The disciples know this night well and so do we. Jesus comes to them walking on the water in the fourth watch, between three and six in the morning, at the hour when the body is most exhausted and hope is thinnest. And where there is uncertainty, there is fear.

Fear, when it takes hold of a community, presents us with temptations. The Gospel of the storm names at least two of them, and both are alive in the West world today.

The bunker temptation

The first temptation is to abandon the ship, to leave the community and go it alone. Every man for himself.

We see it, surprisingly, in Peter. He leaps from the boat, and we often praise him for it. But notice what he says: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you.” Not us — me. He leaves the others behind. And faith turned solitary begins to sink, for the water bears no one who walks alone. Where does Jesus lead him once he has caught him by the hand? Back into the boat, among the brothers. Only then does the wind cease. Salvation, in the Gospel, is never a private rescue.

Call it the bunker temptation: safety sought in withdrawal from others. There is a great preaching sweeping across the West today, expressed in slogans that vary only in their flag: Us first. America First. Australia First. England First. It promises what the bunker always promises: that if we pull up the ladder, seal the doors, and look after our own, the storm will pass us by.

But the Christian cannot say it, because the Gospel will not let us shrink our belonging. Our primary citizenship is not the nation but the human race; our primary vessel is not the state but the one boat in which the whole human family is crossing the same dark water. The nation is a legitimate love, but an idolatrous one the moment it demands we throw others overboard to lighten the load. The boat is not a bunker. It is a communion.

The manufactured ghost

The second temptation is subtler and older. The disciples see Jesus coming toward them and cry out, “It is a ghost!” Terror turns even their Saviour into a phantom. This is what fear does: it distorts the vision, so that grace itself looks like a threat.

When fear governs the eye, every unfamiliar face becomes a spectre. The migrant, the neighbour who prays differently, the one who approaches across our waters: fear renames them all: invader, threat, ghost. And how often it is Christ himself who comes toward us in the stranger, and we scream.

Worse still: there are leaders — in politics, in religion, in the economy — who have learned that fear is profitable. Manufacture a ghost, and people will surrender almost anything to be protected from it: their freedom, their compassion, eventually their grip on truth itself. The mechanism is always the same. Draw a line: we are the good ones, all the others out. Point at the ghost. Promise that its expulsion will calm the sea.

It is not the first time. History keeps the receipts. The Christians were blamed for the fires of Rome; the Jews for the plagues of Europe; the migrant, today, for every modern anxiety. Each generation is offered a scapegoat and told: sacrifice them, and the storm will cease.

It never does. The storm did not cease when Rome burned its Christians, nor when Europe burned its Jews, and it will not cease now.

The Lord has never blessed, and will never bless, those who abandon the ship to which we all belong: the poor children of God, crossing the one dark sea, waiting together for the fourth watch to end and the morning to come.

-Fr Mirko Integlia