even the winds and the sea obey him

The Roman Catholic Lectionary for today presents texts which can cause us to reflect on our assumptions of the nature of God. The Book of Genesis relates both the mercy and the justice of the action of God against the cities of the Plain. We see that Lot is very reluctant to leave the life of city dweller behind. He has known “the good life” in Sodom. Perhaps he has been “living the dream”. The judgement of God is that he is not only a “just” man, of the type that Abraham prayed be saved but that he has an intimate relationship with the Divine from which he can request mercy and an alternate destiny from God. The tension between God who brings justice in fire and brimstone and God who cares for the intimate and human concerns of people is visible here. The psalmist proclaims his integrity and praises God for not sweeping him away with the sinners. This seems to be a proud position in which the Divine understanding of his righteousness may not exactly agree with his own. This, of course, is a problem of most people. The text offers us a reminder to rethink our position and what our choice would be on the Plains of Sodom. The Gospel of Matthew reveals that our human understanding alone will not sustain us when we are brought to those storms which shake our being. We are reminded that we have our relationship with the Divine through the resonance of our indwelling Spirit with the Spirit of God and that relationship is transcendent to the life where “even the winds and the sea obey him” (Matthew 8:27).