There is a story told that once a visitor came to St Teresa of Avila and asked, “How should I picture God when I pray?  What about him is most real?”  And her answer was simply enough, “Picture him looking at you.”

We don’t know if the visitor was satisfied with that answer, but he should have been.  Christ is indeed looking at us, at each one of us.  His knowledge of each of us is personal, his concern for each of us is personal, and his call to each of us is personal.  He can be found, recognised, and responded to.

The Gospel reading for this weekend is an eloquent treatment of just that notion.  In so many places in Scripture the sea, a stormy, unruly sea, is used as a symbol of the world, life, without God.  The apostles have been separated from Christ, they are alone in their boat, and the sea, the world without Christ, is stormy and chaotic indeed.  So much so that they are about to be overcome by it.  Then Christ is pictured as mastering the storm.  He literally walks over it.

Peter saw Christ looking at him through the storm, and became confident that together with Christ, he, too, would be able to overcome the chaos that seemed to surround him.  Peter said, “Lord, tell me to come to you.”  And so, he did, he held out his hand to Peter.

And here Matthew describes beautifully something at least of what St Paul would later call the contradiction, the foolishness of Christianity.  Before you can walk on water, you got to get out of the boat.  Before Peter could benefit from Christ’s power, he would have to step out of whatever had been holding him up until then, he would have to risk walking away from what seemed to be so safe and secure and reasonable. 

And for us, too, that is the hard part.  Getting out of the boat.  Putting aside the false dependencies, the securities, all the ways we think we can make ourselves immune from chaos.  Materialism is a popular boat.  What could be a better barrier against the chaos than money and the things and the power it can buy.  Any number of dependencies can float us along for a while.  Drugs, alcohol, pleasure, acceptance.  Even the human relationships in our lives can be a dependency, an influence that keeps us from hearing Christ’s call.  So can laziness, the habits we build of not responding, not involving ourselves.  So can fear, perhaps even more commonly.

St Matthew’s intricate symbolism this weekend is clear and eloquent.  Christ is very near.  He is standing at the edge of our own personal storm, calling us.  But in order to respond we must ignore the storm, look down at the boat, name it, and climb out.