What Happens After Prayer?
Matthew 14:22-33| 19th Ordinary Sunday| Year A
There are moments in life when being alone with God feels like the best place to be. Away from noise, demands and expectations, the heart becomes quiet. Jesus seems to have known such moments. After dismissing the crowd and the disciples, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. He remained there while his friends were far away on the sea.
Perhaps that mountain was a place of deep communion with the Father. Yet Jesus did not remain there. When the disciples found themselves struggling against the wind, he came down towards them. There is something beautiful in this movement. What Jesus received in the presence of the Father did not remain with him on the mountain. He carried it into the storm.
The disciples were afraid. Peter doubted. They did not fully understand who Jesus was. Yet Jesus did not wait for their faith to become perfect before coming to them. When Peter began to sink and cried, “Lord, save me,” Jesus immediately stretched out his hand and caught him.
Perhaps this is how the mercy of God becomes visible. It is not simply something received in prayer and kept within the heart. It becomes something lived and given to another. Jesus brings the Father’s mercy down from the mountain and reveals it in the middle of the sea.
Peter’s weakness becomes the place where he experiences that mercy. His fear does not disqualify him from being loved. His doubt does not make Jesus withdraw his hand. The disciples themselves are still learning, still struggling to understand, and yet they are allowed to encounter the God whom Jesus knows.
An experience of God cannot remain our private possession. The love received is somehow incomplete until it becomes love given. The mercy received becomes complete when it finds another person. The God encountered in solitude becomes visible in the way we treat those who are frightened, doubtful, difficult or sinking.
Perhaps genuine prayer always has a movement towards another. The mountain is not an escape from the sea. It is where the heart receives what it will need when it goes back into the sea.
And perhaps the quiet question this Gospel leaves with us is this: when we come down from our own mountains of prayer, what does the person beside us receive from the God we have encountered?