Matthew tells us Jesus comes walking across the water during "the fourth watch of the night." The Romans divided the night into four three-hour shifts for soldiers on guard duty, and the fourth watch ran from roughly three to six in the morning, which any person will tell you is the worst possible hour to be awake.
Because It's not dramatic midnight. It's not the hopeful dawn. It's the hour where your phone is off, your coffee is hours away, and your brain decides to replay every humiliating thing you've ever said and done since the third grade. At three in the morning, even a harmless coat hanging on a chair can look as though it has bad intentions.
The Silence We Hold Under Duress
The disciples had been rowing since evening. That’s been probably at least six, seven hours of getting nowhere in the dark before Jesus finally shows up. He was late by our math. God's timing has a well-documented habit of arriving right around the fourth watch of our own lives, after we have prayed, waited, worried, developed three backup plans, and begun offering God practical suggestions in case if he is short of ideas, and after we have stopped expecting him,
There's a strangely similar rhythm in the story of the thirty-three Chilean miners trapped nearly half a mile underground in the San José mine in August 2010. For seventeen days, nobody on the surface even knew if they were alive. When rescuers finally drilled through and got a rope down to them, one of the miners taped a note to it that read, simply, "We are well in the refuge, the 33." They would survive sixty-nine days total before the last one came up.
Seventeen days of total silence before anyone even knew rescue was possible. That's a fourth watch you don't wish on anyone. And yet the miners organized themselves, rationed two days of food into forty-eight, and kept faith that someone was still coming for them in the dark. That's not a flashy miracle. That's just what waiting through the worst hour, the fourth watch, actually looks like.
Now skip ahead to the end of the passage, because it's almost comically undramatic after Peter's whole water-walking adventure. Jesus lands at Gennesaret, word spreads, it's a crowd shoving sick relatives forward just to touch the tassel of his cloak. Those tassels weren't holy in themselves. They were just cloth, hanging off the edge of an ordinary robe. And people got healed grabbing at the edge of it, not the center, just the hem, in a crowd, elbow to elbow with strangers doing the exact same thing.
An Ordinary Faith Rooted in Trust
I find that oddly comforting. Most of us are never going to walk on water. I have difficulty walking confidently across an icy parking lot. Most of us are just going to be one more person in a crowd at 3 a.m., tired, reaching for whatever we can get a hand on. Turns out that's enough to touch.
So maybe that's the real invitation buried in this passage not is "walk on water," but something quieter and more within reach. Somewhere between the fourth watch and the hem of that robe is an ordinary kind of faith: the kind that doesn't need center stage, doesn't need to be the miner who tells the story on television, doesn't need four glorious seconds on the water. Just a hand reaching for the edge of something holy in the middle of a crowd, at an hour when you'd rather be asleep.
So here's the question worth taking home today, what's the "edge of the cloak" in your own life right now? Because the crowd at Gennesaret didn't need a dramatic testimony. They just needed to stretch out a hand in the dark and touch something true. This week, don't wait for the fourth watch to end on its own. Reach out with your hands.
- Today’s Readings
- Father Boby's inspirational homily was recorded live during Mass at the Father Peyton Center this morning. You can view the Mass (and the Rosary at the 30-minute mark) on the Family Rosary YouTube page.
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