Down through the trapdoor, God’s kingdom is a place where grace is an antidote to violence and retribution. It’s a realm where tenderness and kindness are signs of strength and resistance because once we go down we understand that the love and generosity we show is a revelation of who we are and how we choose to live.
Jesus loved and sought out people on the margins. Foreigners and sinners. The unclean and the poor. Women and heretics and more. He sought them out because he wanted them to see they were beloved and blessed by God.
We often make the deep water a metaphor for going out on mission work to distant places or places we have never been. Peter and the disciples would later venture into places across Europe and Asia they never could have imagined. But I wonder if deep water could also be a metaphor for the uttermost places within our hearts, our minds, our souls.
Whether we noticed or not, Jesus was present to us today. And he will be tomorrow. Whether in the face of a neighbor who needs our compassion and our care, or whether in the Divine Love that asks us, in some moments, to set aside our striving and our doing and simply rest in its healing embrace.