Fear and lack of faith sank Peter. It sank many men and women after Peter. Anthropologists hold that the human race emerged ultimately from the sea. Water, as you well know, is central to Christian imagery. Water is a means of salvation and regeneration. It is also an instrument of testing. Jesus used water on several occasions to test people, to probe their depth of faith. The most famous I suppose is today's extract form Matthew's gospel. It is a neat image. It speaks to our own experience. We all know that if we relax in water we float safely along the surface. If we tighten up with fear and panic, we sink like a stone. That experience is replicated in all areas of life. Fear is a smothering thing. It paralyses people; it transforms them into negative pains in the neck. They plod through life sharing their misery very generously indeed. We should not confuse fearful people with timid people. Because fearful people can summon up great strength for their negative battles. They trust no one; they have no faith in life or their fellow human beings. They will try to control everything, to prevent their own fear-filled patches being invaded.

The first greeting of Jesus after his resurrection was: "Fear not; it is I." He had already used that same greeting in his encounter with Peter on the water. The real enemy of his mission and message would be fear, not sin. Fear is the enemy of faith. A young lady said to me recently, "Most suffering in our world is caused by small, fearful men." She knew what she was talking about, I think. Furtive affairs are conducted because fellows haven't the courage to tell their wives or their partners that they have fallen in love with someone else. Of course it can operate the other way too. Fear and a lack of generosity is at the root of most evil and suffering. Beckett has a striking judgement to make: "It was in the lost childhood of Judas that the Son of Man was betrayed." It was lack of faith that led to Peter's sinking. In the Catholic tradition we have understood faith in a very restricted way. We traditionally identified faith as giving mental assent to a prescribed set of dogmas. But faith is a much broader thing than that, and much more demanding and challenging too. It means trusting Jesus as you would a close friend. It is a willingness to trust in the vision of Jesus, to view life in the positive way in which he viewed it, to be positively open to people as he was open to them. To have a positive view of the human condition, to trust his plan for the regeneration of the world through love. And to recognise that all who are willing to take the risk are welcome to be part of that plan. All of us, because of or genetic make-up and our circumstances, will be will be challenged in different ways by that vision. It will make different demands on you that it will on me. And none of us can expect to have the clarity of vision that Jesus himself had. His vision will be difficult to follow in difficult time; it is difficult to subscribe to his elevating vision when we are in the depths of grief. And yet, ironically, it is often his elevating vision that does sustain people in their grief.

Every Christian then is asked to step out on the lake with Jesus, to shed our fears on the pagan shore. If fact, the alternatives are not very attractive. What other option have we if we are to live full, abundant lives? It is interesting the number of times that he actually taught them from the middle of the inviting lake.

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