Daring to Step Out of the Boat: Risking Everything for the Truth: August 5, 2025

Truth. Jesus tries to reassure the disciples. “Take courage, it is I” he said. But Peter is not convinced and asks for a proof: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”.

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Truth: Risking Everything

“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
— Matthew 14:28

Jesus made his disciples get into a boat and sail against the wind all night long. This is a feeling you provincial know all too well, I imagine.

Then he appeared to them walking on the sea. The disciples were not comforted, nor relieved nor full of joy. They were terrified. It’s worth remembering: encountering Jesus might be a uncomfortable, unsettling, even frightening experience: either because in the humanity of Christ we catch a glimpse of his divine power, as when he is performing an extraordinary miracle or in his transfiguration… or because we take him for a ghost.

Jesus tries to reassure the disciples. “Take courage, it is I” he said. But Peter is not convinced and asks for a proof: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”.

What a strange request. Would you have asked the same?

If you weren’t sure it was Jesus—if you feared it was a ghost—would you ask to be commanded to step onto the sea? That’s hardly a safe test. Our prankster ghost might say: “C’mon Pete, jump out of the boat!” only to watch the poor Pete sinking, and then say: “Just kidding!”.

The real proof is whether Peter too will walk on the water.

To know whether the guy on the water is Jesus or not, Peter puts his life in danger. If it is not Jesus, Peter will drown.

Let it sink in: the only way to find out if it’s the Lord is to risk your life. To truly know Jesus, we must be willing to risk everything; to truly know Christ, we must become a bit like him—ready to give our lives away.

What if we imagine religious life—not as the life of prophetic voices sent to the ends of the earth to proclaim the Word—but as the life of those who risk all they have, to know the Lord? Isn’t that, at its heart, the Dominican vocation? To risk everything for the sake of the Truth?

Why take such a risk? Because we have no other choice. Because we know: if we don’t risk our lives for Jesus, we are already lost. Because we have found no other Savior from sin and its consequences (death included). Because Christ is not just our best hope – is our only hope. And at the end, it is always the Spirit who blows and forces us to make this dangerous step out of the boat.

In order to be credible preachers of Christ as Savior, we have to pass through the radical experience of needing salvation…

and of being ready to give away everything to be saved (to throw not only our whole cargo but even ourselves into the sea)…

and finally of being saved.

If we don’t pass through this experience, if we don’t believe with all our soul that our salvation is in the name of Christ, then what sets us apart from the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, or any other ancient school of thought?

But if we are forced to risk our life to know Jesus, then we will be really witnesses and preachers of the Truth.

Unless we dare to throw ourselves into the stormy waters, we will never have anything to preach.

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