Right after the joyous period of the Zemene Tsige (Period of the Flowers) which corresponds somehow to a springtime both for the weather and the spirit, and before we start preparing for Christmas, we have a period in between, which in Tigrinya is called Zemene AstemHro, and in English is called Intercession Period. Intercession means to fall in between two people who do not get along in order to reconcile them.

Now, in our case the two conflicting parts were God and the world. We were in conflict with God because we disregarded his love. He loved humanity very, very much, so much that he entrusted to us the whole of his creation. When God created Adam and Eve he wanted to start with a gesture of complete trust and love: he put them in the Garden of Eden so that they could take care of it, become his cooperators and take pride in the work of the universe. On God's side it was giving the first men and women a chance to prove themselves. So much so that God did not hide from them the possible problems.

Unfortunately, Adam and Eve did not trust God so much as to risk to remain blind, if need be, rather than throw themselves into the arms of the serpent that had done nothing for them before. They were afraid God was not as good as they had expected but had withheld from them something that they could so easily attain by simply eating from the very tree God had warned them not to eat from ... And they preferred to follow the advice of the serpent rather than God's.
And Adam and Eve had to bear with the consequence of their choice: They found out the truth about themselves and the environment around themselves: that they were simple creatures and had not life of their own, that the order of the whole universe was regulated by the very God they did not trust. They found that without trust in God nature, animals, atmospheric conditions, feelings etc. were regulated by selfishness. Man and woman found that they need the help of nature to feed themselves, to warm themselves, to stay well, but the kind of help they needed nature was not willing to give it for nothing. They found that they were naked, that they were powerless, and everything was against them. Only God, the one they had not trusted, the one whose advise they had refused to follow, was still willing to help them. And this he did but at a very great price.
See, when you need to repair a damage done by a mistake sometimes you need to take some drastic measures, depending on how serious the damage is. You see, when your car or your TV or your computer have problems, you take them to a technician. You take it all in one piece but then the technician opens it and breaks it into pieces in order to reach at the damaged part. Also when a sick person goes to the doctor, sometimes the doctor needs to cut and open the damaged part in order to reach to the heart, the stomach or whatever needs repair. Immediately after the operation the sick person seems to be in worse a situation than when he first went to see the doctor. But if the patient behaves and obeys the doctors' guidelines he will get even better than before. The same happened with humanity: in order for man and woman to get reconciled with God, God had to take the first step: he had to send his Son God, let him be born from a woman, Mary, the baby was called Jesus. Jesus is God's son, and therefore is God, but he is also Mary's son and therefore he is human. As such he could understand and make his own our weaknesses and our sins, as God he could please God the way a God is pleased. So he is the great Intercessor: the person in between who reconciles two parties who are quarrelling against each other.

Today in the Gospel we are told how he did so: I said that when man sinned, nature rebelled against humanity. This is what happened when the Apostles were in the sea: a very strong wind rose and was about to swallow the boat in which Jesus and the Apostles were sailing. When the apostles saw that they were powerless against such a force they cried to Jesus: Help us, we are perishing!
Jesus with a command make the winds calm down and the waves immediately subsided.

In this way he showed us how Jesus has reconciled us with nature, man and humanity need not to be one against the other any more, but they can work one for the other.

But this example can show us much more than the mending of the relationships between humanity and nature. The sea which is in tumult represents the chaotic forces against God, the storm is the eschatological earthquake, the boat represents the Church. Without Jesus everything is against us, we can easily fall victims of circumstances, we are weak and cannot resist temptations, we cannot master our feelings, etc. But a confident prayer: "Lord save us! We are perishing!" can make a lot of a difference in our life as individual and as a community and a country, but also the whole world. With this example Jesus and the evangelist Mathew did not want simply to show the power of Jesus, Jesus is not Superman that does wonders and withdraws, but Jesus passes on his power to us as well: he teaches us how to overcome all the difficulties by a sincere and wholehearted trust and faith in him. If we have faith that he is with us always, that he is for us and not against us, if we lean on him and not on our helplessness, then he is already in our boat, he is in our own situation. Had the boat sunken, Jesus too will have go down with the other apostles, it would have been his own disaster.

The other examples we are offered today shows the power of Jesus over Satan, the devil, the evil one who had caused all these problems to humanity. Two men were possessed by the evil spirit. How these two people were violent and antisocial: they could not accept the ordinary social behavior standards like being properly dressed, respect other people, live in decent houses with their families. etc. Everybody is scared of and annoyed by them and therefore they had to live in the cemetery with the dead who alone could not react to their savagery. There is a struggle between them and Jesus: they try to chase away Jesus but he is not scared, he feels compassion of these two young men. As God he reads their whole life history: they might have fallen victims of external forces maybe initially in small things, like lying to their parents, then stealing from home and other people, then fighting with their family and their neighbors, then abusing with substances like alcohol, drugs, etc until they reached a point that they could not live in peace with anybody. They may have had a bad influence from their neighborhood, peer pressure may have drawn them to do things what at the beginning they did not want to do; they might have been abused by others, etc. etc. And he has compassion of them. He loves them; he reaches to them and touches their hearts, until the devil is the one who pleads Jesus to let him leave the two men and get into the pigs that is there. And so the two young men finally find their true selves, they ask for clothes and put them on, they do not run away from people anymore, but they sit at the feet of Jesus. They listen to him, next to him they feel accepted, forgiven, renewed, and strengthened.
The change in them is so evident that they do not need to explain anything to anyone. They give witness that Jesus has healed them and freed them from the grips of Satan. He is the real Savior.
In a way, this is the story of each one of us somehow. It might not be that evident, but somehow we are all victims of the power of Satan. We may be thinking how a few years back we were much better persons. Anyone could approach us; they felt good talking to us, they felt free to ask us of our services. Maybe now ppl, starting from our parents. We may not feel good about it, want to get out of this situation but do not know how. The answer today is we have a saviour, he is Jesus. We have just to trust him, to let him save us, open our hearts to him..