This sermon was originally delivered for the online Sunday worship service at Park Avenue Christian Church, New York, NY, on July 4, 2021. View the recording here.
In the dark of the evening they set out on the lake, assured in the navigational skills that would get them from one side to the other. Their leader, apparently worn out from a long day of pontificating, even fell asleep in the back of the boat. And then, without warning, all hell broke loose.
The storm that erupted was something otherworldly. The Greek expression used here implies a hurricane-like cyclone descending on them from above. And when Jesus eventually wakes and addresses the storm, he uses identical language to what he had used in earlier chapters to drive out demons. “Peace! Be still!” The word he uses literally means, “Be muzzled,” as though Jesus is addressing not a weather phenomenon, but some monstrous creature. The text seems to be suggesting to us that this was no ordinary storm, but a monster-demon megastorm.
And after Jesus calms the storm, his next question to the disciples seems unsettlingly incongruous with the horror they have just collectively survived: “Why were you so afraid?” Jesus seems to be gaslighting them, dismissing their fears as an overreaction. He is not being very understanding, or very pastoral.
So I can’t help putting on my pastoral-care hat for a moment here to reassure us all that fear in the face of danger is normal, sane, and sometimes even a helpful survival response. There is no shame in being afraid. And if you’re anything like me, maybe you’ve spent a lot of the last sixteen months or so being very afraid. Our boat is still rocking from the monster-demon megastorm of COVID-19. The waves haven’t yet subsided. We are still struggling—some of us may feel like we are drowning—in the wake of devastating losses of jobs or loved ones. And despite the relative calm in our particular area of the globe in NYC, we sit watching the horizon nervously for the next sign of suspicious clouds.
Monster demon megastorms are scary. We know it. The story’s original audience in the early church knew it. And despite this portrayal of Jesus with a seeming lack of empathy, I think the author of Mark was attuned to that fear, and was using this story to address some of the particular theological concerns of the early church community.
The story in today’s bible passage echoes multiple descriptions in the Hebrew Scriptures and other ancient religious traditions depicting God as having power over the raging sea. The entire account is nearly a copy of the verses of Psalm 107:
26 The waves went as high as the sky;
they crashed down to the depths.
The sailors’ courage melted at this terrible situation
27 They staggered and stumbled around like they were drunk.
None of their skill was of any help.
28 So they cried out to the Lord in their distress,
and God brought them out safe from their desperate circumstances.
29 God quieted the storm to a whisper
the sea’s waves were hushed.
(Ps 107: 26-29, CEB)
Mark’s audience would have heard this story and understood it as a theophany, a revelation of the Divine at work through Jesus. Jesus has just spent the earlier part of the day speaking in parables to the crowds. Only to his close inner circle does he offer exclusive interpretations of these parables, assuring them that they have special access to “the mystery of the kingdom.” The miracle story of Jesus calming the storm seems to be Jesus showing, rather than explaining, that mystery: that God’s reign is being activated through him in a new and historically significant way.
And what would this have offered Mark’s first audience? Likely written during the Jewish War, shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, persecution—or at least the possibility of persecution under the Roman Empire—loomed heavy in the air. A boat was an early Christian symbol for the church, as it remains a symbol for the church today. Perhaps they would have felt strengthened by the message that, amid the storm of political oppression, Jesus was in their boat. And that meant anything was possible.
But of course they would have known, as we know too well ourselves today, that sometimes we call out to God for rescue…and the boat sinks anyway. The relationship comes to an end. The terminal illness runs its course. We are hit by a ruinous financial blow. Loss and pain loom as an inescapable part of life. Regardless of how much faith we have.
The bible does not present faith as a formula for how to stay safe from harm. In fact, Jesus regularly warns his disciples that following him will put them in harm’s way. In Mark 13:13, he offers them the grim promise, “You will be hated by all because of my name.”
Our text for today, rather than a promise of rescue from suffering, I think invites us to reflect on just who Jesus is in the midst of our suffering:
“Who is this,” the disciples ask among themselves, “whom even the wind and sea obey?”
Who is this? The text says that, after Jesus quieted the storm and gave them a sound telling-off, that the disciples “feared a great fear.” As overwhelming as the storm they had just faced had seemed, the Jesus they were forced to reckon with on the other side of that storm was even more confounding.
It’s worth noting that there are two different Greek words for “fear” being used in this passage. Jesus criticizes the disciples for deilós, a word that could also be translated as “cowardice,” a word that is always used in a negative sense in the NT. But the “great fear” that the disciples experience after Jesus’ miraculous action is phóbos, a word with a meaning that lands somewhere between terror and awe, a numinous wonder at something beyond one’s control and comprehension. It’s the same kind of fear extolled in the proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). The movement of discipleship in this story is not from anxiety to certainty, but from anxiety toward mystery.
Mark, more than the other evangelists, plays up the trope of the disciples “not getting it.” But I wonder if we as readers should be as hard on them. The question they ask is one we would do well to ask ourselves: “Just who is this Jesus?” For all our two thousand years of retrospect, we still haven’t come up with a simple answer to that question. Perhaps we are not meant to lock down an answer, but, in the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, we are meant to live the question. Maybe this scripture is inviting us today to sit for a while in the unease of that question, to enter with the twelve disciples into a space of wonder.
Sitting with our unresolved questions is hard. But if I am baffled, afraid, struggling to make sense of who Jesus is and why it matters in the here and now, then I am not alone. There are these “other boats” that headed out with Jesus and his disciples that appear in the text somewhat randomly. Some commentators believe this detail is a remnant from some earlier manuscript and is pretty much meaningless. But, for me, the “other boats” offer some reinforcements. They likely contained some of the people who had been gathered around Jesus at the lakeshore to hear his teaching on the kingdom of heaven. They likely contained both men and women of different social classes. Their presence in the story, sloppy remnant or not, speaks to us of a larger community of curious and cowardly, fascinated and flabbergasted Jesus followers.
If I’ve learned anything from this last year, and from the people I minister to as a hospital chaplain, it is that faith and fear not only can coexist—they very often do coexist. What matters more than whether we are afraid is the authority we give that fear, how we allow it to interact with our choices and actions. Some of the bravest people I’ve met are also the ones who are the most terrified: social-justice activists, cancer patients, parents. Pretty much anyone whose decisions can have weighty consequences, yet they get up and make those decisions anyway, guided by their morals and values rather than by their natural impulse to avoid pain and loss. One of my favorite thinkers on the topic of fear is the poet, author, queer activist, cancer patient, and black feminist Audre Lorde. She offers us these reflections in her poem, “A Litany for Survival”:
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraidSo it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
Mark’s audience knew well, to live in oppression is to live with fear; however, accepting the reality of our vulnerability offers a form of liberation.
This is the paradox of faith: that the movement of discipleship brings us from one form of uncertainty to another. But the good news is this: that our ability to “get it” does not determine God’s ability to act in us and through us and for us. At each new season in our lives, at each new season in the life of the church, we are invited to reflect anew on the question, “Who is Jesus?” To live into that question. And, since Jesus’ spirit lives on in us, to discern how we are called to be Jesus to a storm-ravaged and weary world. It is uncertain and often fearsome work. But Jesus is in our boat, church. If he is sleeping, we had better wake him up.
