The storm

Was it a lack of faith to wake Jesus? Should the disciples have just kept on, gritted their teeth, and trusted that somehow the storm would spare them? Faith harder, don’t wake Jesus. But calling on Jesus is never, ever, shown to be a faithless attribute in the Bible. It is the resistance to calling upon Jesus that is faith-deficient. Jesus’ nap helps reveal for the disciples not only the storm without but the storm within. 

The ancient poets used to say there is no other thing worse than the sea for breaking a man. On the lake of Galilee, the second-lowest freshwater lake in the world, seven hundred feet below sea level in the Jordan Rift valley and getting lower, where the African and Arabic tectonic plates pull apart, where the Word of God has become flesh and begun tearing into the veil that separates humanity from God, the disciples are crossing the lake with Jesus. A wind storm has come across the surrounding hills, a katabatic wind, a wind that passes from a higher altitude and rushes toward a lower altitude, and there are not many places in the world lower than this lake. The disciples - and any Galilean fisherman worth his salt - knew they were in trouble. 

The storm rushes upon them with such force that they are in danger of capsizing. In the Bible, large bodies of water like the one Jesus and his disciples sail upon in Luke chapter 8 are symbols of our limitations as creatures. There are creatures of land, in God’s great creation song, and creatures of the sea. Man was made to be a creature of the land, but we can’t get it through our skulls. The disciples work the sail, man the halyard, they trim and raise, chart course and watch the horizon and lean and shift. At some point, in the exhaustion of fighting the winds, recognizing they were in very real trouble, they wake Jesus and tell him they are perishing. They brace themselves against the mast, the rigging keeping them from falling into the sea, drenched in sweat and swells, exhausted and afraid. They knew of Jesus as a miracle worker, a healer, logic that could twist religious lawyers and scribes into knots, the Rabbi, the Master. But what do you really know about a person until your life depends on them? Blinking the water out of their eyes they look to Jesus. And Jesus, after rising, says “where is your faith?"

Their cry - we are perishing - grows out of the desperation one experiences when their skills and gifts and talents cannot save them. T.S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, says the sea "tosses up our losses... the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men.” The sea stands symbolic of our vulnerability. And the disciples, and us too even as we read it, are engaged in a fight to the death against vulnerability. In the storm the disciples of Jesus did what they could, losing against the elements. They did what we all do as we confront a world against us. When we cannot spin a lie fast enough or rob Peter to pay Paul. As we sense our little boats swamped - from friends or employers, from a spouse that seems particularly unimpressed by us - you trim the sail and bail water between swells. You bail against being discovered a fraud, you dream anxious dreams where you’re unprepared for class or late for a meeting. We bail and trim but our little boats, the barrier that guards against being swamped or overwhelmed or depressed, isn’t good enough and the rudder has long since snapped. 

In the truest sense the disciples began taking on water once they rolled up their sleeves and left Jesus to sleep. Later in 1 Timothy St. Paul will write that this turning away from Jesus is how we make a shipwreck of our faith. It wasn’t that they woke Jesus, it was that they woke him only after they were certain there was nothing more they could do, and what was left was not faith in the end but despair. Exhaustion drove them to wake Him, not faith. They do not ask Him to stop the wind and the waves, they confess their lostness. They had to wonder if the Jesus of Nazareth cosmic ride was a cosmic joke. They have jumped out of a plane and, having pulled the rip cord on their parachute, find only confetti. 

As the disciples waged warfare against the storm without and the storm within, they had to determine what was more seaworthy - their ship of full rigging, or a sleeping savior. Today this remains the primary thing to be decided as we follow Jesus, and it really is a one-or-the-other way to live. One way is pride down to the mortise and tenon joint, a strong ship right up until the waves are bigger than our boasting. We sail into exhaustion, followed by shame. The other way is a vessel of humble work and rest, the displacement of pride by a rigging built into the body and blood of Christ, trusting the Word and sacrament to bind you not to the exhausted desperation of your little ship but to your Savior. The good sailer knows a seaworthy vessel. 

It’s a story far older than 2000 years. Jonah, at the end of himself, is tossed overboard and swallowed by the beast of God’s good mercy. Noah spends years building an Ark designed as an absurdly obvious sign for generations that the only way to tread water is to be shut up within God’s great covenant. Jesus builds a craft of wood too, a cross-vessel of passage over judgment and estrangement. A boat without a keel or mast but blessed and sound. While the ship of the disciples raged unsuccessfully against the waves, like Elijah patiently waiting out the priests of Baal on Mt. Carmel as they called out and danced and cut themselves to get a false God’s attention, the sleeping Christ waited for His moment to prove His seaworthiness. 

Jesus of course does not simply let his question hang in the wind, he stops — literally “pauses” the storm — and much as it reads, they were in an instant calm, the sound of the howling wind replaced by the gentle lapping of a placid lake against the hull. If, as is so commonly taught, Jesus is discouraged by their waking Him, rather than waking him so late, believing that their boat was the only vessel of salvation, the lesson changes. You lose the substance of this moment. The Bible shows us that our Lord delights in these opportunities to calm both the storm without but the storm within. Jesus calming the storm isn’t about dropping the mic, it’s about picking up little faiths. In that calm they see that they had not been swallowed up by the storm, but by the Christ. The God napping on the boat is not subject to the elements, the elements are subject to Him. Little faiths have to learn that they tread waters not of human competency, but of mercy. Where is your faith, Jesus asks. Your ship isn’t seaworthy, but the savior is. Such is a message at the heart of every trial ever suffered by every Christian to ever live. 

It may be that we will spend seasons of our lives trimming the sail, swinging the jib, and hanging on for dear life because we very much believe that if there is a good life to be had it will be by our sustained furious effort, and that if ever God is to be truly happy with us then it will be by our lack of need for Him. But we will be mistaken on both counts. We’ll know we’ve learned to sail when we’ve learned that Jesus Himself is the vessel of good hope. What we lack is not buoyancy but to be cast into the deep waters of faith. To be swallowed up, little try-harder boat and all, in what the Bible calls growing up into Christ. A destination against which we have sailed a good long season, a port nearer to home than we can imagine.

[Pictured: The Gulf Stream (Winslow Homer)]