Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35 – 41
10th Sunday after Trinity
St Barbara’s; 04.08.2024
Rev Jeremy Bevan
“Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” “Do you still have no faith?” “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him.”
Three big, searching questions lie at the heart of a dramatic encounter in today’s Gospel reading. Honest questions, our own or the ones Jesus asks us, have a way of propelling the kingdom of God forward. They can challenge us, stretch us, re-shape us amid life’s many ups and downs. They can be God’s invitation, helping us realise more fully the breadth, length, height and depth of the divine love that holds and sustains us.
The first question is the disciples’ complaint to Jesus, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” It seems understandably direct as the boat fills with water. It has good Bible pedigree, too. Centuries earlier, Israel’s psalmist had cried to God, “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” Though uttered in panic and dread, the disciples’ urgent accusation reveals perhaps a hitherto unvoiced hope, too: Jesus can deal with our predicament.
In response, Jesus uses the same words to quieten the storm here as he did to rebuke the spirit that possessed a man in Mark chapter 1: “Be muzzled, cur.” Strong words? Perhaps, but then his business is hardly arranging the weather for barbecues or picnics. Rather, it’s to speak the creator’s words of order to a disordered creation. As the awestruck psalmist wrote of God centuries earlier: “You silence the roaring of the seas, the tumult of the peoples.”
When a loved one dies suddenly, when evil, mindless violence unfolds in a quiet seaside town beset by tragedy, when rage at our own failure or the betrayal of others overwhelms us, there is one who cares – and who rules sometimes despite appearances. One who has lived among us, knows what our lives are like, and has the power to bring “great calm” even in the midst of the storms of life. In response to our angry, even despairing, question, “Don’t you care, Lord?”, Jesus says to us now as he did to the disciples then, “I’m here in the boat, right here with you.”
Let’s turn now to the second of those questions, the one Jesus asks his disciples: “Do you still have no faith?” Or maybe “Do you not yet have faith?” In all the gospels, the disciples are slow to grasp who Jesus is. But Jesus’s question implies that faith is something that can grow. So how do we grow faith? Well, being an explorer certainly helps.
It’s striking how often the Bible rewards explorers. Think of the Hebrew midwives, exploring the question, “What happens if we don’t kill all the Hebrew baby boys as Pharaoh demands?”; Moses, turning aside to observe the burning bush; Saul asking the unidentified vision on the road to Damascus, “Who are you, Lord?” Faithful people pushing the boundaries of faith – and finding their sense of who God is immeasurably enlarged.
The poet T.S. Eliot talks about how the end of all our exploring of faith can be to come back to where we started and truly know that place for the first time. Amid storm and risk, the disciples take another step towards understanding properly who Jesus is for the first time.
Though extreme danger, hardship or distress understandably focus our attention on staying alive, we do well, if we can, to ponder where God is in it all, and how our situation is shaping a bigger sense of who God is. May God give us the grace to explore those boundaries amid the storms this week. To ask, “What is it you’re doing that’s new here, God? What are you teaching us?”
The disciples’ final question, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him.” We might be tempted to follow the disciples’ awestruck gaze towards the now stilled waters, or to listen, astonished, to the “great calm” Jesus has brought about. But Mark seems to use this final question as a way of tugging at our sleeve, as if to say, “There’s something, someone, more important here than a sudden change in the weather.”
Mark’s focus on who Jesus is, rather than the miracle for its own sake, is quite in keeping with what Jesus himself says. In John’s Gospel, Jesus urges belief in him, faithfulness to him, because of who he is; and only if that’s too much of a stretch, he says, should we rely on the evidence of his miracles. The miracles are not a bludgeon to beat us into faith like some utterly convincing magic trick that removes the need for faith or trust in him.
Who is this Jesus, who commands the wind and the waves? Our reading from the book of Job, and many of the psalms insist that it’s God who has power over the created order, and especially the sea – for Jewish people a place of danger where the forces of chaos lurked. It’s God who is described in the psalms too as the one who vanquishes the evils that rock our lives. If Jesus can still these storms too, well, the parallels perhaps are clear. And whenever people heard that passage from Mark’s Gospel read, it would almost certainly have sparked all sorts of resonances with their Bible, our Old Testament. When I was preparing this sermon, commentators made links from our Gospel passage to Genesis, Exodus, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others: around thirty in all. And the point is: all of those references were talking about God’s power to control the seas, bring order from chaos, find a way through for God’s people. That same power, Mark says, exactly the same power, is in Jesus.
The disciples’ question, “Who is this?” is one for us to ponder, just as much as it was for the disciples. Who is this? God with us. Not just a wise Galilean holy man, but God with us in all the uncertainty, the chaos, the distress of our storm-tossed lives. How might that change the way we approach life over the coming days and weeks? May we know God with us as we explore faith’s boundaries, God helping us grow in faithfulness; and God caring for us, right here with us, in the boat.
