“The Lord of Nature”
HE NEVER LEFT THE BOAT
Continuing from last week, as Jesus finishes the Sermon on the Lake, he orders the boats across to the other side. No after-chat with the congregation, no meet-and-greet, no fellowship hour—they just go. The text says they took him “just as he was”—that is, there in the boat, probably still seated as he had been while teaching. Here is where our text picks up…
Text: Mark 4: 35-41 Esv
35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side."
36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. 37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" 39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
40 He said to them, "Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?" 41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?".†
iT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
It was a dark and stormy night. A writer’s cliché that describes our place in Mark. The waves pick up and slam the boat, and the Disciples fear for their lives. Jesus is asleep in the stern, asleep during the storm. Now this is either the perfect picture of keeping a cool head when all around are running crazy, or else it is the picture of people’s ultimate frustration—a leader who is completely asleep when all hands are needed on deck. Perhaps a bit of both.
The disciples are afraid. At least some of them know a thing or two about fishing at night and being caught out on the lake during a squall. It can be deadly, even for experienced boaters. I’m sure there are hundreds of similar fishing boats at the bottom of the Galilee Lake from nights just like this one.
Here’s my first question: How long did they wait before waking Jesus? Even in the dark, I would think the fishermen among the twelve would have known when foul weather was coming. Certainly they knew once the wind picked up that the waves would increase in size. Even so, they let Jesus sleep. Then the winds really started to blow, and all the non-fishermen were given cups and baskets to bail water that sloshed in. Even now, they prefer not to bother Jesus. “He’s had such a long day—he needs his sleep! It’s okay—we can handle it.”
And here’s one picture of the Church. After all, Jesus wasn’t a fisherman—he was a rabbi—what would he know about sailing? It would have been only too easy for the guys who wanted to take charge to say, “Why wake him? Let him sleep—we got this!” We too might think there are areas in our lives where we don’t really need to consult Jesus. Yes, on all religious matters we’ll go to him, but when it comes to our businesses, our families, our marriages, it can be tempting to do the same—to think, well, Jesus wasn’t married, Jesus didn’t have to raise babies, and no one ever expected him to run a business, so let’s just take care of those things ourselves. Let him sleep—we got this!
Did it work for the Disciples? No. Why then, would we think it can work for us? Pride goeth before a fall. Truth be told, there may be things we do—or enjoy doing—that we don’t really want Jesus taking over. Talking about Jesus is fine for Sunday mornings at church, but do we really feel like we need him in taking care of our own business? Perhaps that is why the Disciples didn’t wake him right away; they simply wanted to handle things themselves.
The Disciples Rebuke Jesus
As things get worse and waves fill the boat, they begin to realize that they have to wake him. If nothing else, perhaps he could help bail water. The tone of their question is most interesting:
"Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"
Not, “Rabbi, we all wanted to let you sleep, but the situation has grown out of our control: help!” Not, “Rabbi, we just thought we’d wake you to let you know that we’re doomed…thought you might like to be awake when we die.” Instead, they rebuke him: “Don’t you care!?” or “Does it not matter to you that we’re all on our way to a certain, watery death?” The question is dripping with resentment. Where does this come from? Really—the nerve—Jesus doesn’t care?
There is a special brand of selfishness that can come upon us when we’re in trouble—in a personal storm of our own. A trial, a bind, the death of a loved one, an unforeseen emergency—any of these can be cause for us to enter a kind of crisis-mode self-absorption. Those times we might pray, “Why, O God? Why me?” or “Why does the storm have to be such an extreme one?” As we see ourselves suffering, we may even come to blame those who do not seem to be on our side or others who are not helping us when they clearly have the power to do so. There can be a kind of self-righteousness—a kind of special entitlement—that comes with our suffering. We can fall into the mode of blaming the rest of the world for not suffering in the same way. When we are feeling really rattled, the last person we want near us is someone who fails to share our anxiety, misery or outrage.
Jesus sleeps peaceably, even when water splashes onto him. Finally, one of the disciples (perhaps Thomas, who can be delightfully snarky) snaps and delivers his rebuking line: Don’t you care that we’re all dying? It is an understandable question. The resentment is only a mask. Behind that mask is simple fear.
FEAR
August 14, in Terminal 8 of JFK Airport, a group burst into mad applause at Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash. Somehow, the applause sounded like gunfire; at least to someone, and apparently it only takes one. A woman screamed that she saw a gun. Then there was a stampede. A people plowed through the metal poles strung throughout the terminal to organize lines, the metal clacking on the tile floors sounded like gunfire. More stampeding.
There were other stampedes, some small and some large, throughout the airport, to judge by the thousands of passengers massed outside on the tarmac by about 11 p.m. — not a peaceful mass, but a panicked one. Some of them had been swept outside by police charging through the terminals with guns drawn, others had been on lines where TSA agents grabbed their gear and just ran.
One man had darted down a jet bridge to take cover, inspiring others to follow, running and yelling. Only when he reached the end did he realize that the door was locked, and that, because there was no plane on the other side of it, he was actually suspended 20 feet or more in the air, like at the end of an unfinished bridge, with dozens or maybe even hundreds coming behind him. He’d have to smash the window, he figured, and try and open the door from the other side, then just jump. That’s when he heard the screams of the crowd storming toward him: “They’re coming this way!”
There was no “they.” There was not even a “he,” no armed person turning on a crowd. But what happened at JFK on August 14 was, in every respect but the violence, a mass shooting. The fact that there was no attack at the center of it was both the weirdest and the scariest part — that an institution whose size and location and budget should make it a fortress, in a country that has spent 15 years focused compulsively on securing its airports, in a city with a terrifyingly competent anti-terror police unit, could be transformed into a scene of utter bedlam, stretching out from all eight terminals across the tarmac and onto the adjacent highways, by the whisper of a threat. Within minutes, the whole apparatus of the airport and its crowd-control mechanisms had collapsed into total disarray. [From New York magazine, by David Wallace-Wells, August 15, 2016]
Fear is false evidence appearing real. Applause mistaken for gunfire sends a city into a panic. Fear plays havoc with our every sense of reason and probability.
• [Your friend is 5 minutes late]— He’s never late; it’s obviously some horrible car accident!
• [You hear a negative comment]—Everybody is against me!
• [A stranger walks past your house, looking at it]—It was a burglar casing the joint!
Fear puts the nervous system into panic mode—fight or flight—and sends us charging for our lives down a dead end jet bridge. Fear is absolutely humorless and distorts reality to its worst possible conclusions.
“Don’t you care that we are perishing?”
FEAR & Fearless Christianity
The antidote to fear is loving and trusting in God. Placing our ultimate love and trust anyplace else is foolishness, though it is our instinct. The Disciples in the boat trusted in their own sailing skills, then in their own bailing skills, but it wasn’t enough; it didn’t work. We may look for sources to trust in other than God. We look to ourselves, human goodness, governments or insurance companies to keep us from fear. This is all, to some degree, misplaced trust. It’s like Peter expecting Thomas to save the boat.
When we trust in God, fear loses its power; fear is put in its place. If we fear God, other fears fall into perspective. When we fear God and God alone, both tyrants and terrorists are brought down to size.
Our calling is not to be like the Disciples, but like Christ. This means we are aiming for a fearless kind of Christianity. We are to become the cool heads in the crazy boats, the calm heart in the midst of the storm, gathered and fearless.
There are two kinds of fear: one is simple, biological fear. That is good—a good gift from God for our survival and care—and it is part of our God-given nature. The other kind is a deeper fear—fear that sets into the will or our attitudes—that’s what we need to get beyond.
Fear that is set into the will can make us permanently defensive and irretrievably suspicious. Think conspiracy theorists and end-of-the-world, doomsday Christianity. Fear drives them to see all the storms of life as eclipsing every other power, even God’s power to do what is redemptive. They, like the Disciples in the boat, assume we are all perishing.
We, however, are called to be cooler, and scripture gives us the antidote to fear in 1 John 4: 18:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
It is the number one commandment—to love God above all else—that also delivers us from fear. To love God means that we trust in his providence. God is in control, and the circumstances of our lives that can appear scary are actually overseen by God’s goodness.
Jesus Casts Out the Storm
In total contrast to fear, we have Jesus, who in the midst of a life-threatening gale is sleeping soundly as a baby (at least until the panicky disciples wake him). Jesus is fearless. Though hidden by the pitch black of a stormy night, I expect their faces would have been all fear and panic. Jesus gets up (or maybe just sits up) and shouts into the dark storm, “Be muzzled! Be still!”—which is the same word he used to cast out demons. “Pipe down! Knock it off, already—some of us are trying to sleep here!” The storm is “cast out” of the lake, and there is “enormous calm.”
As the Disciples stand with their mouths hanging open, Jesus says to them:
“Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Amplified: “Has the secret of my authority not yet dawned upon you?”
After this, the Disciples say:
"Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"
The text indicates that they are more afraid now than when they thought they were dying in the storm! Here’s Mark’s sense of humor. They’re all fine, the lake is glassy and smooth, and the dawn now casts its gentle light over the landscape. Jesus has gone back to sleep, and the Disciples are cowering away from him on the boat, saying things (I imagine) like, “I was afraid of him just for being an exorcist—but who casts storms out of lakes?”
After 2000 years, that question comes to us with equal relevance, because fear is still a big part of our lives. We too need the power that can transform dark and roiling seas into that enormous calm of the text.
What are Our storms?
What storms threaten us? Scare us? Send us into a self-delusional panics? It is a political year, which means all the networks are furiously competing for our earspace. Fox News has set the new standard for setting off the alarms—GIGANTIC HEADLINES for every story (I shouldn’t pick on Fox alone; this is now the industry standard for CNN and MSNBC as well)—everything is a SPECIAL REPORT and BREAKING NEWS, all the time, 24/7. Television news has completed a transition away from the traditional values of objective journalism and into unapologetic, sensationalistic titillation.
Remember the story of Chicken Little? The funny little hen who ran around shouting “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”? Chicken Little runs amok—not only in an election year, but every year—seeking like crazy to raise the public blood pressure and to get people agitated into a panicky dither. The story was originally told as a take heed against alarmism. Today its meaning is largely lost— absorbed by the endless alarmism of cable news.
The Church has its Chicken Littles as well—pundits and “church experts” who specialize in collective handwringing, bemoaning the state of the Church and American Christianity in general. “Look what’s happening in Israel!” they exclaim, “we are clearly in the last days!” The alarms are sounded, and all us chickens start stampeding through airports or stop what we’re doing and look up at the sky, waiting for it to crack.
Does anyone really want to live that kind of life? Do we want to be like the Disciples in the boat—fearful, panicky, and resentful of the powers that put us here? Do we want to be a part of a mindless, scurrying stampede of people running from their own shadows?
Instead, why can’t we be the cooler heads—the coolest heads? How can we become the God-loving, God-trusting, Love-empowered followers he wants us to be?
Asking the Love Question
Again, from 1 John 4:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
We choose between serving feat and serving love. When we love—when we trust in God and believe that God is in control—fear simply dissolves. The choice to renounce fear and serve trust in God is a necessary and deliberate choice.
We can begin by asking the Love question:
“In my fear, how am I failing to give love?”
Whatever the source of fear, no matter how menacingly it looms over our equilibrium, we can choose to love instead of fear.
Love says: God is good, all the time; all the time, God is good. When we believe that, we can accept that whatever it is that upsets us—no matter how big and dark the storm—we trust that God has not brought us this far only to have us drowned in the lake. Though troubles may come (does anyone imagine that they would not?) we can meet them with cool heads, even considering them as the exercises set before us by a loving Lord who means for us to develop our gifts—hurdles put on our path by a loving God who doesn’t want us squandering our hearts and lives on fear.
How would it feel to live that life to the fullest? Beyond fear, unshaken, unbroken, unflappable—cool, collected and faithful in the midst of every storm—this is the Christlike pattern toward which we grow and strive.
The ultimate hope is that at the end of all worldly storms, when we see him face-to-face, we will be able to say that we never feared, because we knew he was with us the time. †