Matthew 14.22-33
One Sunday after Casey returned from his second tour in Iraq he shook my hand in the narthex and introduced himself as the husband of the young woman I’d seen often in worship and as the father of the baby girl who was always in her arms.
“I guess I didn’t realize you were married,” I said to her and shook Casey’s hand.
“Almost two years,” she replied, smiling nervously, “but— the war and all— this is the first time we’ve gotten to live together.”
Even with a baby tow, checkout clerks surely still carded Jennifer, and Casey’s cheeks were so smooth there wasn’t a chance a razor had ever needed to touch them. Neither one of them looked old enough to be married much less parents.
“She really loves this church,” he said, shaking my hand, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Sir?” I waved him off.
Casey’s grip was as steady, his countenance as calm as his face was smooth, the look in his blue eyes seemed tranquil. I couldn’t have guessed then that there was already a storm gathering inside him. One Sunday Casey started to wear his dress uniform to worship. “That’s odd,” I thought, “but then again, in every church, especially in the DC area, there’s always a handful of folks who take the whole God and Country line a little too far.”
Another Sunday further down the calendar Casey, unsolicited on his way out of worship after the service, insisted to me that serving as a sniper had in no way effected him.
The Sundays following his insistence turned to swagger, bragging to me of the ISIS soldiers he had killed and how his conscience was not at all a casualty of his deeds. The next Sunday he appeared to take pleasure in turning my stomach describing what he called collateral damage.
A few weeks later, in the middle of the week, he came by the church office to let us know that during the worship services the coming Sunday he’d be armed and patrolling the perimeter of the church parking lot to protect the congregation from a terrorist attack.
That’s when I called Jennifer.
Maybe I waited too long to reach out. Hindsight’s always clearer. We always see the present only as though through a glass dimly. After I relayed my recent encounter with her husband, a wave of grief crashed over her and, like a sudden clap of thunder, she broke down weeping.
A moment later, catching her breath and gathering herself, she softly in to the phone, “It’s like he’s been sucked out to sea.”
At the very back of the Bible, the scriptures conclude with a brief but all-encompassing promise, “…and the sea was no more.”
Water moving at nine feet per second can move an eighth grade wrestler. Just two feet of water is powerful enough to lift a Dodge Ram. In Comfort, Texas the Guadelupe River rose from hip height to over three stories tall in only two hours. Along the river in Hunt, Texas the flow of water increased from eight cubic feet per second to one hundred and twenty thousand cubic feet per second in a little over three hours. Which is why, in the symbolic world of the scriptures, the sea is not a place of tranquility or rest.
The faster the water moves, the greater the force it exerts on a car or a structure or a child at summer camp—that pressure increases proportionally to the square of the water’s velocity.
Again, the physics is theological.
In the Bible, the sea is the opposite of Mary’s womb.
The sea is not a space for God.
In the scriptures, the sea signifies the world gone wrong, a creation out of control. And yet Jesus can stroll upon the sea in the midst of a squall as easily as if the sea is hard, Hill Country land. He can walk on water. He can even summon Peter to stride upon the sea. Nevertheless! Ambulating upon H2O is not the miracle.
In the miracle of Jesus Walking on Water, Jesus walking on water is not the miracle.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has just fed far more than five thousand. After the twelve disciples gather up a dozen baskets overflowing with leftovers, Christ makes them to get into a boat and go before him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
The word Matthew uses is ēnankasen.
The verb means to insist, to compel, to constrain.
Thus the American Standard Version translates the opening verse, “And straightaway Jesus constrained the disciples to enter into the boat and go before him to the other side.”
He constrains them to get into the boat and he commands them to journey to the other side.
Jesus wants them in the ship.
Jesus wants them in the ship on the sea.
Jesus wants them in the ship on the sea amidst the storm.
Jesus dismisses the thousands of full bellies, and he retreats up into the mountain to pray. And while the Son prays to the Father, the disciples row towards the far side of the sea. While Jesus is alone in prayer, Matthew reports, the twelve are alone on the water.
Jesus left them at the first watch— dusk. In the middle of the night, when they were twenty five to thirty stadia from shore, three and a half miles from safety, the waves begin to batter the boat. And the verb Matthew employs means to torment or to torture. The boat is being tortured by the waves because the wind— a mighty rushing wind— “was against them.”
This is not simply a storm. This is a deadly storm. This is a squall.
At least a third of them in the boat are fishermen. So they know the danger. And they know now Jesus is worse than asleep in their boat; he is nowhere to be found— all night long. Matthew writes that Jesus does not come to them until “the fourth watch of the night.” In other words, they are alone in the boat, battered by the wind and the waves from dusk until dawn.
Again, Jesus wanted them here; Jesus wanted them in the ship on the sea amidst the squall. In fact, the scripture suggests Jesus ascended the mountain to pray in order to produce this very storm. Just as he used the loaves the fish to test Phillip and Andrew, he uses this storm to teach them about each storm on every sea.
When Christ comes to them at the last watch, their dire straits at first grow still darker. They see him walking on the sea towards them and he terrifies them. They thought they knew him. Now they fear what they suddenly realize they do not recognize in him. They are unsettled that this both is and is not the Jesus they have known. And failing to recognize him, they project onto him what they believe is all there is to be found in a storm at sea, “It is a ghost!”
Notice:
Jesus comes to their battered boat, striding upon the sea, but the storm still rages.
Jesus neither rescues them nor rebukes the wind. He instead reveals his true, triune identity. He unveils to them in the boat what he previously announced to Moses from the Burning Bush. Jesus is the Great “I AM.”
“Courage! I AM. Be not afraid.”
As the church father Cyril of Alexandria notes, Matthew fixes Christ’s imperial “I AM” at the very center of this miracle story. He who fed the five thousand is the LORD who rescued Israel from slavery.
The same accompanying, delivering God of whom the psalmist sings:
“Your way was through the sea, O God, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen.”
“Courage! I AM. Be not afraid.”
Of course he can stride upon the sea.
He can even part the sea two.
In 1933, before his involvement with the Confessing Church led to his exclusion from the University of Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught a series of Lectures on Christology. The Confessing Church was a movement of the few Christians who opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant Church. The winds and the waves of that particular storm battered the church nearly into oblivion.
Nonetheless!
On Wednesdays and Saturdays of that summer, from eight until nine in the morning, Bonhoeffer taught students at the University of Berlin about him who is the Great I AM.
In one of the final lectures before his expulsion, his students transcribed him as having said:
“Jesus is not separate from Christ…Christ’s humanity is his divinity…This is one of the first axioms of theology— that wherever God is, God is wholly there.”
Wherever God is, God is wholly there.
If God is in the water of Mary’s womb, God is wholly there. If God is in Jesus, God is wholly there. If Christ is on the sea, God is wholly there.
Of course he can walk on water!
God is not subject to creation as we are subject to creation.
But again—
That God can walk on water is neither a miracle nor a marvel.
More than a year after my phone call with Casey’s wife, he asked me to meet him for coffee. He’d been getting help in a support group and meeting with a therapist. The storm hadn’t passed, but it had calmed.
“I don’t need to advice from you,” he told me, holding his cup but not drinking.
“Good,” I said, “despite what church people think, they don’t offer any advice-giving classes in seminary.”
He didn’t laugh. I’d interrupted.
“I don’t need advice,” he said, “and I don’t need a prayer to make it all go away. I don’t even need you to tell me everything’s going to be okay.”
“What do you need?”
“I need you to promise me I’m not alone.”
“That happens to be a promise I can make,” I told him.
One of Christianity’s first and most vigorous intellectual opponents was a second century Roman philosopher named Celsus.
He wrote a critique of the faith entitled The True Word, a work now known only from the response it provoked from the church father Origen.
Like other sophisticated citizens of the empire, Celsus mocked Christianity as irrational, subversive, and offensive to classical reason and established order.
According to Origen, Celsus especially recoiled at the recipients of Christ’s supposed miraculous works.
Embracing lepers.
Feeding a horde of hungry poor.
Walking on water to boat of frightened fishermen.
Such acts, Celsus insisted, contradicted every agreed upon conviction about deity. A true god is eternal, no more involving himself in time than he privileges those unworthy of his favor. Celsus especially rejected the claim that Divine Transcendence would stoop to human frailty.
In other words, Celsus found it appalling not simply that Jesus walked on water but that God would come on the water to twelve nobodies.
For Celsus, the absurdity of the gospel was not merely Jesus’ alleged miracle but the company God supposedly keeps.
A true God would never be wholly there.
Just so—
Celsus grasped the true miracle better than many believers do.
At the fourth watch, when Jesus comes to them, the storm does not cease. He is present to them in the storm, but his presence with them does not preserve them from the presence of storms. The storm keeps storming. And standing atop the sea— right at the center of the story— Jesus issues his imperial “I AM” statement.
Perhaps sensing the fear of his friends, Peter replies to the figure on the water, “LORD, if it is you bid me to come to you upon the waters.”
Jesus replies, “Come.”
And Peter— his name means “Rock,” remember— sets forth from the ship.
Matthew does not report how far away Jesus is from their boat when he says, “Come.” Matthew does not say how many steps Peter manages to walk on the water. Does Peter plunge immediately under the water? Or does he manage to make it some ways away from the boat? Had he not glanced in fear at the wind, could Peter have walked the whole way on the water? Matthew gives no clue. For that matter, Matthew does not even describe how Jesus saves him.
Panicked and sinking, Peter cries out, “LORD, save me!”
“Jesus,” Matthew writes, “stretched forth his hand and took hold of him.”
Which is to say—
Not only can Jesus stride upon the sea, the weight of the Rock cannot pull Jesus under the water.
Peter’s fear and panic is no anchor to Jesus.
Peter cannot drag Jesus down into the deep.
He is unsinkable.
If God is there, God is wholly there.
The next thing Matthew tells us that they are all in the boat together. Does Jesus carry Peter to the boat? Does Jesus simply appear in the boat with Peter as he does behind locked doors on Easter evening? Do Peter and Jesus walk to the boat, side by side, holding hands, on the water? Once again, Matthew does not dwell on any such details.
BECAUSE THIS IS NOT A MIRCLE ABOUT WALKING ON WATER!
“I need you to promise me I’m not alone,” Casey told me.
“That happens to be a promise I can make,” I told him.
And he leaned over the table towards me, like I was about to place the promise in his mouth, “Not only are you not alone. He’s in the boat with you.”
In the Gospel of John, after Jesus issues his imperial “I AM” from atop the water, the evangelist observes, “Then they were glad to take him into their boat.”
And he was glad to come aboard their boat.
He can walk on water.
But he wants to be in their boat.
He can stride atop the crest of a wave. He does not need to scull against a stirred up sea. He has no reason to sweat the swells and the surf. He can tow them all the way to shore. He can amble along on every froth and ripple and wait for them on the other side. It is not so miraculous. Wherever God is, God is one hundred percent there— of course he can walk on water.
Yes, he can walk on water!
But God wants to be in the boat with them!
He can walk on water. He can summon Lazarus from the tomb. He can make the sick whole as easily as he divided the Red Sea. But he wants to be in the boat.
He stretched out the heavens like a curtain. He poured the oceans from the cup of his palm. He told the mountains where to rise. He calls into existence the things which do not exist. He is Alpha and Omega, the End with a capital E and the Beginning of all things, but he is glad to be in the boat.
With them.
And don’t forget who is in the boat he’s glad to board.
On Easter, Thomas will trust neither the gospel nor the word of his friends. Simon is a Jewish nationalist. Judas is a member of the “Sicarii,” extremist nationalists who pursued political assassinations of Roman officials and Jewish collaborators. What is the Prince of Peace doing including him? Meanwhile, Matthew is a tax collector, colluding with the evil empire that sought to kill Christ in his crib. James and John worried only about their status in Jesus’ administration. And Peter will deny Jesus faster than the Sea of Galilee can swallow him.
But God is glad to get into the boat with the likes of them.
And Jesus is glad to be aboard with you.
This is the miracle. This is the marvel.
Not that Jesus can walk on water.
Not even that Jesus loves you. Or that he died for your sins.
The miracle— the marvel— is that Jesus likes you.
You.
Not as he can make you.
Not as you hope you will be.
Not as you wish you were not.
You!
Jesus likes you.
He can walk on water.
But he wants to be in the boat with you.
As Robert Jenson says of the gospel:
“The place to begin is with astonishment.”
Astonishment.
He can walk on water, but he wants to be in the boat.
With you.
The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians that “anyone joined to the LORD becomes one Spirit with him.” In other words, Jesus is not himself apart from you anymore than the Son is himself apart from the Father.
Jesus is not Jesus without you!
And how is that even possible?
Because he asked for it!
And his intercessions never fail.
In the Upper Room, on the night before he dies, Jesus prays to the Father, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may my disciples also be in us.”
That is:
On the night he was handed over— the last thought on Christ’s mind— Jesus prays, “Father, I want to be in the boat with_______.”
Father, I want to be in the boat with Kelly.
Father, I want to be in the boat with Konnor.
Father, I want to be in the boat with Marilynn Oliver and John Clarke.
In Kerrville, Texas, the water rose thirty five feet in only five minutes.
Until the sea is no more, storms will keep storming.
The disciples were in the boat because Jesus compelled them. Though the waves and the wind tortured them all night long, they rowed towards the other side of the sea in accordance with Christ’s command. In all of the Gospels, this could be the instance of their greatest faithfulness to Jesus’ word and their most steadfast obedience to his will. Yet their faithfulness and their obedience does not protect them from the storm.
Faith is not magic.
Discipleship is not a means to an end.
And Jesus is not a genie in a lamp called prayer; he is your fellow passenger.
Protection from the storms of life is not the promise of the gospel.
Quite simply, there is no other way to live the Christian life but in the shadow of the cross. There is no other way to live the Christian life but in suffering because the life your baptism gifts just is Jesus’ own cruciform life.
Yes, Jesus works miracles— yes, of course; wherever God is, God is wholly in Jesus.
Absolutely Jesus works miracles.
But the miracle Jesus will not work is undoing what he did at your baptism.
He will not take his life away from yours. And his life is cruciform. Therefore, protection from the storms of life is not the promise of the gospel.
The promise is that whatever wind is against you, whichever wave rocks you, whenever the undertow threatens to pull you down, you are not alone.
Not only does God love you— to the cross and back, Jesus likes you. Whether he sits stern or bow, he is glad to be in the boat with you.
Hear me.
This is not a mere metaphor.
You probably assume that you are sitting in the sanctuary of Annandale United Methodist Church.
You are actually sitting in the nave of the church.
The nave is the central part of the church starting at the narthex, where you entered the church, and extending to the altar rail.
Inside the altar rail are the chancel and the sanctuary.
You are sitting in the nave of the church, whence derives the word navy.
That you are sitting in the nave explains why the vaulted roof of almost every church is designed to look like an inverted keel.
Not only is physics theological, architecture is as well— the architecture traces back to this text.
From the very beginning, the Body of Christ identified itself as a boat.
A boat tossed on a sea of disbelief and ridicule. A boat tortured by waves of oppression by evil and by collaboration with evil. A boat with a wind of apathy against it, with a wind of worldliness against it, with a gale of overwhelm against it.
And also, don’t forget, the mast of a ship is a cross.
This is the boat.
You thought you were sitting in the sanctuary. You actually came aboard. And all of you— I’ve been here long enough to know— have known the sea. Some of you have had more than one wind against you. Many of you have been tortured by waves far longer than the fourth watch. I’m looking at a few of you (both here and online) who I know have been rowing and rowing and rowing, thinking you’re the only one in the boat. A few of you, I know, have lost loved ones to the undertow.
I cannot promise you, “No storms!” But I can promise you, “He is glad to be in the boat with you!”
This boat. This creaky ship. This ordinary vessel.
He can walk on water.
Of course he can approach us as word and water, wine and bread.
Some come, not aft but fore.
The gospel promise is not protection from the storm.
It is provision in the midst of them.
You’re already on board— come. Jesus said it is so— the loaf and cup are him. Jesus is God. And wherever God is, God is wholly there.
So come.
Take and eat.
And no matter tosses you to and fro, God will be wholly with you. For no other reason than that he likes not only Casey but you.
Some come.
You’re already on board, stern and aft.
So come.
Not because the seas are calm, but because he is present. Come, because the gospel promise is not that he’ll still every storm, but that he will never, ever leave the boat.
This boat—he’s right here!
Wherever God is, God is wholly here.
And he is glad to be here.
With you.
For you.
Because he likes you.
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