The Word Speaks Still, And When He Does Even the Waves and the Winds Remember Who They Are

Miracles as Visible Words of the Gospel

Mark 4.35-41

I did not preach this weekend. I’m on holiday in the Galápagos Islands. Nevertheless (being a preacher), I have been reflecting on the scripture scheduled for this past Sunday of our series on the Miracles of Jesus.

There is a way of conceiving miracles as intrusions upon creation by the Creator, as interruptions of (allegedly) natural processes. This manner of construing the miraculous, I suspect, accounts for the reluctance of modern believers to affirm the miracles of Jesus as anything other than source material for ethical lessons. Perhaps you have endured, for example, a “sermon” asserting that the Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Gospel of John is really about the imperative to share our possessions. The little boy in John 6, in this interpretation, shames the masses with his willingness to share his five loaves and two fishes.

At first glance, Mark’s reporting of Christ calming the storm does indeed appear to be an instance of interference with a world of divinely-imbued secondary causes. This is problematic only to the extent that Jesus is precisely the opposite of what Mark and the evangelists believe, a man.

The Gospels, it is crucial to remember, exist for no other reason than to bear witness to Jesus as the God-who-is-human. The account of Jesus calming the storm, therefore, is not simply a supernatural interruption of natural processes. It is, properly speaking, an enactment of the gospel in visible form.

The miracle is not an intrusion upon the world.

The miracle is a visible word of the gospel— the good news about the incarnate God.

The calming of the storm, as Karl Barth puts it, is a performed proclamation. It is constitutive of the announcement that, in Christ, the world does not merely return to what it was; it becomes what it was always intended yet never before realized: a cosmos fully transfigured by union with God.

Miracles, then, are unveilings.

Revelations not exceptions.

In Church Dogmatics IV.1, Karl Barth insists that revelation is not a communication of abstract truths about God but the very act of God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ. “Revelation,” Barth writes, “is God’s act in which He makes Himself known and, in so doing, is Himself for us.” Because the gospel is witness not wisdom, the good news about a person rather than principles, revelation does not merely inform; it enacts.

Revelation is the event in which God becomes present as Lord.

Over sin, death, and chaos.

Understood in terms of Mark 4, the calming of the storm is altogether more than a display of supernatural power over the natural order. It is the disclosure of the deeper truth that creation itself belongs to the Word through whom all things were made. Mark 4 does not depict a scene of divine force imposed against nature but rather a display of nature’s proper relationship to its Creator— now made flesh and dwelling within it.

As visible words, enactments of gospel, miracles are thus not exceptions to the rule of the world but interruptions of the disorder that sin has introduced to the world. Fleming Rutledge notes wryly in a footnote in her most recent book that there is no location in creation not inhabited by the Enemy, the Powers of Sin and Death. There is no place in the world where the world is as the world is intended. Talk of “nature” is incompatible with the gospel. Just so, miracles are not violations of a world properly ordered according to divine, natural intent but revelations of creation’s true End.

Miracles are signs of creation’s aim.

If all of creation groans in labor pains, then the calming of the storm is not the suspension of nature’s processes but their rectification and reordering around the incarnate Logos.

Miracles disclose creation’s true order, yes.

But Maximus the Confessor insists on pushing even further than Karl Barth. For Maximus, the incarnation is surpassingly more than a repair job of a fallen world. Maximus takes the Apostle Paul at his word: Incarnation is New Creation. This is “the whole mystery of Christ.”

The incarnation is but the innovative completion of creation itself.

In calming the storm and walking upon the water, in multiplying loaves and going down to death for a father’s little girl, Jesus does not perform miracles as though they were parlor tricks or even pointers to his divine identity.

Christ is innovating creation.

Maximus argues that the Word becoming flesh is not a contingency necessitated by sin but the very purpose of creation from the beginning. The cosmos exists to be united to God, and in Christ this union is realized—not as a restoration to a primordial state but as an advancement, a transfiguration into something entirely new. This is nothing less than what the prophet Isaiah foretold of him.

As Jordan Daniel Wood summarizes Maximus:

“The Word’s assumption of flesh is not a reparation but a perfection of creation—an innovation by which the world becomes more than itself, exceeding itself in union with God.”

Back to the calming of the storm.

The miracle is not merely an act of the Creator reminding the sea of its original obedience. Far more so, the miracle is an instance in which the sea participates—even if momentarily—in the New Creation being inaugurated in Christ.

In calming the storm, we see Mary’s boy giving birth to a New Creation.

The winds and waves obey him because, in Christ, creation is being gathered into a more intimate, more perfect relationship with God than previously known. In the calming of the storm, in other words, we glimpse not a return of creation to Eden but of its End in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

Again, this is the problem with speaking of creation as “nature.”

Creation finds its true being only in consummation in Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

The word consummation is not lightly deployed in Christian speech, for it properly denotes a relationship. The calming of the storm reveals that the created order—winds, waves, water—are not indifferent mechanisms governed by impersonal laws but are elements of a cosmos whose being is contingent upon, in relationship with, and fulfilled by, its relation to the Logos.

As Chris Green puts it:

“In the miracles of Jesus, the cosmos rehearses its own eschatological fulfillment.”

The calming of the storm does not merely show Christ’s power over nature anymore than the raising of Lazarus reveals only his power over death. Jesus wept. He did so because he loved Lazarus. Likewise, the calming of the storm reveals that nature itself is destined for communion with Christ.

The storm ceases not because Jesus overpowers nature.

The storm stops because in Christ creation hears its future.

If miracles, as Barth says, are “visible words,” what gospel do they proclaim?

They declare not only that God is for us, but that, in Christ, the world is being transfigured into what it was always meant to become. Miracles do not merely reverse the effects of the fall; they advance creation toward its ultimate destiny. Like Peter walking upon water, when Jesus calms the storm, the waters participate—however fleetingly—in their ultimate purpose: to exist in perfect communion with the Word through whom they were made.

The winds and the sea obey, not simply as servants to a master, but as creation responding to its perfection in its Maker.

Nothing less than this is the promise proclaimed by the doctrine of theosis.

Barth writes:

“The miracle is not that God has power over the world; the miracle is that God in Christ chooses to be God with and for the world, and that the world, in Him, comes to its true end.”

Much like what we say over bread and wine at the end of Great Thanksgiving’s epiclesis, episodes of the miraculous are foretastes of the Last Future. As such episodes, we should expect the miraculous to occur in our lives in ways every bit as ordinary but reliable as loaf and cup.

In this case, perhaps we should start by looking to the storms within us.