Third Sunday after Trinity, 2021. Year B.
Readings: 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 & Mark 4:35-41.
This is one of those short vignettes from the life of Jesus that Mark specialises in, told at Mark’s normal breakneck pace, but also with the eye for the little, eyewitness, details and colour that Mark is so good at.
One of the most notable things about Mark’s Gospel is how short it is, and it is passages like this that show us the incredible economy of Mark in creating a scene for us, with as few words as possible.
You end up wondering whether the cost of ink and parchment was just too much for the persecuted Roman church he was writing as part of to afford.
Jesus has had a full day, down at the lake, preaching to the crowd in parables, and then, as the preceding verse to our passage notes, having to explain each of his parables to the disciples afterwards.
All day he has been talking about the coming kingdom, but Mark is careful to emphasise, only in parables.
The crowd has been so large that they have pushed him back into the water, and he has had to preach to them from a boat.
Now as evening comes he tells his disciples that they should cross the lake to the other side. Already in the boat, and being fishermen, they set out just as they are, in the boat.
Jesus travels light – there is no need to go back to where they might have stayed the night before – everything they need is everything the have, and everything they have they carry with them. Mark can tell us this in just four words – ‘just as he was’.
We can try and imagine what the day has been like. Maybe it was spring, with the hills above the Sea of Galilee ablaze with flowers, and their perfume thick on the air. Maybe it is later in the year, and the sea is like a glass radiating back the dead heat of the day towards the same hills, now dried and brown. Maybe that is why they are down by the lake, to capture what little cooling breeze there is blowing off the water?
It is in that sort of heat that the life-giving properties of water become most apparent. The divine bounty of a spring of crystal clear, living water, bursting forth from the earth, cold and fresh. The great lake, sitting in its bowl of haze shrouded mountains, provides a livelihood for the fishermen from whom so many of Jesus’ disciples were called, and the fish that they catch are a staple part of the diet of everyone living around the lake. Fish often appear in Jesus’ stories as a symbol of the bounteous plenitude of God, and of his infinite love for us. For people back then, with only the haziest grasp of the ecology of fish population dynamics, they must have seemed an inexhaustible resource. Indeed, even today, when we do fully understand the science behind fish stocks, we are all too guilty of making exactly the same mistake and assuming that fish are an inexhaustible resource that we can plunder at our whim.
As the little armada of fishing boats sets out across the Lake, Jesus settles down to get some sleep in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. Why a cushion? Maybe when Mark was first telling the story, his listeners had some experience of small fishing boats and were wondering how on earth someone could actually get comfortable enough in one to sleep. The answer – there was already a cushion in the boat. Maybe its just one of those little details that Peter noticed.
Anyway, as Jesus is sleeping, suddenly a dangerous squall hits the boat. The Sea of Galilee is noted for the suddenness and ferocity of its storms, because the mountains around it channel the winds in unpredictable ways.
Suddenly, the sea is changed from being a convenient preaching place, or a source of life-giving fresh water and fish, into a terrifying force of nature. This is the primordial chaos that Genesis refers to in its second verse – “darkness covered the face of the deep, while wind from God swept over the face of the waters”. This is the sea that John refers to at the end of his apocalypse when he is given the vision of the fulfillment of God’s promises – “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth ; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”
The sea is a metaphor for the destructive power of untamed nature throughout the scriptures. Indeed it is a common metaphor throughout the ancient Near East.
In the creed, we describe God as ‘creator of all that is, both seen and unseen’, but when we look at the Genesis account of creation, it certainly looks like the waters are there before God first speaks. God fashions everything else, but the waters are already there. What is possibly more important though is not that they are already there, and therefore exist prior to or even apart from God’s creation, but that they, even if not created by God, obey him completely. Most of the other mythic creation accounts of the Near East are told around a struggle or war between competing elemental deities. In Genesis 1, we have an account of a creation that is wholly and completely subordinate to the word and will of God, who is able to order it as He wishes, without compromise or dissent.
But this primordial disorder is still present in the world.
While Jesus sleeps, this force of chaos can creep back into the world, and the disciples despair. They are like the seeds that Jesus has described earlier that day, that fall upon the stony ground. They blossom initially, but then when the hard times come, they despair and wither away. Maybe this time he is only sleeping for three hours; later he will be gone for three days.
When Jesus awakes, he is able to still the storm with a word. The chaos is still obedient to the word of God. The disciples ask themselves who Jesus is, but the scriptures already give them the answer. Only God has the power that even the wind and the waves obey instantly. This is not just a miracle, or a show of magical power. This is a direct affirmation of divinity – Jesus showing that he is indeed God, for only God has that total power over all of creation.
So what can this story say to us, who are not there in the boat, with Jesus sleeping on the cushion?
We too are beset with the forces of disorder and chaos in this world that God created to be ordered and peaceful.
Sometimes, for us too, it feels like the waves are breaking over our boat and that we are rapidly shipping water.
We feel like we are at the mercy of events that we have no control over.
Sometimes the storm calms; sometimes we feel like we are bailing for ever; sometimes it feels like the boat sinks.
We have to remember that God’s love for us is infinite, even greater than the number of fish in the sea. We may exhaust the fish of the sea, which would be a terrible sin, but even then, we would not exhaust God’s love for us and for all of his creation.
The early church often used the image of a boat to symbolise the church. They too felt that they were beset by storms. They prayed to God to be saved from the torments of the world.
A boat is a very apt metaphor, because everyone in it is in it together. They are, as the saying goes, ‘all in the same boat’.
Genesis 2, in its story of creation, emphasises the role that God has given us as stewards of creation. Salvation may be personal, through faith, but it is also corporate as well. If the boat sinks, we will all drown.
Salvation is not an individual act. We are not saved and go to heaven. Salvation is communal – there will be a new earth as well as a new heaven – there needs to be an earth to be reborn. And in that new earth, there will be no temple, for God will dwell amongst us. And there will be no more sea.