PUNNY!
Mark 4:35-41; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Psalm 107:1-3,23-32; Job 38:1-11
I love thunderstorms. There’s something about them that is at the same time beautiful and calming yet dangerous and frightening. In fact, one of my favorite things to do, or at least what used to be one of my favorite things to do, was to sit on a porch and enjoy the sound of the rain and watch the light show.
For some people, however, a thunderstorm is not a happy thing, especially if you’re on a boat. The two worst things than can happen to a boat with sails in the middle of a body of water are actually the exact opposite of each other: too much wind and not enough wind. The situation the disciples were in for our gospel lesson today is that of the former. All of a sudden there was just too much wind.
Now, the sea of Galilee is a bit of an oddity among lake-like things. It’s fairly small as lakes go, being thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, a yet still has a maximum depth of a relatively shallow 141 feet. This, combined with it being 693 feet below sea level (making it the lowest freshwater lake on Earth) and being surrounded by mountains, leads to some interesting weather patterns. The cool, dry air of the mountain peaks create some intense storms when it mixes with the warmer, wetter air nearer to the lake, and the shallowness of the lake means some pretty intense waves from the wind coming off the mountains.
Of the group of our disciples, remember that fully a quarter of them — Peter, Andrew, James, and John — are fisherman who lived and worked on this lake. They know full well how dangerous these storms can be, and the gospel tells us this was a pretty severe storm, as the waves “broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped.” At this point the disciples start freaking out, and then discover that through it all, Jesus is sleeping like a stone in the back of the boat.
So, they do what any sensible person would do in this situation — they wake Jesus up to inform him of the situation. Notice what they don’t do; they never ask Jesus to help the situation. No, they simply say, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” Jesus, who at this point had been teaching all day and was rather tired, was resting, and the disciples, convinced that they were going to die, wanted to make sure that Jesus was awake and just as freaked out as they were.
I mean let’s be honest here, there’s nothing worse than when you tell someone about a problem you’re having and they act like it’s not a big deal. We talk about our problems and we essentially want to be acknowledged that, yes, we are encountering a significant problem and we are right to be freaking out about it. That’s just natural humanity coming out.
Yet in the disciples’ case, it wasn’t that Jesus was unaffected by the problem, in fact he simply got up, and said to the wind and waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and the storm passed completely. At this point the disciples, likely with their mouths wide open in astonishment, got to hear Jesus rebuke them, saying, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”
What a thing to say to a bunch of people who were convinced, moments ago, that their deaths were assured. The disciples had no reason to doubt that there was nothing anyone could do with their problem as, of course, no one can control the weather but God. And, in their minds, especially this early in Mark’s Gospel, they had very little reason to see Jesus anyone other than a somewhat eccentric teacher and healer. So when Jesus, somewhat nonchalantly, stood up and made the storm stop, they didn’t know what to do. The only answer, of course, was the one that Peter came up with four chapters later, that Jesus is the Messiah.
We often find ourselves with problems and difficulties that feel like storms swirling about, ready to swamp the boat of our lives and drown us. Yet how often, when we pray about them, do we simply tell God how impossible our situation is and that there’s nothing that can be done? How often do we express the same lack of shown by the disciples and assume that our “storm” is so great that even God can’t fix it.
The thing is, Jesus is all about calming the storms in our lives. And usually the solution is a lot simpler than we expect. The best solution to these problems is to realize that God is trustworthy. Once we really get to that point, and we believe that God means what he says he can do, there are no problems big enough to get in our way. We worship a God who calms storms — there’s nothing He can’t do.