Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
23^rd of June 2024

Mark 4:35-41

One of the last poems that the nineteenth-century British author Emily Bronte wrote begins:

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear.

Sadly, none of Jesus’ disciples was an Emily Bronte.

The story of Jesus calming the storm at sea is one of the most famous of all the miracles. Versions of it are told in all three of the synoptic gospels. (Matthew 8:23–27, Mark 4:35–41, Luke 8:22-25). The miracle of the story, Jesus replacing a great gale with a great calm, is so spectacular that we might lose sight of its setting, the journey to ‘the other side’ of the Sea of Galilee. But both miracle and setting are equally important.

Immediately before this journey Jesus has been teaching the crowd, and we heard some of those teachings last week in two parables about seeds. This block of teaching began in a boat; Mark tells us that Jesus ‘began to teach beside the lake. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the lake and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the lake on the land.’ (Mark 4:1) The beginning of today’s story, ‘And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was,’ suggests that we are meant to think of this happening immediately afterwards. There has been no time for the disciples to forget what they have been taught.

The journey to ‘the other side’ of the Sea of Galilee is deeply significant. Jesus and the disciples are leaving behind the Jewish side of the lake and entering Gentile territory. Symbolically, this is a journey into the unknown, the other. As always it is hard for us as the descendants of the Gentiles to understand just what a daunting prospect this would have been. I am reading a memoir by an anti-Zionist Israeli-American, Miko Peled. He describes his first visit to a majority Palestinian town in Israel, Nazareth, to visit the family of Palestinian Nader Elbanna, with whom he has been working in the USA on projects for Rotary. Miko writes:

Driving from Jerusalem toward the Galilee in the north, the scenery was beautiful … However, as soon as we entered the city of Nazareth, a sense of alienation descended upon me like a dark cloud. The street signs and billboards screamed at me in Arabic. I realized I was surrounded by Arabs, and suddenly everything spelled danger. I was sure that we stood out as clueless foreigners. Still, I couldn’t have put my finger on it, what it was exactly that I feared. Would they (they!) attack us? Was there a mob somewhere waiting to assault Jews? I realize now that, despite my politics, I was indeed afraid, and that this fear existed deep in the recesses of my mind, where I can only guess it was nurtured for years. Moreover, I had to exercise enormous control to prevent it from consuming me.

We looked for the home of Abu Najib, Nader’s oldest uncle, and I soon realized I had no idea how to find it in this city that, at the time, was completely foreign to me.

“We have to stop and ask for directions,” I admitted to Gila reluctantly. My wife looked at me. “But who should we ask? Is it safe for us to get out of the car?”

The thought of admitting we were lost and vulnerable in this seemingly hostile environment seemed tantamount to inviting an assault. In that moment, we became the defenceless Jews that we were brought up to be, just like our forefathers in the ghettos of Eastern Europe.[1]

Nothing happens when he asks for directions, except that he and his wife finally find Abu Najib’s house and participate in a wonderful meal. But when we hear Jesus say to the disciples, ‘Let us go across to the other side,’ imagine a Jewish Israeli traveling to Nazareth.

On the way, a sudden storm blows up, as they so often do on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus sleeps through it because he has the faith in God that enables someone, the psalmist says, to ‘both lie down and sleep in peace’. (Psalm 4:8) The disciples are unimpressed by this and wake him, asking, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ Are they expecting him to be able to save them from the storm? The psalmist also calls on God to awake: ‘Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off for ever!’ (Psalm 44:23) Are the disciples crying the same thing? Or do they merely think that at the very least Jesus can help bail out the boat?

The disciples address Jesus as ‘Teacher,’ but Jesus immediately shows that he is much more. He speaks, rebuking the wind and saying to the sea ‘Peace! Be still!’ and the wind disappears, and the sea becomes still. In the same way that Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit in the synagogue in Capernaum saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!,’ he now rebukes the primordial chaos that is the sea. The one who is stronger is here, the Lord of creation whose voice creates calm.

The disciples obviously do not yet know who this Jesus is. The translation we use says that ‘they were filled with great awe’ but the Greek word translated ‘awe’ is fobos, fear, from which we get the word phobia. It could be that they are feeling the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom, or they could simply be terrified. After all, they are still asking, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ They will not get their answer for some time.

When Jesus asks the disciples, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ the word he uses is not fobos. It is deilos, and it has the implication of cowardly timidity. These are Jesus’ closest disciples, the ones called by him, the ones who are spending all their time with him, the ones to whom he has explained parables in private, the ones who have observed miracles, and yet they are still filled with cowardly terror. They are seeds in rocky ground: ‘when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away’. (Mark 4:16-17)

It is important for us to note what Jesus does not say, as well as what he does. He does not say, ‘There is nothing to fear’. There is something of which to be afraid: the great gale; the waves beating into the boat; the risk of the boat being swamped. Instead, Jesus asks, ‘Have you still no faith?’ The world is full of dangers: Jesus was executed; Mark’s first readers had experienced the Jewish War; Miko Peled’s thirteen-year-old niece was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 1997;[2] more than 15,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel in recent months. Throughout history humans have cried to God, as the disciples did: do you not care that we are going to die? The answer that comes is not, ‘there is nothing to fear’ but ‘do not be afraid’.

‘Do not be afraid’ is the most common instruction in the Scriptures; later in the Gospel according to Mark Jesus will come to the disciples as they are ‘straining at the oars against an adverse wind’ in another boat, walking on the water and saying, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’ (Mark 6:45-52). The world is full of dangers, and we can respond with fear, deilos, or with faith. The source of faith is the knowledge that when the waters seek to swamp us, we are not alone in the boat.

Sometimes, in this life, the waves will overwhelm us. The test will come back positive; our job will be made redundant; the relationship will break down; we will have to give up our independence; those we love will die. But not even as we approach death will we have to face the waves alone. One of my favourite Paul Kelly songs is ‘Deeper Water,’ which describes the different stages of life as going out further into deeper water. In the song those stages include a relationship:

Now the man meets a woman unlike all the rest
He doesn’t know it yet but he’s out of his depth.

They have a child:

Well the years hurry by and the woman loves the man
Then one night in the dark she grabs hold of his hand
Says “There, can you feel it kicking inside!”
And the man gets a shiver right up and down his spine.

But then:

So the clock moves around, and the child is a joy
But Death doesn’t care just who it destroys
Now the woman gets sick, thins down to the bone
She says, “Where I’m going next, I’m going alone”.

I love this song, and because I’m ridiculously sentimental it always makes me cry. When the woman says that she is going into death alone, she is right. No matter how strong the love between her and the man, her and the child, they cannot come with her. We can accompany those we love right up to the threshold of death, but we cannot cross the threshold with them. What today’s story suggests, though, is that she will not be truly alone as she goes into the deeper water of death. Why are we afraid? ‘If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.’ (Romans 14:8) Jesus is in the boat with us.

I began this Reflection by saying that none of Jesus’ disciples was an Emily Bronte. Fear literally has the last word in the Gospel according to Mark: the women ‘went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ (Mark 16:8) But that is not where their story ends. If fear had been the end, we would not be here today. We know that they overcame their fear and found faith, because they passed that faith onto us. Today, when we celebrate the forty-seventh anniversary of the Uniting Church, let us remember all those who sailed before us in the small storm-tossed boat that is the church, the boat that we see in the logo of the Uniting Church and the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches in Australia, all those whose faith overcame their fear. They are the guides and role models on our journey, as we cross to the other side and brave the winds and the waves. They remind us that no matter how small and vulnerable the boat feels, Jesus is in it with us. Amen.

[1] Miko Peled, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (2016), pp. 155-6.

[2] The General’s Son, p. 17.