In today’s Gospel lesson from Mark 4:35-41, we hear about Jesus and the disciples caught in a storm while crossing the Sea of Galilee. In the middle of the storm, Jesus is in the back of the boat taking a nap. The disciples ask him, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing?” And Jesus wakes up and says to the storm, “Peace, be still.”
The disciples are relieved, but they also ask, “Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?” As Jesus demonstrates God’s power over the chaos of the wind and sea, we wonder the same question. Who is this Jesus we follow? Where is he in the storms of our lives?
Today’s other Scripture readings are Job 38:1-11 and Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32. Portions of this sermon are adapted from my sermon on these texts from June 23, 2018, for which I found helpful Professor Matt Skinner’s comments on WorkingPreacher. Here’s the worship livestream from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
If you were here last week or you watched or listened online to last week’s sermon, you might remember I talked about the ordinariness of Jesus’ parable.
He said the kingdom of God is like if a farmer scatters some seed, and then leaves it alone. God’s kingdom grows in the midst of everyday life. It’s not usually dramatic; it’s often hard to see in the moment.
I stand by truth of everything I said last week; it was kind of a boring parable. And then we get today’s story. This is one of those stories that loses something from its familiarity. Of course Jesus can calm storms.
I have VBS on my mind today – did any of you learn this story as kids in VBS or Sunday School? It’s a great story for kids – you get everyone to sit really close together and make storm noises, then someone gets to be Jesus and tell the storm to be quiet.
But imagine if you didn’t know this story. Imagine if you were one of the disciples experiencing it.
There are two questions the disciples ask in this story, and I want to look at both of them with you this morning, but I want to start with the second, the question the disciples ask in the last verse.
After Jesus has calmed the storm, Mark writes, “[The disciples] were filled with great fear and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’”
You and I know the answer to that question. We know Jesus is God, so of course he can calm storms. This is not a surprise.
But put yourself in the disciples’ place. Imagine you’ve spent some time following this rabbi—not a ton of time; this is still pretty early in Jesus’ public ministry—but imagine you’ve been following this teacher Jesus, and you know? You’ve learned a lot. He makes God’s kingdom seem real.
He’s been teaching in parables, describing God’s kingdom using images like seeds and lamps and weddings. He’s also done a little faith healing, which was pretty cool. One of the healings was on the Sabbath day, so some of the religious leaders have been grumbling, but the crowds following him just keep getting bigger.
Pastor MaryAnn Dana says, “For all these naive fishermen know, Jesus is a captivating teacher with an unusual ability to connect with people, but nothing more. They have no idea just who he was. When the waves come and threaten to swamp the boat, the disciples expect him to react as they did. In verse 38, they don’t ask him to intervene; what they say is, ‘Do you not care?’ How can he sleep at a time like this?”
But suddenly, they find out Jesus is far more than they realized. “He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And it worked. The sea obeyed.
Even for us, that’s a pretty good miracle. We can do a lot of things that would have amazed the disciples. We can go to space, we can talk to people on the other side of the planet, we have computers, air conditioning, cars, x-ray machines, all kinds of technologies the disciples would never have dreamed of. But we still cannot control the weather.
I’m thinking especially today of people I know who are dealing with flooding right now, in Greene where we used to live, in Sioux Falls, and lots of other places. I’m thinking of Apple Grove Lutheran Church in Argyle, Wisconsin, destroyed last night by a tornado. We can’t control the weather.
And there’s actually more theological significance here than you might realize. Throughout Scripture, the sea represents chaos and disorder. It’s an image that goes all the way back to the creation story.
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. Creation starts with empty, formless chaos, and God brings order to it. God gathers the waters together so the dry land can appear.
At the other end of the Bible, all the way in Revelation 21, listen to how John describes his vision of the final coming of God’s kingdom. “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, the ocean deeps, this symbol of darkness and chaos and monsters and stormy depths, the sea will be no more.
In God’s final, eternal kingdom, there is order, not chaos. There’s still water, but it’s the fresh water of life, flowing from the river of God, not the scary, chaos of the ocean.
Go back to that first reading from Job for a moment. This is towards the end of Job’s story, when after 37 chapters of Job complaining about what God has done to him and demanding that God give him an explanation, God finally answers him.
For three chapters, God argues back to Job that he doesn’t need an explanation and he wouldn’t understand it anyway because Job is only a human and God is God and God’s ways are higher than Job’s reason.
The point is for Job and for us to trust God, to have faith. We’re not going to debate now whether or not Job’s suffering was just or fair.
Instead, look at the language used to prove how powerful God is, right in the middle of that first reading.
God rhetorically asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements? Who laid the cornerstone of the world?”
And then, in verse 8, “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb…and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?”
God sets limits on chaos and boundaries for the sea. We obviously understand the sea and storms and water a lot better today scientifically, but rationally knowing the forecast doesn’t help a whole lot when you’re on a ship caught in a hurricane.
I heard a news story on Friday about Global Hydrography Day (by the way, if you think church holidays are obscure, try celebrating Global Hydrography Day!) anyway, there was a Global Hydrography Day announcement of a new milestone: One quarter of the global seafloor has now been mapped. Just 25%. Remember the tourist sub last year that imploded? The chaos of the sea is still a powerful image.
With all that in mind, go back to the disciples and Jesus in their boat. They’re crossing the Sea of Galilee when a storm comes up. And it’s not just a storm, it’s a “great windstorm.” The Greek word is “megale” – it’s a “mega-storm.” Some of the disciples are professional fishermen, but they’re still terrified. They’re in a small boat, tossed around by the storm, and these men are convinced they’re about to die.
And Jesus is asleep. There’s something symbolic there too, I think.
The first question the disciples ask is, in the King James translation, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” Or, as the more contemporary Easy Readers’ Version puts it, “Teacher, don’t you care about us? We are going to drown!” I think that one’s probably more accurate.
I don’t know if we’re usually so blunt about it, but I think that’s a question most of us have wondered about at some point. Not the drowning part, but the question of whether God cares, or perhaps whether God might be asleep, unreachable, ignoring us.
If you’ve ever looked at the world and wondered where God is, if you’ve ever sat in a hospital room or a graveside, or seen reports of wars or mass shootings, or natural disasters—floods, tornadoes, mudslides—, if you’ve ever gotten a diagnosis and wondered were God is, you’re not alone.
Will Willimon writes, “In scripture, the question is never, ‘Is there a God?’ but rather, ‘Does the God who is there care about us?’” (page 104, Will Willimon’s Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year B, Part 1).
It’s a fair question, and we have an answer. The witness of Scripture is that God is present. God cares.
As we talked about a few weeks ago, even when Adam and Eve rebelled and broke 100% of the commandments they’d been given, God came with them out of the garden. Their sin had consequences; God didn’t immediately fix everything and make it all better, but God refused to give up on them.
The Psalms especially promise God cares, God is involved. One of my favorite, Psalm 121, talks about the Lord neither slumbering nor sleeping. The Lord is your keeper, the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.
Psalm 23 describes the Lord as the good shepherd watching the sheep, leading, protecting.
The Psalm we just read—Psalm 107—describes sailors caught in a storm who were at their wits’ end, who cried to the Lord in their trouble, and the Lord stilled the storm and hushed the waves.
This story of Jesus in the boat is another witness for us. Because Jesus doesn’t stay asleep. The disciples ask him if he cares—again, I don’t think they’re necessarily expecting him to help, but he’s all they’ve got—and he wakes up and does something only God can do.
He says to the sea, to this threatening source of chaos, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. Literally, it’s a great calm, the same word megale that described the storm. A mega-peace.
The disciples ask each other, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Who is this Jesus who has the power that only God has?
This won’t be the first time the disciples ask this kind of question. They won’t truly understand until Jesus demonstrates another power that belongs only to God by rising from the dead. But they’re starting to realize who Jesus is.
As we go through the storms of life, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Jesus is with us. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggles, in our 24 hour news cycle, in the dramatic announcements that keep coming at us and telling us to be outraged over one thing or another, that we miss the most important part of the story. We can trust that Jesus is with us in the boat. We can trust that he cares for us.
God might not act the way we expect. God might not answer for 37 chapters, and we might not understand the answer even when it comes. It might seem like God is asleep. But ultimately, God does answer. Jesus does calm the storm, and he’s the only one who can.
Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him? This is God with us. This is God in the flesh. Jesus is with you on your journey. Amen