Review

Can you believe it?  We’ve been studying Mark’s Gospel together for about twenty weeks (including the time we spent in meetings at my house before the COVID-19 crisis began)!  Maybe it’s time to pause for a few moments and take stock.  Where have we come from?  What have we seen?  Where are we now, and where are we headed?  Here’s an overview. 

We’ve talked about the advent of the Arche of the Good News of Jesus Christ (1:1) – the only authority to which any of us owe absolute allegiance and obedience.  As a matter of fact, we’ve said that authority and allegiance are key themes in the Gospel of Mark.  Accordingly, we’ve seen this Arche step onto the stage of the world and into direct and immediate conflict with other “arkys” or “principles of governance” that want to control us:  family, tradition, the state, civil government, and the religious establishment to name a few.  We’ve seen Jesus confront each one of these “arkys” with His bold claim to unrivaled sovereignty.  We’ve watched Him demonstrate His dominion over every competitor, from physical illness to demonic “powers and principalities” (Ephesians 6:12) to the Law of Moses to natural family ties.  And we’ve heard Him articulate His message of the kingdom through a series of parables and analogies – parables that underscore the ironic, ambiguous, subtle, paradoxical, and irrepressible nature of the kingdom of God. 

Now it’s time for Jesus to stop teaching for a while and shift back into action mode.  In the passages that follow, He will once again show us by way of His mighty deeds how the principles set forth in the parables apply to the real world.  This shift of emphasis is important, for as the apostle Paul says, “The kingdom of God does not consist in words, but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:5).              

New Horizons:  Verses 35-36

35 On the same day, when evening had come, He said to them, “Let us cross over to the other side.” 36 Now when they had left the multitude, they took Him along in the boat as He was.  And other little boats were also with Him.[i]

Up to this point, Jesus’ ministry has taken place primarily in and around Capernaum, a town on the northwest shore of Lake Galilee.  At this point in the narrative the Master has just finished presenting a series of parables from His seat in a fishing boat at the edge of the lake.  As the crowd disperses and the sun sinks below the horizon, He says to His companions, “Let’s cross over to the other side.”  It seems like a small thing, but it’s the launching point for the next episode, and it’s worth pausing over for several reasons.

First, as my friend Richard Harris (a “remote” member of our group since the beginning of the pandemic) has reminded me, this word of Jesus deserves notice because “this is what He told them to do and they, in obedience, went about it.”[ii]  They might have balked, but they didn’t.  Their unquestioning cooperation is perhaps all the more remarkable in that Jesus doesn’t tell them what He intends to do on the other side of the lake or why He wants to go there now, with darkness coming on.  The disciples probably thought it was a crazy idea, but they put out from shore anyway.  And that’s a good thing.  Apparently they were already learning that Jesus sometimes asks us to do unreasonable things.      

Second, any objections they might have expressed would have been more than justified.  Violent storms are frequent occurrences on Lake Galilee.  As N. T. Wright explains, “To this day, the car parks on the western shore have signs warning drivers of what happens in high winds.  The sea can get very rough very quickly, and big waves can swamp cars parked on what looked like a safe beach.”[iii]  It’s true that Peter and his fellow fishermen often plied their trade at night despite the threat of sudden squalls; but they probably kept fairly close to land in case of emergencies.  In any case, it’s almost certain that they would never have considered sailing all the way over to the southeast shore – a distance of about ten miles – at night and in the dark.  That’s something they probably wouldn’t have done at any time.

This leads to the third point.  “The other side” was not friendly territory.  It was Gentile country – part of the Decapolis or “Ten Towns,” a loose coalition of Hellenistic cities operating under the suzerainty of the Roman Empire and forming a part of the Province of Syria.  We’ll come back to this when we talk about what happened after Jesus got there.  But for now it’s worth mentioning that the apostle Paul wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of evangelizing non-Jews.  Here, in the very earliest stages of His ministry, it’s Jesus Himself who makes the decision to take the message of the kingdom to “those other people.”  And in so doing He strikes a fatal blow at spiritually sanctioned jingoism, separatism, racism, ethno-centrism, and nationalistic loyalty.  Biblically speaking, if any group of people ever possessed the slightest justification for such loyalties and prejudices, it was the Israelites, the Chosen (by the way, Americans aren’t even in the running).  But Jesus nips this kind of thing in the bud when He says, “Let’s cross over to the other side.”                  

Finally, as Richard has also pointed out, part of the irony of the situation lies in the fact that the disciples’ unexpressed misgivings prove to be well-founded.  As it happens, they do run into a storm.  It’s a bad one, too, with violent winds whipping down from the Golan Heights, stirring up waves more than sufficient to overwhelm a twenty-five to thirty-foot fishing boat.  As it turned out, “The thing they feared had overtaken them” (Job 3:25).  If they’d had the presence of mind, they might have said to Jesus, “We knew it would turn out this way!”  The point, as Richard expresses it, is that “sometimes when God tells us to do something, we will encounter problems.”  This is part of the irony and ambiguity of the kingdom.  There are no guarantees.                   

Asleep in the Storm:  Verses 37-38

37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling. 38 But He was in the stern, asleep on a pillow.  And they awoke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”

I just said, “There are no guarantees.”  I’m going to take that back.  There is one.  Just one.  And it is the guarantee that Jesus Himself will be with us no matter what kind of problems or storms we may encounter (Hebrews 13:5).  What’s more, He isn’t worried about the situation.  It’s of no great concern to Him how bad it looks.  He’s there, sleeping on a pillow in the stern, for all the world like a child who doesn’t know the meaning of words like “danger”, “death”, “fear”, or “responsibility”.  These things don’t exist for Him, because, as God, He is Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Author and Creator of all things.  But it would be equally correct to say that these things don’t exist for Him because, as a human being, He has perfect confidence in the watch-care of His Father. 

In this, Jesus does not differ from you or me.  Theoretically speaking, we can have that same confidence.  And yet, as we know all too well, He is in fact very different from us in this regard, for most of us (myself at the top of the list) find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to exercise that kind of trust.  In fact, we don’t understand it.  From our perspective, to sleep in the midst of the storm is dereliction of duty.  After all, it’s our job to fret and fume when things get tough.  If we don’t do it, who will?  Certainly not Jesus.

And so the disciples, in a flush of righteous indignation, actually rebuke Jesus.  They call Him on the carpet and blame Him for His “lackadaisical” attitude.  “Don’t you care that we are going to die?” they shout.  He’s there, He’s with them in the situation, yet they still feel entitled to accuse Him of not caring.  It’s a familiar scenario.                    

“I can almost see Peter standing there, with a spare bucket ready to hand it to Jesus – as if to say, ‘The least you can do is help us bail the boat!’  Peter and the others had an idea of how they were going to save themselves and they wanted Jesus to help them with their plan.  That’s just how we are.  We have our own plans, and our prayers are asking God to endorse and cooperate with them.  ‘Oh God, we say, here is my strategy, now won’t you bless it?  I know it’s a really good idea!’  We presume to tell God how he should manage our problems.  But of course, God is not limited by our imaginations, nor is he obliged to respect our comfort zone.”[iv]                  

The Word of Authority:  Verse 39

39 Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace, be still!”  And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.    

But Jesus doesn’t need a bailing scoop.  Neither is He concerned with our well-laid plans for survival and self-deliverance.  There’s just one thing He requires, and it’s the very thing we’ve been talking about ever since we started studying Mark’s Gospel some twenty weeks ago:  the Authority He wields as the Absolute, Indisputably Sovereign Arky of God.  There’s a sense in which the book of Mark is all about this Authority.  And Jesus demonstrates it here in a powerful, unforgettable way.          

To the storm He says, “Peace!  Be still!”  Or, in Wright’s translation, “Silence!  Shut up!”  And instantly there is a “great calm.”  

N. T. Wright introduces his discussion of this passage by saying, “This tale … isn’t just about danger and rescue.”[v]  He’s right.  More than anything else, it’s about the irrefutable Authority of Jesus.  And the context in which it makes its claim is all the more powerful by reason of its associations with profound and ancient biblical imagery. 

The sea, for ancient Israelites, was always a place of dark, primal evil:  the home of monsters (e.g., Isaiah 27:1; Revelation 13:1); the source of tumults and disasters (Psalm 65:7); an obstacle and an enemy to be conquered, parted, and pushed aside by the power of the Lord (Exodus 14:21).  The readers of Mark’s narrative, like the disciples in the boat, would have had all this at the back of their minds as they heard the wind roar and saw the waves pounding against the bulwarks of the ship.  And when the storm fell still at Jesus’ command, they could not have failed to remember passages such as Psalm 89:9 (“Thou dost rule the swelling of the sea; when its waves rise, Thou dost still them”) or Psalm 107:29 (“He caused the storm to be still, so that the waves of the sea were hushed”).  The implications would have been inescapable.                      

Fear and Fear:  Verses 40-41

40 But He said to them, “Why are you so fearful?  How is it that you have no faith?” 41 And they feared exceedingly, and said to one another, “Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!”

“Who can this be?”  My friend Richard says that this is one of the profoundest questions in the entire Bible:  a question that cuts to the heart of who we are and what our lives in this world are all about.  Who indeed is this Jesus who, on the one hand, looks, acts, and sounds like one of us, and yet, on the other hand, rules the forces of nature by the power of His word?  According to the testimony of the Scriptures, there is only one possible answer:  He must be God in the flesh:  YHWH Himself. 

No wonder the fear they felt in the presence of the forces of mere nature (Greek deilia, a “cringing cowardice”) is transformed on the spot into the dread and awe (Greek phobos, “a fear which inspires flight”) that we all must experience when suddenly confronted with the reality of the Supernatural – what Rudolf Otto calls the “Numinous”[vi].  According to Otto, it is this elemental “creature feeling” – the only appropriate response to an encounter with the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans[vii] – that forms the foundation of all true spiritual experience and changes our day-to-day existence into a never-ending adventure.

And no wonder Jesus chides them, though ever so gently, with the words, “How is it that you have no faith?”  How indeed?  Given everything they’d seen – and everything we’ve read – up to this point, they should have known better.  But they didn’t.  Somehow or other, they still didn’t get it.  And they wouldn’t for some time to come.    

Final Thoughts

I’m going to give my friend Richard the last word on this week’s study:

“Who is this God we follow?  The answer to that question is of paramount importance.  Is He really who He claims to be:  the maker of trillions of stars, untold worlds across the universe, sovereign of the trillions of cells in each of our bodies; the one who knows every hair on our head by its number, all 100,000 of them, ours and all eight billion others with whom we share this little blue planet?  Who is this, that all these things obey Him?  Ought we not, as the old hymn goes ‘Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey?’”

---

[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from The New King James Version. 

[ii] I should mention right up front that I’m indebted to Richard for a number of excellent insights into the deeper implications of this passage.

[iii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 51.

[iv] More from Richard.

[v] Wright, p. 51.

[vi] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Chapter II, “Numen and the Numinous.”

[vii] Ibid., Chapter IV, “Mysterium Tremendum.”