Beyond the Boat

A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

Matthew 8:24-27

In Matthew’s gospel, we have a sense that the disciples understood by now that Jesus had the power to protect them; in Mark’s account, their plea to the sleeping Christ is not one for salvation so much as exasperation at his indifference toward their seemingly impending doom. Only in Matthew’s gospel do the disciples implore, “Lord, save us!” It seems that, whereas Mark’s disciples still seem to be missing the point altogether, Matthew’s disciples have at least grasped that their Master has the ability to rescue them.

And yet, when he calms the tempest, they are amazed. As the footnote in my Bible helpfully points out, the ability to control the sea was a characteristic attributed to divinity (The psalmist marvels, “You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them” [89:9]). It appears that the disciples, having already witnessed Jesus healing the sick and diseased, believed that he would miraculously preserve their bodies in spite of the storm. The possibility that he would be able to rebuke the very winds and waves that threatened them had probably not even entered into their minds. Thus, Jesus criticizes them for having “little faith.”

Often I find myself slipping into this same fallacious line of thought. Though I’m aware that God has the power to free me from my troubles and concerns, I stubbornly attempt to confine that power to my own relatively narrow point of view. I struggle for solutions, wondering why God isn’t intervening in the ways that seem most obvious, forgetting, for all intents and purposes, that the one I serve has absolute authority over the entirety of space-time.

Christ was aware that God’s ways are beyond the obvious and the immediately relevant. In the desert, he was faced with the temptation of demonstrating evidence of his divine heritage rather than placing absolute faith in God’s Word (Matthew 4:1-11). And yet he chose to let God be God. To the tempter’s seemingly harmless proposal that Jesus “command these stones to become loaves of bread,” Jesus invokes scripture that points to his unwavering faith in God’s preeminence: “One does not live by bread alone; but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Through Christ’s example, we are challenged to not be misled by easy or “obvious” solutions and to remember that God’s word is sufficient.

At Taizé, I entered into silence hoping that God would use that time to provide me with specific guidance as to what I should do with my future; but I came out of it, instead, with an abounding sense of freedom from worrying about the future or the past and with the hope that, despite my circumstances, I could always find peace in God’s unfailing Love. In the middle of the chaos and anxieties of our jobs, our relationships, our personal struggles for meaning and purpose, we cry to God for redemption. And God replies, “Why are you afraid?” Though we may believe, in principal, that God has the power to rescue us from anything, we are called to expand that belief beyond our own grasp of the situation, to have faith in a Savior who operates outside our realm of understanding and to know that he can not only protect the wellbeing of the people in the boat; he can calm the storm.