It was now dark, and
Jesus had not yet come to them. (John
6:17[RM1] ; cf Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 6:45-52[RM2] [RM3] )
This is another story of the disciples in a storm on Lake
Galilee. Quite recently we touched on a
former event which has Jesus asleep in the boat, they wake him and he commands
the storm to cease.[1] Now, in John’s Gospel, but also in Matthew
and Mark, the disciples are again in a storm on the lake. They are far from land, we are told. The narrators stress, it is dark, the fourth watch of the night, says
Matthew – that is the Roman measurement of time and the 4th watch is
about 3 am, just when everything seems worst, as every insomniac knows. The
wind was against them, we read, they
were making headway painfully, says Mark… beaten by the waves, writes Matthew. So we recognise the despair and fear, the
sense of helplessness, being able to see no way out. This narrative, in all its versions, is
packed with allusion and metaphor, intended to make us think about our own
storms and darkness, to make us use our imaginations, help us to identify with
the inner realities and with Jesus’s presence.
When they see him he is walking on the water. Remember, says John, Jesus himself had been
increasingly troubled and oppressed by the crowds and their demands. The latest was that they had wanted to make
him king, presumably in the place of Herod.
They were calamitously misinterpreting his message – and so Jesus needed
to get away by himself, in the hills on the other side of the lake, away from
the disciples also, for a few hours – he
made them go back across the lake, report Matthew and Mark. Now, in the storm, in the dark, they see him,
but think at first it is a ghost, a phantom.
Curiously, we are even told that Jesus meant to pass them by… A man I talked with has suffered a string of
pointless, cruel setbacks and tragedies, and through it all he has struggled
honestly to do what he can and stay afloat.
But when the latest blow fell he told me how his friends said to him,
“That’s life, mate.” But he said, “It’s
not life, is it -- it’s not a fair go.”
He is in the dark and he is in a storm.
When it is a dark and stormy night you either have a faith
or you don’t. You have either learned
along the way, perhaps long ago, what Jesus means when he asks them why they
are afraid, or you haven’t. You have
either learned that life is not about the self and its survival, or you missed
that somehow, or you rejected it.
Faith is what happens in the dark. It is how we react when we can’t see. It is what is in us, despite all that is
happening. It is where we are when we
shut down the activity, relinquish the control – control that was always
illusory anyway – when we become still and silent, consenting as deeply as we
know in mind and heart to the way of Christ.
And then we may indeed see him, as it were walking on the waves, in the
storm.
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