God's presence is perplexing

45 Right then, Jesus made his disciples get into a boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake, toward Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. 46 After saying good-bye to them, Jesus went up onto a mountain to pray. 47 Evening came and the boat was in the middle of the lake, but he was alone on the land. 48 He saw his disciples struggling. They were trying to row forward, but the wind was blowing against them. Very early in the morning, he came to them, walking on the lake. He intended to pass by them. 49 When they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost and they screamed.50 Seeing him was terrifying to all of them. Just then he spoke to them, “Be encouraged! It’s me. Don’t be afraid.” 51 He got into the boat, and the wind settled down. His disciples were so baffled they were beside themselves. 52 That’s because they hadn’t understood about the loaves. Their hearts had been changed so that they resisted God’s ways.

~ Mark 6:45-52, CEB

A few verses before these, Jesus broke a small amount of bread into enough pieces to feed five thousand people. That act was a sign of God’s kingdom breaking into the world through Jesus. The disciples noticed that a miracle happened, to be sure, but, according to these verses, they didn’t grasp the significance. They didn’t connect the action of the miracle to what it means for Jesus to be God in the flesh. Again, that’s understandable, it’s a pretty huge leap to make. But their inability to see and understand caused problems for them down the road. They couldn’t see God at work in the feeding story, and they can’t recognize God’s presence in Jesus as he walks on the water. What does this lead to? Bewilderment.

God’s presence truly is rather bewildering. When we see it or experience it, it’s hard to come up with a proper explanation. Sometimes things can be explained, and sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they are simply acts of God. Skepticism, in our day, is extremely popular. Some skepticism is a good thing. Too much, perhaps, leads to a certain hardness of the heart.

Do we have some responsibility for the ways in which we fail to recognize God’s action or see him at work? Possibly, though I’m not particularly fond of the blame game. I’ll say more on this tomorrow.

It's not easy to trust God during chaos

45 Right then, Jesus made his disciples get into a boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake, toward Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. 46 After saying good-bye to them, Jesus went up onto a mountain to pray. 47 Evening came and the boat was in the middle of the lake, but he was alone on the land. 48 He saw his disciples struggling. They were trying to row forward, but the wind was blowing against them. Very early in the morning, he came to them, walking on the lake. He intended to pass by them. 49 When they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost and they screamed.50 Seeing him was terrifying to all of them. Just then he spoke to them, “Be encouraged! It’s me. Don’t be afraid.” 51 He got into the boat, and the wind settled down. His disciples were so baffled they were beside themselves. 52 That’s because they hadn’t understood about the loaves. Their hearts had been changed so that they resisted God’s ways.

~ Mark 6:45-52, CEB

Here’s another boat/water story from Mark.

Jesus has done a few more miraculous healings since we last saw him on a boat with the disciples (not including the miracle on the boat itself). So, they should be even more clear as to who he is, what he has the capacity to do, etc. This passage, like the other, shows Jesus as someone more than human. Will the disciples be able to recognize that?

The focal point of this boat story is not Jesus calming the winds the disciples were up against but, instead, Jesus himself walking on the water. Evidently, they didn’t recognize him and thought he was a ghost. Their response? Fear. Once again. Even when they realized that the “ghost” was Jesus, they were still “beside themselves” and “baffled”. How could they not know or understand? Verse 52 says they hadn’t understood about the loaves. Just before this, Jesus had performed the famous miracle of feeding the five thousand, and I guess the disciples still didn’t quite grasp the nature of who he was. Because of that, they’re afraid. Because of that, it seems, their hearts became hard.

There’s a lot going on here, and we’ll look at it over a few days. The first thing that stands out to me is the disciples’ inability to recognize the true power of God and to submit to it, and trust it. Granted, I’m not sure I would have done any better in the circumstances. It’s not easy trust in God’s power when our lives are in chaos.

I mean, I have access to the whole story and I’m still no better at trust or managing fear.

Don't pay attention to scare tactics

Fear has always been a really effective tool for getting people to do what you want. Entire governments have operated under this principle. Parents have employed this technique with great success. I know many parents who have told their kids that if they pee in the pool then a red ring will appear, letting everyone know what they’ve done (I think I’m going to do this- it’s funny). The media has made liberal use of fear in our country. Political discourse is based on fear (“if you take the other guy’s stance, then our country will be destroyed”). Churches have also kept fear-based tactics en vogue. Some frame salvation in terms of fear (“if you don’t pray this prayer, then God will burn you in hell”). Or, they take a page out of the political book (“if we accept a certain kind of person in the church, then God will burn us in hell”).

Faith communities simply should not be run like the media or governments. It should not be a place where the leaders use tactics to make subtle power plays to get people to do what they want. I once heard a pastor say, “If you say what you want forcefully enough, and repeat it enough times, eventually people will do what you want.” That isn’t what faith is about (that pastor recently left ministry, thankfully). Faith is not about making a name for ourselves, or building a legacy, or getting fame or fortune. So many leaders have used fear-based tactics to do this for themselves. And you know what? Shame on them. Because what we see here in this passage is a direct contradiction to that. We see, as we’ve said, a God who offers us an alternative life to one of fear. One in which we place our ultimate trust in our higher power, not something else. We discern, together, what’s good for a community. We don’t listen to people who make us afraid so that they can get their own psychological cravings met. That nonsense needs to stop.

I want that alternative life. One where I see a bigger picture. One where I understand that I’m not in charge of the universe and that the world does not revolve around me, and that my community does not revolve around me. One in which we reject power dynamics and power plays in favor of working together to submit to God and follow his voice and call. I don’t want a life where I’m constantly making certain choices because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t.

And, as far as I can tell, God doesn’t want that either.

There's no shame in being afraid

35 Later that day, when evening came, Jesus said to them, “Let’s cross over to the other side of the lake.” 36 They left the crowd and took him in the boat just as he was. Other boats followed along. 37 Gale-force winds arose, and waves crashed against the boat so that the boat was swamped. 38 But Jesus was in the rear of the boat, sleeping on a pillow. They woke him up and said, “Teacher, don’t you care that we’re drowning?” 39 He got up and gave orders to the wind, and he said to the lake, “Silence! Be still!” The wind settled down and there was a great calm. 40 Jesus asked them, “Why are you frightened? Don’t you have faith yet?” 41 Overcome with awe, they said to each other, “Who then is this? Even the wind and the sea obey him!”

~ Mark 4:35-41, CEB

What were the disciples supposed to do? I mean, the boat is on the lake, in the middle of a storm, about to capsize, and Jesus implies that their response, fear, is the wrong response. Why is that wrong? Wouldn’t we be afraid in the same situation?

Yes, absolutely, but here’s the thing: we’re not in their situation. By this point in the story, the disciples (many of them, anyway) have seen Jesus at work. They’ve seen his miracles, and the things he’s capable of. They’ve seen enough to know that he is worth trusting, and that he is a very unique kind of prophet, at the very least. (Let’s give them some grace for not fully understanding he was God in the flesh. Let’s face it, that’s a hard conclusion to jump to). In other words, they should have some idea of who is in the boat (though let’s not be too harsh either, Jesus is one-of-a-kind). Perhaps their response should have been, “Jesus, we’ve seen the works of your hands, we know what you can do, would you please help us out of this jam?” Who can really say?

But my point is this: we don’t have Jesus in the flesh who we can reach over and wake up and ask to solve our problems. Our circumstances are different. So we need not shame ourselves over a “lack of faith” or some such thing when we experience fear and anxiety. Instead, we pause to prepare. Then, we go before God and community and open up about our fears. We don’t tell ourselves, “Well Jesus said just have more faith so I just need to have more faith.”

No, we don’t shame ourselves. We don’t tell ourselves we just need to do better. We rely on others. We practice seeing God through others. We take our fears to others and trust them to sit with us in our fear. Maybe this helps us with our fear, maybe it doesn’t, but it will at least provide us with a few moments where we are surrounded by God’s love.

Submitting God to our Fear

From yesterday: Too often we submit God to our fear, rather than the other way around.

I heard a story once of a family whose daughter had some health problems. She had to have some tests done and, fearing the worst, the family was quite anxious about the potential news. One day they got a call from the doctor’s office, and they let it go to voicemail. The family was absolutely convinced that it was bad news (re: fear). Why were they convinced? I have no idea, but the family was so convinced that it was bad news that they sat down to pray that God change the test results from bad news into good news. They then called the doctor back and found that the news was, in fact, good. They were convinced their prayers had worked.

This is an odd story to me. I believe God is capable of doing those kinds of things, if he wants. He’s powerful enough. But it seems that this family subjected God to their fear, rather than subjecting their fear to God. They could have taken a step back and realized that they were viewing their circumstances through a lens of fear, then confidently answered the phone because they trust that God gives us an alternative way to live.

With God, we can confront good news and bad news alike. Instead, they wanted God to “change” the news. The fear told them that the news couldn’t possibly be good. And, I think, this is a way of saying that faithful people should not get bad news- and so we should pray when we’re afraid of bad news that news be changed to good news.

Faith tells us that there are many possibilities.