I
read a quote recently, about the difference between religiosity and
spirituality. The person describing the difference said a religious person is
someone sitting in church thinking about fishing, and a spiritual person is
someone who sits in a fishing boat thinking about God. A spiritual person
practices entering God’s presence wherever they are; whether that be in
traffic, at work, volunteering, dealing with children, sitting in the doctor’s
office, really wherever we find ourselves. That distinction was helpful. I was
also reading a devotional the other day from a monk who made recognizing God’s
presence His focus wherever he was, like when fishing or going about whatever
duties we do. Knowing that God is with us is one thing; actively seeking His
will in each moment is a discipline, but a discipline that starts with the
recognition that God is with us.
The
flip side of this practice of recognizing God’s presence wherever we are is
that there is no place where God is not; there is no place God will not go with
us. To the far ends of the earth, to the very depths of our pain and
frustration; God is there, and not only there, He gives help to the hopeless
and hope to the helpless. I am always amazed that the Creator of the universe
gets into our lives with us; I always think that’s amazing and wonderful. It is
my belief that as we practice recognizing Jesus more, as we turn our focus off
of ourselves in the situations where we are, and turn towards Jesus, the more
we see Him acting in our lives, the more we see what He is doing to come
alongside us.
Our
passage this morning is Mark 6:45-52.
Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of
him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. 46 After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.
47 When
evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land.
48 He saw the disciples
straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth
watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to
pass by them, 49 but when
they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, 50 because they all saw him and were
terrified.
Immediately
he spoke to them and said, “Take courage! It is I.
Don’t be afraid.” 51 Then
he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were
completely amazed, 52 for
they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened. [1]
Let’s pray.
First off, let me give you some context to this passage.
Mark is the gospel that was written first, and was likely used as the basis for
both Luke and Matthew as they expanded their descriptions of what happened when
God walked the earth, when Jesus was alive. Mark is a fun book because in it
everything happens at once. I’ve described it to our small group in this way;
the perspective Mark brings to the story of Jesus life is like looking through
a high powered camera lens. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but a high
powered lens tends to visually shorten the distance between objects. Two
objects may be hundreds of yards apart, one before the other, but the long
distance lenses collapse that distance. Same with Mark; his way of telling the
story of Jesus collapses the distance between events in Jesus life. One of
Mark’s favorite words is “immediately”. Everything happens “at once” or
“without delay” or “immediately” in Mark. There isn’t the space between events
that there is in the other gospels. In any situation, Jesus has been teaching
and healing people. He has been traveling throughout Galilee; about the mission
of proclaiming the kingdom of Heaven is at hand in Himself.
As a part of that proclamation, Jesus had been teaching
when everyone noticed they were hungry, and the only food around was 5 loaves
of bread and two fish. Jesus used that little amount of food to create more and
feed the 5000 men, which meant that the total number fed was likely double that
or more because wives and children weren’t counted. Adult men mattered,
everyone else was of less importance in that society. Fresh off that
experience, a demonstration that Jesus commands the physical properties of the
world and is able to create something out of nothing, Jesus is going to
demonstrate His further authority over the forces of nature.
So the passage begins with Jesus sending the disciples
away from the place where they had fed all those people, on their way to
another town called Bethsaida, which was on the North east coast of the sea of
Galilee. Jesus, after doing a miracle in one place, a big miracles like feeding
that many people, tends to not stay in that place for too much longer. The
people have seen what He can does, and who He is, I think, so He pushes on.
Immediately
Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida,
while he dismissed the crowd. 46 After
leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.
Jesus had a very close relationship with God the Father,
and He spent a considerable amount of time in prayer. But it wasn’t the type of
prayer the religious hierarchy in Israel would pray. They used to prayer in the
city squares, long eloquent prayers shouted toward the sky in full view of
everyone, so everyone would be impressed with their words and their prayer
life. Jesus modeled and prayer life that was just the opposite; a prayer life
with just Himself and the Father. That type of prayer is still important;
private time in prayer with our heavenly Father. If you are depending on the
prayer time we have here during church, just on Sundays, you are going to feel
dry and distant in your relationship with God the Father.
I guess it is part of my job to sell people on the
advantages of daily prayer times, and daily times of reading Scripture. I wish
we were more passionate and excited to read God’s Word; like people had been
for a millenia and a half before the Bible was translated into local languages.
We have God’s Word, and we have access to our Heavenly Father through prayer,
and yet getting folks to read the Bible and pray is almost like pulling teeth.
That shouldn’t be. I don’t want to get off topic onto a rant here, so I’ll just
say Jesus prayed on a regular basis to the Father; and it should be good enough
for us to do that as well.
When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was
alone on land. 48 He saw the
disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the
fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was
about to pass by them, 49 but
when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried
out, 50 because they all saw
him and were terrified.
The
fourth watch would have been getting on towards twilight, the very last part of
the night. Jesus has sent the disciples on before Him, but He looked out and
saw that they hadn’t gotten very far. The wind was against them, and often the
wind blows the top layer of water in the same direction, so they were rowing
against the wind and the current of the water. Effectively, they had been
rowing all night, trying to get to Bethsaida. I’m sure they were tired, having
missed a night of sleep in addition to trying to row for 6 or more hours. Jesus
needs to get to Bethsaida too, He’s going to meet them there. But Jesus is
traveling differently, walking on the water, not rowing through it. Because He
can, I suppose. Heck, if I could walk on water, every time I could I would.
Wouldn’t need a ferry to get over to Fire Island. Wouldn’t need a boat to go
deep sea fishing; I can think of a lot of advantages walking on water could
bring.
And
so Jesus is about to pass the boat by, skating across the top of the water. The
disciples are awake, and see Him. They cry out in fear, because they see
something that doesn’t compute, it doesn’t work in the world they know. No one
walks on water. And fishermen are notoriously superstitious, so the cry to ‘watch
out for the ghost’ doesn’t surprise me. To me, that is a normal way to respond
to an abnormal happening. I think we all would do the same, we would have had
the same reaction, to be terrified. There is a lot in this world that terrifies
us. People have always been afraid of the unknown, whether it is the future, or
of suffering and how bad that might be, or simply of relationships that are
unknown. There is a lot unknown in this world, and a lot to be terrified of.
Not that we should be terrified, but we simply are. It is a normal human
reaction when we are facing becoming parents, or watching our kids do something
dangerous, or perhaps we are facing a surgery or medical procedure, or maybe we
are beyond medical procedures. Being scared is something we shouldn’t be, and
we know this intellectually because we know God is with us, but the reality is
that we are scared.
This is an uncertain world, where the next year, next month even tomorrow isn’t promised. We trust people we don’t know everyday with our lives, and we do it so often we don’t think about it. We trust people to stay on their side of little yellow line on the pavement. We trust doctors to be confident, people who fix our brakes to know what they are doing, but in the end this world can be a scary place where anything can happen. We can spend years rowing against the world, against the problems this world presents us. We can spend years being afraid of Jesus, and what His presence in our lives might mean. We can spend years fighting against God and His will for our lives, and it might feel like we’re rowing against the current and against the wind at night. The disciples perhaps even were at the end of the rope, up all night rowing as hard as they could, and still within sight of the shore where Jesus was. We’re never out of sight from God. Maybe you’re feeling like that today; tired, exhausted like you’ve been awake for day fighting against the world. I have good news for you; Jesus sees you, Jesus walks toward us to be with us, even over the water He walks toward us. Jesus has been through Hell for us, walking on water is nothing compared to that. Jesus went through Hell for you, so walking on the water is nothing.
Immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take
courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” 51 Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind
died down. They were completely amazed, 52 for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts
were hardened.
I think this is the
excellent part of this passage. Jesus responds to their fear immediately.
Immediately He comes to them, shows the disciples that it is He Himself. He
sees them, responds to their fear by showing Himself, and then He gets in the
boat. Jesus sees that they are having trouble and He gets into the boat with
them. Jesus does that so well, hops right into where we are, whatever our
troubles are, and there He is. One of Jesus’ titles is Emmanuel, literally, God
with us. Here we see how God was with the disciples in the midst of their
troubles, at the end of a long night of rowing, exhausted, perhaps frustrated
and angry that the trip had taken so long, that they seem to have labored all
night and produced almost nothing. They really hadn’t gotten very far at all,
they had struggled and fought and produced very little. But now Jesus was in
the boat with them, God had consented to join them, and life got easier.
The wind died down, it
stopped pushing the water current against the boat, Jesus was with them. The
fighting against nature was over, God won. Jesus had proved He was in control
of nature with the loaves and the fish, but the disciples still hadn’t gotten
the message. They still didn’t understand who had been preaching, who had been
healing, who had gotten into the boat with them. God Almighty was walking past
them on the water and got into their little boat with them. The God who created
the universe, from one end to the other, millions of light years of space and
time, with physical mysteries that we don’t understand and perhaps never will,
that God was walking across the lake and got into the boat with them.
And it is that God who
offers to get into our boats, our lives as we live through trying times. As we
live life in the new century, struggling with the same old problems, God sees
us, God knows us, and God offers to get in the boat with us and live through
whatever problems life is throwing at us. Does that mean Christians get to
leave the boat and walk off over the water into a pain-free future where
nothing ever happens wrong, where we are treated as royalty? Of course not. In
fact, we are told that life won’t be easy. There will be trials and
temptations, there will be times that try means souls. But the good news is
that God has promised to never leave us or forsake us and will not give us what
we cannot handle in this life, at least what we cannot handle with Him in our
boat.
The disciples had to
keep rowing, they were still on the water, at night, still tired from a long
night spent rowing against the current, they were still in the boat. But there
was something different. Jesus showed up, told them to buck up, to take
courage, and then He got in the boat with them. There is something about God’s
presence that makes the hard times in life withstandable, or survivable or
endurable. God’s presence makes a difference. It always has. God’s presence
made Moses job bearable, from confronting Pharaoh to enduring the whining
Israelites in the desert. God’s presence made the prophets of the OT able to
withstand the scorn and physical abuse by their countrymen. God’s presence in a
stable meant that God would be with us, one of us, and that should make life
endurable. When Jesus left the earth, the Holy Spirit was sent in His place to
be Emmanuel, to be literally, God with us. We serve a God who gets in the boat
with humanity, and more importantly, gets in the boat with you.
I want to end with a
personal story. There have been times when I have been really low, times when
keeping going seemed to be the hardest thing I had been asked to do. At one of
those times, between graduating from seminary and being called here, I received
a letter from a church that was very encouraging, and made me smile. I don’t
remember what it was about the letter specifically, or who the letter was from,
but I do remember sensing God’s presence very strongly, and that God was
enjoying the letter I had received too. It was almost like there was a private
joke between me and Him, something that He enjoyed very much. And I knew God
was still caring for me, still with me even though my circumstances hadn’t
changed, it made all the difference to know that God was aware of what was
going on, and still cared. God does care, enough to get in the boat, enough to
become human, enough to die on the cross, enough to offer us His body and His
blood, so that God can be with us in this life, and we can be with Him in the
next.
Let’s pray.