Sermon: “Who Is This?”

Text: Mark 4:35-41

Trinity Sunday (B)

June 7, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Today in the church calendar we focus on God’s Trinitarian nature.  Psalm 29, which Alan just read and which glorifies God as the one who controls even the raging ocean, is one of the lectionary texts for the day.  Since I already have preached here on the other texts for today, I decided to depart from the lectionary for the preaching text and to select a gospel passage that would compliment Psalm 29.  Thus, our second reading is from Mark’s Gospel—the miracle of Jesus calming the storm.

As Mark tells the story, when Jesus had rebuked the storm and the water was calm, a great awe—a reverent fear—fell upon the disciples who were in the boat with Jesus.  They asked, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”  As many commentators have noted, that question is the key to interpreting the passage.  In Mark’s Gospel it takes a good while before the disciples begin to understand the identity of the one they call “teacher.”  While the demons knew that Jesus was the “Son of God,” and sometimes said it out loud,[1] Jesus consistently referred to himself as “Son of Man,”[2] a somewhat mysterious term from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel.[3]  It is not until the midpoint of the gospel that Peter, the most perceptive of the disciples, figured out that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God.  And so it is that the Gospel according to Mark can be understood as a gradual revelation of Jesus’ identity through the events of his life.  It’s a worthy Trinitarian reflection: even the wind and seas obey this man.  “Who is he?”

Sermon.  On our recent trip to the Holy Land, I was completely unprepared for the beauty of the Sea of Galilee.  Maybe early May is just the best time of year to be there:  the weather was bright and the water calm and blue; a gentle breeze was blowing almost all day long.  In the evening, when our walking and touring was over, Amanda and I enjoyed sitting out on the patio of the German pilgrim hotel where we stayed, watching the shadows gradually fall upon the eastern mountains just across the water.  One morning, at Scott Paul-Bonham’s suggestion, we took at boat ride out upon the Sea of Galilee.  When we reached the middle, the pilot stopped the engines so that we could read the passage from Mark about Jesus’ calming the storm.  On this nice day it was hard to imagine the storm. 

Now, I have to admit that while the beauty of the lake was surprising, so was its small size.  I say “lake” because—despite the biblical name—it really isn’t a sea at all.  Its length from north to south is only about 13 miles, and its width would not exceed 10 miles.  You might compare it to Monroe Lake, just southeast of Bloomington, which is about the same length, although the Sea of Galilee is a good bit wider.  In clear weather it is always possible to see the mountains across the lake, and that feeling of being ringed around by the hills contributed to my perception of the lake as small.  As we read the passage from Mark under sunny skies and gentle breeze, I found myself arguing with the scripture:  “I have been in storms on lakes before.  How bad can a storm get out on this little lake?  And even if the boat capsized, these were fishermen and probably strong swimmers.[4]  Couldn’t they simply have swum ashore?”

Mary, our Palestinian Christian guide, explained; and since we returned I have found support for her explanation in a biblical geography book edited by William and Caroline Dando, of Indiana State University.[5]  The Sea of Galilee is surrounded by mountains.  On both the east and the west, there are narrow mountain passes that give access to the lake.  As the winds from the Mediterranean come from the west, or the winds off the Golan Heights come from the east, they travel through these narrow passes.  When they do, their velocity naturally increases; and they are funneled right down into the lake.  Moreover, in a relatively shallow body of water, like the Sea of Galilee, wind energy quickly creates large waves.  Here’s how a French visitor in 1959 described the phenomenon:

 . . . I witnessed many such storms over the Lake of Galilee, with the waves rising to heights which flung them halfway up the trunks of the shore-side eucalyptus trees, most of those trunks taller than thirty feet, and the silver spray of the flinging waves reaching the delicate down-hanging foliage.

                . . . And people who know the lake well, have told me that storms on the Lake of Galilee are as dangerous as on any sea, possibly more dangerous because the waves have a whirl and a suck in them which overturns boats and drowns bathers. . . . Once when, swimming foolishly far out across the lake, I was caught in a storm.  Fierce gusts of winds had come without reason or warning down from the distant . . . peaks . . .; the wind roared through the hill gullies and the lake waves were soon of a great height, the waters seething and flinging at the rocks along the shore, making return hazardous for any swimmer.[6]

Under conditions such as these, no wonder that even experienced fishermen like the disciples of Jesus would be afraid for their lives.  At the very least, had Jesus not intervened, they would have lost their fishing boat[7]—and thus, their livelihood.

But Jesus did intervene, and a great calm settled upon the lake.  Just as Jesus had already demonstrated his authority by casting out demons and healing the afflicted,[8] now he showed his power over natural forces.  Even in our own age of science, we have never been able to control—or even to predict—the weather.  So even we, who are somewhat jaded by modern advances, would marvel if someone could speak to a violent storm and make it stop.  Surely, Jesus’ disciples were just as amazed.  But for them there was more.  They knew the Old Testament forward and backward.  They probably could have recited Psalm 29 from memory: “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over mighty waters. . . . The Lord sits enthroned over the flood.”  They would remember all the stories connecting God with wonders of nature—the creation itself, when God commanded the waters to go back and the dry land to appear; the great flood of Noah’s time; the parting of the Red Sea; the holding back of the waters of the Jordan; and God’s power to still the storm when the prophet Jonah’s ship was foundering. [9]  Only God can stop a storm, and Jesus did it with a word. 

“Who is this?”  In their hearts, the disciples knew the answer to their own question; they simply could not yet believe it.  Increasingly they were convinced that God was present uniquely in the person of Jesus; and subsequent events in the Gospel would continue to bear that out until—at the end—even a Gentile Roman centurion at the foot of the cross would have to admit, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”[10]  In the mystery of the Trinity, we affirm that God has always existed in three persons—the Father, the Son (often called the Word), and the Holy Spirit.  As Christians we believe that the second person of the Trinity—the Word—became human in the person of Jesus and lived among us from that first Christmas day in Bethlehem until his ascension to heaven after his death and Easter resurrection.  Now Jesus is present with us by his Spirit, by the Holy Spirit.  When we share the Lord’s Supper, as we will be doing in a few minutes, the Holy Spirit unites us with the risen Christ.  However, this well-developed understanding of the Trinitarian nature of God was not formulated within the church until several centuries after Mark wrote his Gospel.  Yet the things Mark affirmed about Jesus, such as his power over the natural world, were essential to the later development of Trinitarian doctrine.

So Mark’s main point is that Jesus stilled the storm, as only God can do.  But Mark is a sly one!  Even as he emphasizes Jesus’ divine power, he never lets go of Jesus’ humanity.  When the storm came up, where was Jesus?  Asleep in the back of the boat!  We can read this as evidence of Jesus’ great faith and peace of mind, but at the most basic level it is evidence of his humanity.  While the Old Testament sometimes poetically accuses God of being asleep,[11] especially when the children of Israel are in some trouble, the basic understanding of the Old Testament is that God never sleeps.  In Psalm 121 we read that the “Lord who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”  So Jesus was divine, but he was also human.  He needed rest. 

By now many of you have read The Shack,[12] by William P. Young.  While some of it is not quite square (or maybe I should say, triangular) with orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, Young does a good job making the point that wherever one person of the Trinity is present, all are present—whatever one person of the Trinity experiences, all three experience.  The importance of this insight is hard to overstate.  Because Jesus fully experienced what it is to be human, this was also God’s experience.  This means that the God we worship is not some abstract ruler far away upon the clouds, but rather a personal God who knows intimately all the things we are going through—good and bad.  Through the humanity of Jesus, God knows what it is like to be us.  So when you pray, you don’t have to convince God of how you are feeling—of the things you are struggling with.  God knows them already.  Because Jesus came and lived among us, God’s knowledge is not just intellectual.  God can feel what we are feeling.  Even when we struggle with our faith, when God seems far away, God understands that, too.  Jesus knew that even if the disciples lacked faith now, their faith was growing each day.  He had faith in them long before they had faith in him.  That’s how God is with us: God has faith in who we can be; our challenge is to grow into God’s faith.

Just like the storms in Galilee, the storms of our lives can et pretty big and scary.  When we are tossed upon the storms of life’s events, Jesus has the power to calm the winds.  Even more, when the storms are inside us, Jesus feels them and can make us still within.  When the storms subside, we are still in the boat.  There’s a lot of fishing yet to be done.