June 20, 2021 “Who Is This?” – Mark 4:35-41

Mark 4:35-41
“Who Is This?”
June 20, 2021 – Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

My mother and I were puking over the side of the boat. Forty years ago, she had treated Beth and me to a whale-watching trip in southern California. I think our captain was a bit too eager not to lose his fee that day. So we went out into waves that seemed as high as the cabin. Mom and I both turned green and tossed our cookies, but Beth was happy as a clam as she viewed the whales. It’s her Swedish, Viking blood.

That whale-watching venture and the ferry ride I told the children about give me some appreciation for how the disciples felt that evening when the storm came up. They were in a smaller craft, which would have been tossed around much more than our tourist boat or ferry were.

In 1986, a drought around the Sea of Galilee revealed an ancient boat stuck in the mud. Carbon 14 dating puts this boat pretty much at the time of Jesus, between 100 B.C. and 40 A.D. I think Stan, Linda and Chris saw it on their trip to Israel a few years ago. Maybe others of you have. It was made primarily of cedar, although there were ten types of wood in it, from having been patched so often. It was 27 feet long, 7 and a half feet wide, and maybe about 4 feet high. It would have been rowed by 4 men and could have carried fifteen. It’s exactly the kind of fishing boat the disciples had.

We’ve been listening to Jesus’ teaching in Mark 4. We need to remember that as He spoke, Mark 4:1 tells us He was teaching from a boat, pushed out a little from shore so He could speak to the crowd. Now in verse 35, Jesus is weary. He asked them to simply row Him away, to the other side of the lake. Verse 36 says they took Him just like He was, sitting in the boat, probably on the deck in the stern. Which is where we find Him in verse 38 as the storm is rising.

It’s easy to imagine Jesus falling asleep there. Public speaking for even a little while is tiring. On occasions when I’ve had to teach all day I’ve been exhausted, even with breaks and a lunch time, which Jesus didn’t have. So as the disciples began to pull on the oars and the boat gently rocked away from the shore headed east, Jesus laid back on the cushions He had been sitting on and dozed off.

The Sea of Galilee sits seven hundred feet below sea level, in a basin surrounded by hills and mountains. To the northeast, Mt. Hermon rises nearly 10,000 feet above the lake. The warm air at the level of the lake and the cold air rolling down the mountain can mix and kick up furious weather conditions. That’s what happened that evening. The word translated “windstorm” can mean “hurricane” in Greek. Boatmen on the Sea of Galilee today still call that evening east wind “Sharkia,” which is Arabic for “shark.”

You don’t have to be on the water to feel like you’re in a small boat in a big storm. Think about someone you love who laid in a hospital bed with COVID-19 and no one able to visit this past year. Imagine how low-income renters feel as eviction moratoriums are lifted but jobs and income have remained elusive. Consider how you’ve felt yourself when the wind has rocked your own little vessels, whether those have been the ships of family, of health, of employment or just your own frail emotional boat.

The memory of their boat in the storm stuck with these men. They must have repeated it often enough that it became a symbol for their whole enterprise. In the catacombs, early Christians painted pictures of that boat. Sometimes it was Noah’s ark, sometimes the boat with disciples in it, sometimes just a ship on the water. But they understood themselves to be like those disciples, out on stormy seas with their Lord.

It became an icon representing the Church. That sense of being in a boat together even carried over into the language of church architecture. In a traditional church building the area where the congregation sits is called “the nave,” deriving from that same root which gives us “navy.” Christians gather on Sunday morning to ride out the storms of the world, here in the boat together.

Verse 37 says the storm came up, the winds beat into the boat, and it was being swamped. Water was coming over the sides. Water in your boat is scary. One day out on a lake in a rented rowboat with my friend Jay we lowered the anchor into deep water. But in our hurry to start fishing, we let the anchor rope catch for a second around the latch on the plug in the bottom of the boat. It popped loose and water started pooling around our feet. We were able to grab the plug and force it back in, but for a few seconds, we had visions of our boat sinking beneath us. It got our pulses racing.

Water in the boats of our lives takes many forms. It can be a conversation with a doctor. It can be a phone call from a son or daughter in the middle of the night. It can be a piece of paper demanding payment for more money than we have. At those moments when the waves slosh over the side, we sometimes ask, “Where is God?” “Why isn’t He here?”

The answer to that question, “Where is God?” is the same as it was for the disciples, though they didn’t yet realize it. He’s here. For them, Jesus was right there, in the back of the boat all along. The Lord was with them in the boat, in the storm.

Yes, Jesus was asleep in the boat. But the very fact that Jesus was sleeping offers us an odd assurance. Our Lord was there because He became one of us. He knew what it was like to have worked all day and be so exhausted that He just had to rest. He felt what it’s like to be aching tired at the end of a grueling day. He went through the kind of stress that makes us just want to flop on the couch and close our eyes. He is with us in every way, including His own experience of what it’s like to be bone weary of work and life.

So we know He’s there. The bigger problem is the question that arises once we realize that God is present. That question is the one the disciples cry in desperation in verse 38. Matthew and Luke tone it down. They have the disciples calling to Jesus to save them, or simply waking Him up with an appraisal of their situation, “We’re perishing!” But Mark, who got this story from Peter, is more honest about what they really said, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

That’s how we feel sometimes, isn’t it? God may be here, but He just doesn’t care. He’s in the boat beside us and He knows perfectly well it’s sinking, but it feels like it doesn’t matter to Him. He isn’t helping. The job, the marriage, the bills, God must know all about them. So why isn’t He doing anything? Is He asleep in the back of our boat?

Jesus didn’t respond to the question about whether He cared. Instead He showed them the answer. Verse 40 tells us how He woke up and “rebuked” the wind. That word for “rebuke” is the same one used in chapter 1 and chapter 3 when Jesus rebuked evil spirits. Jesus spoke to the storm, to the water, like one who has authority over a person. He said, “Peace! Be still!” The tenses of the verbs suggest something like, “Be still and stay still.” Then, says Mark, “there was a great calm.”

To get the picture we need to imagine something like those images from the film, “The Perfect Storm.” Hear the sound of the wind, the slam of the waves against the wooden boat. Feel the chill of cold air and soaked clothing. See the disciples pulling down the sails and dragging at the oars to turn the boat into the waves. Everyone is yelling, moving, desperately trying to do anything that might save them.

Then Jesus sits up, speaks a couple of words, and all is quiet. The disciples also quieted. Frantic, shouting, even shouting at Jesus one moment, but in the next moment they were sitting still, completely dumfounded. Oars, ropes, gunwales still in hand, they sat gaping open-mouthed at the Man in the back of the boat.

They’ve just been through a harrowing experience. They are catching their breath. They collecting their wits. And now in verse 40, Jesus wants to help them learn from it. So He asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Think about it from the point of view of Mark’s Gospel. What have they seen from Jesus? He has healed a lot of people and He’s driven out a lot of demons. And He’s just been teaching them how the kingdom of God grows like planted seeds, springing up by the work of the Holy Spirit and growing large from tiny beginnings. Now Jesus asked them to make application of those lessons. He’s wondering why they haven’t put two and two together and discovered Who is with them.

You may have noticed that, in the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is always warning the disciples and the demons not to reveal who He is. But the disciples are also still just figuring it out. You and I read this and we’re not surprised at all that Jesus speaks to the wind and the waves and they calm down. We’ve heard for twenty centuries that Jesus is God. But for those first believers it was an incredible revelation.

Jesus asked them why they still had no faith. Jesus seemed to think they should have more. For one thing, they could have noticed where Jesus was always going, where He always landed in that boat that went back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. He landed where a man full of demons needed to be set free. He sailed to where people were waiting to hear His teaching of good news and to be healed of disease. In the next chapters we’ll see Him come ashore to rest but instead provide food for a hungry crowd of thousands. Jesus was always going where people were hurting, and right then, even caught in the middle of such a journey, He was right there with them.

Those disciples had yet to learn that Jesus was Lord of their storms. Not just the squalls that kicked up on that big lake where they earned their living, but the storms they would each face as they kept on following Him. Peter would wind up on his own cross. James would have his head cut off. John would be sent into exile in his old age. They discovered Jesus would be there even in that sort of gale, when the winds of death were blowing. They would learn faith.

Their faith began with fear. Our English version says “they were filled with great awe,” but that’s too tame. Literally, it says “they feared a great fear,” repeating the word for fear twice. They had been afraid when the wind was blowing, but now that it had stopped they were more afraid, afraid of the One who calmed the storm.

Proverbs 9:10 says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” In their awe and fear of Jesus they began to learn some wisdom. It was enough wisdom to make them ask each other the question we find in verse 41, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” It was exactly the question Jesus wanted them to ask. “Who is this?”

We often hear people going through some rough patch, some storm of life, say, “You just gotta have faith.” We need to inquire “faith in what?” When Jesus asked scared men why they still had no faith He didn’t mean some general faith in a universe where everything will just work out for the best. Faith like that, generic faith that somehow life will turn out O.K., is meaningless, hopeless faith. Jesus meant faith in Him. After all they had seen Him do, didn’t they have any more faith, any more confidence in Him?

That question, though, “Who is this?” is a step on the road to faith. To discover bit by bit, storm by storm, who Jesus is and what it means to have Him in the boat with us, is to grow in faith.

Years ago, I went with others from our church on a raft trip down the wild and scenic section of the Rogue River. Two of us had no experience in a raft at all. Jeff and I rode with an experienced oarsman, Gus. Most of the trip was a pleasant, relaxing float through beautiful country. But not long after we put in, just around a bend, we came to rapids. At that point, I was glad Gus had rowed a boat like that for years. He told us to hold on, and he took us through the heavy water smooth as silk.

Later in the day we came to a rougher patch, rapids around what they call the “Coffee Pot,” I think for the way it percolates. By then I had confidence in Gus, so I wasn’t prepared for what happened. Right in the middle of the river, our raft got stuck, tilted up against a big rock. We weren’t pinned, the water wasn’t holding us there, but we needed to get unstuck and back out into the main flow.

So Gus had Jeff and I shift our weight to the other side. He had us rock back and forth. He had us grab paddles and try to push off the rock. But we were still stuck. Finally, Gus jumped out the boat, picked up the side of the raft and began to heave it off the rock. I sat there thinking, “What happens if the boat comes free and he doesn’t get back in the raft before it moves off?” I realized the answer to that question was that Jeff and I would be sitting ducks for whatever the Rogue River and the Coffee Pot cared to do to us.

Fortunately, when the raft came free Gus was ready. He leapt back in the boat, grabbed the oars and took us through churning water like nothing had ever happened. Now, even more, I said a prayer of thanks that Gus was in our boat and that he was who he was, an experienced navigator on that river.

When you head into your own storms, when the river turns and you see the rapids coming, when the wind comes up and waves start coming over the side, my hope is that you will remember a couple things. The first is to stay in the boat. Over the years, I’ve talked with someone who’s going through a problem with family or work or some other stress and they will say, “Pastor, I don’t know if I will come to church.” But this is the boat. This is where we ride out the storms. This is where the Lord meets us together. Sailing into the storm is not the time to jump out.

Most of all, though, the second hope I have is that you will remember who is here in the boat with us. He’s the Lord who made the water and the waves and the very wood out of which boats are constructed. Our faith in Jesus Christ is faith in God, that God Himself is taking us through the storm. He’s more than an experienced navigator. He’s more even than a miracle worker who can control the weather. He cares about what is happening to you. He cared enough to ride out the storm of His own death so He could save you.

Jesus kept getting in that boat and going to where people in need were waiting. He took His disciples with Him. He wants you and I to go with Him too, even through some storms. It’s not always quiet and calm in Jesus’ boat. You may be buffeted by your own needs or made to feel you are rocking the boat when you tell the truth about the needs of others, but Jesus is always there.

May the presence of Jesus calm your heart, if not the storm. Even if the waves are crashing, may you find the stillness of our Lord’s peace surrounding you. May you be filled up with the faith that Jesus is here, because that is who He is and what He does.

Amen.