Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – 23 Jun 24; Christ Church St. Lucia (7am only)
Readings: 1 Samuel 17:32-49; Psalm 9: 9-20; 2 Corinthians 6: 1-13; Mark 4: 35-41
If you’ve driven from Sydney to Canberra via the Hume and Federal Highways, you will have driven along the western shore of Lake George. Often, it’s practically dry, however in the 1980s when Libbie and I lived in Canberra it filled a few times and we can remember on more than one occasion driving along the shore of the lake with the water lapping the road embankment. Lake George is at its maximum 25 km long and 10 km wide. You may well think that’s today’s piece of inconsequential trivia. But wait – there’s more. The Sea of Galilee is at its maximum 21 km long and 13 km wide. So, if you’ve driven along Lake George, you’ll have some idea of the size of the Sea of Galilee. There’s another similarity – on both bodies of water the wind and waves can rise quite suddenly. As humans, we’re often powerless in the face of water. It can easily overwhelm us. The journalist Julia Baird has written movingly of a very recent experience when she, her brother and her father, all experienced ocean swimmers, were caught in a rip and nearly drowned.[1] The Sea of Galilee has an average depth of 25 metres and at its maximum is almost 45 metres deep. In today’s Gospel, we’re in deep water. Deep theological water.
A small group of boats sets out on Lake Galilee – and there was more than one boat. The text says, “other boats were with him.” What happened to them I wonder? What happened to the people in them? How many were saved? How many died? One of the sudden storms for which the lake is well known blows up. The community for whom Mark’s Gospel was written would have familiar with such stories. It’s a violent squall, and the boat immediately begins to fill with water. The disciples, some of whom were seasoned fishermen, are filled with fear and amazed to find Jesus asleep in the stem. They mistake his slumber for indifference: “Teacher, don’t you care that we’re drowning?’’ (4:38). This is the first of four unanswered questions in this story (see also 4:40, 41), and each arrests the attention. The fact that the first question is left unanswered increases the tension in the story just prior to its climax. Like the disciples, those hearing the story are eager to learn why Jesus is sleeping during such a crisis. They wait on the edge of their seats, for Jesus’s response, but he never answers the question. Why doesn’t he answer? Well, he’s about to answer a different question.
Before he says anything to the disciples, Jesus, we’re told “woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ The wind ceased and there was a dead calm” (4:39). This language of Jesus “rebuking” the wind and “silencing” the sea is reminiscent of an exorcism story in Mark Chapter 1. You may recall Jesus is at Capernaum (on the shore of Lake Galilee by the way) and encounters in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. The text there says Jesus “rebukes” the spirit and says “be silent”. So, Jesus is not simply manipulating the physical elements into a more favorable weather pattern; he is engaging demonic powers and demonstrating his authority over them. Here the story picks up on a common theme in antiquity, especially in Jewish literature: that the sea is to be equated with all the forces of chaos and evil. It’s not a place to enjoy – to go for a swim, or to go boating, or to go on a cruise. A few hardy souls went fishing, but for everyone, the sea was a place to be feared. The Old Testament is full of texts about this. For example, Psalm 69 “Save me O god, for the waters have come up even to my throat. I sink in deep mire where no footing is”[2]. Or Psalm 144 “Reach down your hand from on high; rescue me and pluck me out of the great waters: out of the hand of aliens.”[3] In the Book of Daniel, there’s a description of a dream which Daniel has. Four great beasts are described in terrifying detail – and they come up out of the sea.[4] From the beginning, when the spirit of God hovered over the unformed and unfilled waters[5] creation was understood as bringing order to this chaos. In Daniel’s dream, a being described as an “Ancient One” takes his throne and defeats the beasts.[6] The Psalms also allude to the reality of God having power over the waters and all the forces unleashed by it. “When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; the very deep trembled…”, says Psalm 77[7], or Psalm 89 “You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them.”[8]
Apocalyptic texts, both Jewish and Christian, speak of a future world in which the watery chaos has been finally defeated, sometimes depicted by the monsters of the sea being devoured at the messianic banquet or there is a simple assertion in the Book of Revelation that “the sea was no more”[9] So Jesus’s calming of the sea has, to use a theological term seeing we’re in deep theological water, Christological implications. That is, it’s about who Jesus is; Jesus has authority over the watery chaos, an authority associated with God himself.
Jesus then turns to his disciples and asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” (4:40). The second and third unanswered questions in this story put the disciples in a bad light. Even though they have heard his teaching, they still do not grasp the significance of what they’ve witnessed. They lack faith in who Jesus is; a point confirmed by their closing question. Still filled with fear, they say to one another, and this is the fourth unanswered question “Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him!” (4:41). Those who in the early part of the story were so sure that they were taking the familiar Jesus with them, “just as he was,” are now revealed to be clueless regarding the true identity of Jesus. He is sovereign over wind and sea; he is Lord over evil and chaos. He is God incarnate.
The story doesn’t end there. It’s immediately followed by the story of the Gerasene demoniac. Bear in mind that in the original text there were no verse or chapter divisions. These came much later, so the story of the stilling of the storm and the story of the Gerasene demoniac are linked. The demons in habiting the man who accosts Jesus bargaining with him to be allowed to enter a herd of pigs feeding on an adjacent hillside. This part of the story would have been humorous to an original readership who were either Jewish or familiar with Jewish dietary law. The unclean pigs were an appropriate refuge for the unclean spirits. Jesus grants their request, and immediately “the herd of about two thousand pigs rushed down the cliff into the lake and drowned” (5:13).
The readers know what the unclean spirits do not: Jesus has just demonstrated he is Lord even of the sea, the place of chaos and evil. The unclean spirits had hoped to escape the authority of Jesus by entering unclean pigs and returning to the place of chaos and evil – the place where they belong. But, according to Mark, there is nowhere that they can go that lies outside the divine jurisdiction of Jesus. They are the victims of their own ingenuity, and once again the authority of Jesus over the demonic is demonstrated.
You can also read the Gospel passage in an allegorical way. The ship or boat is one of the earliest symbols of the Christian church. In fact, the logo of the World Council of Churches still features a small boat. Boats need to take the water at some stage – and that immediately involves risk – but risks we need to take. Our Archbishop in his address to Synod yesterday morning quoted Dom Helder Camaro; “Pilgrim, when your ship long moored in harbour gives you the illusion of being a house; when your ship begins to put down roots in stagnant water by the quay: put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul and your own pilgrim soul, cost what may”[10] The storm is a handy metaphor to describe personal or community calamity, so the ship tossed to and fro by a violent storm is a readily recognizable image of a church in trouble. Come what may, Jesus has the power and authority to still the storm, rescue the disciples, and bring the boat safely to its destination.
These two seemingly unrelated stories, the stilling of the storm and the healing of the Gerasene demoniac, underscore the same reality. And that reality doesn’t have much to do with the external detail of what may or may not have happened on a stormy lake or with a herd of pigs; it has even less to do with “praying to the weather gods” as folk religion might like to think. Allegorical readings of it are helpful up to a point. The reality is that it’s about the identity of Jesus. Psalm 65 says of the God of our salvation: “You still the raging of the seas; the roaring of the waves, and the tumult of the peoples.[11] Jesus has ultimate authority over evil, whether it manifests itself in nature, in the life of an individual or a community or nation, or in institutional opposition to the church, or indeed within the church as we’ve become all too tragically aware over the past few years. By the end of these stories, the reader is hopefully much better prepared to answer that fourth question in the reading, “Who then is this?”[12] That same question echoes down the ages to us as 21st century readers. “Who then is this?” What will our answer be?
©The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-16/rip-surf-safety-drowning-spoon-bay-too-many-died-warnings/103971940
[2] Psalm 69:1-2
[3] Psalm 144:7
[4] Daniel 7: 2-3
[5] Genesis 1:2
[6] Daniel 7:9-12
[7] Psalm 77:16
[8] Psalm 89:9
[9] Revelation 21:1
[10] Archbishops Address to the First Session of the Eighty-First Synod of the Diocese of Brisbane p7.
[11] Psalm 65:6
[12] Mark 4:41