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| Boat on the Sea of Galilee |
Things don't always go as planned. In Mark 6, Jesus had just miraculously fed five thousand people, and before that had been giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the mute, and helping the lame walk.
But these had all been public events and involved people with whom he didn't have a close relationship. So Jesus comes up with an idea: he is going to show his best friends, the disciples, that he is connected to God like no one else.
He sends the disciples across the Sea of Galilee and goes off to pray. They struggle all night rowing their boat into the wind and just when they are most fatigued, Jesus comes effortlessly walking on the water beside them.
Mark tells us that Jesus "intended to pass them by," which is kind of frustrating because they could have used some fresh arms for rowing, but Jesus had different plans. "Pass them by" is the same phrase used in Exodus 33.17ff where Yahweh shows Moses his glory by "passing him by."
Unfortunately things don't go so well for Jesus. As he is passing the disciples by, they see him and freak out, thinking he is a ghost. Jesus allays their panic and says "Don't be afraid, it is I." The Greek phrase Mark uses is ego eimi, "I am," which is the Greek translation of Yahweh from Exodus 3:14.
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| W.O.W.: only for special circumstances. |
But announcing he was there wasn't enough, so Jesus gets into the boat with them. He saw that they weren't ready to step toward him and see him for whom he was, so he steps toward them.
They hadn't figured out that he was God manifest as a human; doing the things only God had historically done for his people: feeding them in the wilderness, healing, sustaining, providing life giving teaching, and showing them his glory.
If Jesus' best friends, those who witnessed everything he did, had a hard time believing, how much harder is it for us? But that's OK. Jesus doesn't push it. He puts some things on hold he had been planning and gets into the boat, meeting us right where we are.
2 comments:
wow some great insights to the connection to the Exodus story.
I definitely appreciate God's consistent willingness to meet us where we are - its almost as if he understands how this life of faith can be overwhelmingly difficult.
Yeah, I think "faith" often becomes an argument b/t people and not b/t us and God. There are a number of examples in the Bible like this where God comes alongside us as we struggle to believe...the interesting thing is he did that in a premodern world, where belief in the supernatural was much more popular than it is today.
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