Stormbreaker
Propers: The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 12), AD 2024 B
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
It isn’t a very big boat. But then, it isn’t a very big lake, not by our standards. “Sea of Galilee” seems to me a bit grandiose for a freshwater body of some eight by 13 miles. Yet it is the only major pool of potable water found in the entirety of the Holy Land, produced by its only significant river, and so it proves to be a popular place.
There’s a reason why Jesus moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, hanging out His shingle at the Sea of Galilee; along the ancient trade route we know as Via Maris. In the time of Jesus, Jews had settled mostly on the westward side of the lake, Gentiles to the east. The major exception to this was the recent addition of Tiberias, a literal Roman resort and spa some six miles south of Capernaum, constructed by the horrid House of Herod to keep their imperial overlords happy.
By the time of our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus’ rabbinical career has truly taken off. So many people, from so many surrounding regions, have come to hear Him preach, that things have often gotten out of hand. At one point, the masses crushed in so close that He had to push off from the shore in a boat just so that people could see Him. Shortly thereafter, His own mother came up from Nazareth only to find that she couldn’t manage to squeeze into the same building as her Son. Mary had to turn to calling through the crowd.
He caused such a hubbub that learned scribes came up from Jerusalem in order to see what the fuss was about. Galilee tended to be a hotbed of rebellion, with firebrand preachers rightly earning imperial ire. And the scribes were not impressed by what they saw. They officially declared Him demoniac: a crackpot Christ who’d caught religion like the plague. Alas, this failed to slow Him in the slightest. If anything, I think they fanned His fame.
One day, Mark tells us, when the evening had come, Jesus proposes to His Apostles that they escape the crowd at Capernaum by crossing over the lake. It’s a bit of an odd request, setting out as the sun descends, especially considering that the eastern shore is pagan. Yet if the Apostles have their misgivings, Mark relates them not. Jesus settles down for a snooze upon a cushion, trusting in His fishermen to steer the vessel true.
It so happens, mind you, that we have just such a watercraft: a first-century Sea of Galilee fishing boat excavated and on display in a museum at Kibbutz Ginosar. It measures some 27 feet long, by seven and a half feet wide, and a little over four feet at its highest point. So, like I said, not a very big boat, on not an overlarge lake. The Sea of Galilee, however, is infamous even today for its sudden squalls and wild weather. I can attest to this myself. I’ve seen that lake go from clear, to foggy, to whitecap chop in the matter of a morning.
So the notion that Jesus could be sleeping soundly, on what ought to be a relatively manageable trip, a simple evening’s cruise, when a sudden storm brews up out of nowhere, threatening to capsize the ship and drown them all, is an entirely believable scenario. What happens next, perhaps less so.
Keep in mind that these are no mere neophytes, panicky landlubbers overreacting to a tempest. No, these are lifelong professional fishermen, who spend their waking hours in this very boat, on these very waves. They know the proper time to be afraid. It’s sort of like hitting turbulence on a passenger jet: you don’t really need to worry, unless you see the flight attendants starting to get scared. That’s when you know that it’s bad— so bad, in this case, that the Apostles seem convinced that they’re all about to die.
Somehow Jesus remains asleep in the stern. I have a hard time imagining waters so rough that they founder the boat, yet fail to wake up the occupant. And His Apostles appear no less flabbergasted than I. “Teacher, wake up!” they cry. “Do you not care that we’re perishing?” Seriously, this guy’s about to nap through His own death. Yet Jesus, on His rousing, sounds uniquely unimpressed. “Peace!” He calls to the storm. “Be silent! Be still!” And immediately they witness the wind to cease. A dead calm descends.
He turns to His horrified Apostles. “Why are you afraid?” He scoffs. “Have you yet no faith?” And let me tell you, if they’d been terrified of the wind and the waves, these veteran boatmen, how much more terrified must they now be of the one who silenced the storm? They are filled with awe— with terror, really. They cower. And they whisper furtively to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?”
Terror, confusion, and an open question with an obvious reply that we haven’t the chutzpah to answer: these are the hallmarks of the Markan narrative. Because we know exactly what Mark means to say, do we not? We know precisely whom he means. “Thou dost rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, thou stillest them,” sings the Psalmist in the 89th Psalm. “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty!” we read in Psalm 93.
“Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress,” continues the 107th Psalm. “He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.” There is only one answer, in the Hebrew Bible, as to who commands the sea: the One, in the words of the Book of Job, “who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb … and prescribed bounds for it … and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed.’”
God. Only God, in the Hebrew Bible, commands the wind and the waves. Only God corrals the chaos, and can walk upon the waters. In every system of pagan belief, from Marduk through Zeus to Thor, the storm god is the biggest, baddest bloke on the block. Yet to Christ the storm is nothing, not even worth getting out of His bed. “Sit down! Shut up!” And a dead calm descends, a stillness somehow louder than the lightning.
That is the message of our reading from this morning: shock, terror, disbelief, and a truth whose name we barely dare to speak. Mark isn’t subtle. There’s no beating about the bush. The Apostles can see, though as yet they can’t admit, who this Jesus is, who He has to be, according to the Scriptures and the witness of their eyes. But it can’t be true, can it? God cannot be Man. It’s too much, too astounding, too impossible— and yet! “Who then is this?” they demand of one another. Deep down they all know, and not one of them can say it.
You’re supposed to be afraid. Afraid of the One who dismisses the storm. Afraid of the One whom the demons obey. Afraid of the One who can raise up the dead! Afraid of the One who is not in His tomb. And make no mistake: we’re not afraid because He’s evil. Oh, no. Evil we know. Evil we can deal with. We’re afraid because He’s good. A kind of good we’ve never seen before! A good that burns the darkness away, strips bare all lies, banishes shadows, throttles death, harrows hell, and tears Heaven wide open! Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.
We forget that, sometimes, when we think to tame the Christ, to make Him inoffensive, palatable for general consumption. But He isn’t safe. He isn’t tame. He’s wild and good and true. He’ll shred the sin right out of you and raise you up anew. And so I leave you now not with any easy answers, but with poetry truer than prose: “Maybe,” by Pulitzer poet Mary Oliver.
Sweet Jesus, talking his melancholy madness, stood up in the boat and the sea lay down, / silky and sorry. So everybody was saved that night. But you know how it is / when something different crosses the threshold — the uncles mutter together, / the women walk away, the young brother begins to sharpen his knife. Nobody knows what the soul is. It comes and goes like the wind over the water — sometimes, for days, you don't think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon, after the multitude was fed, one or two of them felt the soul slip forth / like a tremor of pure sunlight before exhaustion, that wants to swallow everything, gripped their bones and left them / miserable and sleepy, as they are now, forgetting how the wind tore at the sails before he rose and talked to it – / tender and luminous and demanding as he always was — a thousand times more frightening than the killer storm.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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