TEXT: Matthew 14:22-33
The Step
“Go on; get
out of here!” Jesus seems to tell the disciples. “Y’all go on by yourself. I’ll catch up with you later.” Now, how Jesus was going to catch up with
them on the other side of the sea no one seems to have considered. But given the tone that sounds to have been
in his voice, maybe no one wanted to risk a question. Obediently, they climbed into the boat and
set sail. Alone.
I don’t know why Jesus sent the
disciples away by themselves. It could
have been that he had simply reached his social capacity – his limit of
presence, even the presence of his friends – and needed some time alone. I know that feeling. I was tempted once, during a long road trip
with a colleague for whom silence represented social and conversational failure, to roll down the
window and stick my head into the rushing wind just to have some time alone.
More likely,
it wasn’t merely the press of people, but their pressing needs that had
spiritually depleted Jesus, and he needed some time in prayer.
But it could,
just as well, have been strategic. All
good parents, teachers, managers and mentors know that they can’t hover over
their children or students forever – shielding, whispering the right answers in
their ear. At some point learners must
flex their own skills, listen for their own intuition, test their own training,
resourcefulness, and resilience. Knowing
that he wouldn’t always be around, perhaps Jesus felt like it was time the
disciples tasted life on their own, and tested their metal along the way.
Who knows? Maybe it was all of the above. Whatever the reason, Matthew describes the
moment rather bluntly:
Immediately Jesus made
the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he
dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the
mountain by himself to pray.
So the disciples set sail, but it
doesn’t go well. Darkness has fallen,
and the waves have risen – a miserable combination. Sailing blindly in a sea-slammed boat, with
what at least feels like the imminent possibility of being thrown
overboard. And my guess is that we have
some experience with that. Knowing that
“the sea” is a common biblical symbol of chaos – for all that stands as the very
antithesis of God’s creative intent – most of us don’t have to think very hard
to recall a time when chaos was having its way with us…
Ø When your marriage begins to
unravel.
Ø When your kids rain a blowing
hurricane of bad decisions and frightening consequences.
Ø When grief swells the very waves of
life into your soul.
Ø When the job that put the food on
your table crumbles beneath your feet.
But the truth is, it’s never far
away. We aren’t always mindful of the
fact that we generally live our lives sailing just along the surface of
chaos. By all accounts, most of the time
we experience sunny skies and smooth sailing.
But all the while, just below our feet, the sea is gripping the keel,
and has a way of breaking out of its tranquility suddenly and frequently enough
– slamming its waves into the frame of our lives – to remind us of just how
precarious are our days.
It is, according to Matthew, deep in
the night when the waves become the most savage – during the fourth watch of
the night, by Roman counting; 3:00 – 6:00 a.m.
I am familiar with that space in the night – roughly corresponding, as
it does, to my own rather routine periods of chaos. I don’t sleep well throughout the fourth
watch. I hit the pillow like a stone at
bedtime, and sleep restfully for the first several hours. But along about
The fourth watch; stormy seas; choppy
waves. And edgy, anxious, irrational and
sometimes understandable fear. And in
the midst of it, the disciples begin to panic.
It is a telling juxtaposition if think about it a minute: the disciples are becoming collectively
unraveled, while Jesus is getting himself to together. The disciples are feeding each others’
hysteria rather than finding, together, a shared and greater strength. Jesus, meanwhile, has settled himself into
prayer.
And in the spirit and strength of
that prayer, he comes across the chaos to help.
What happens next is a virtual symphony of echoes from other biblical
stories – intended by Matthew or not, I can’t say; but resonating,
nonetheless. Like those who would later
visit the empty tomb, for example, the disciples did not recognize, at first,
the Lord they had come to love, thinking him a ghost – or worse. But meeting their eyes, Jesus reassured them,
saying “Don’t be afraid; it is I.”
Except that way of translating hides the power of the words, and the
echoing story behind them.
Remember in the book of Exodus, when
Moses, while tending the sheep, sees a burning bush and turns aside to examine
it? The voice that meets him from the
flames says, “Don’t be afraid. I am the
Lord. I have seen the distress of my
people and I have come to help.” And
when Moses asks for the name of this one who speaks, the voice replies, “I am.” That is the very phrase inside our story this
morning. When the disciples see this
mysterious figure, he replies something very much like, “I have seen your
distress and I have come to help.” But
the self identification is exactly the same as in Exodus. “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus comforts them, “I
am,” with all the divine presence and power that name commands.
And then comes Peter’s mind-blowing profession
of faith. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said,
“Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came
toward Jesus.
What could he have been thinking!? No one in his right mind would jump over the
side of a boat in the midst of stormy seas.
Which is why his action has caused any number of interpreters to suggest
that his “right mind” had long since gotten seasick. One interpreter even goes so far as to hear
something sinister in the way Peter frames the question – “Lord, if it is you,
command…” bearing too much resemblance to Satan’s testing of Jesus in the
wilderness: “If you are the son of God…”
So, has Peter lost his mind? Has his impetuous nature once again gotten
the best of him? Or has he become the
very embodiment of Satan?
I sure don’t think so. In this, one of his few shining moments,
Peter becomes for me something of a hero of faith. Faith is one of those funny concepts that requires
visibility to be real. Mandatory, in
this arena of faith, is a step.
Frederick
Buechner argues that faith “is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a
process than as a possession. It is
on-again-off-again rather than once-for-all.
Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway. A journey without maps.” (Wishful Thinking p. 25)
That was certainly true when Abram
was called by God in the 12th chapter of Genesis to go to a new and
distant land. All he was given, in exchange for giving up all that he had known
and all he had done, was the rather vague assurance that God would lead
him. There was no stated destination,
there was no map; nothing. Just, “start
out, and I’ll tell you which way to go.”
Moses faced into something of the same.
When the voice from the burning bush told him to go before Pharaoh, win
release of the Israelites, and lead them to a promised land, Moses asked how he
could know that he was really speaking to God, and that God’s promises were actually
true. The voice rather unreassuringly
replied, “when you have brought the people out of
Faith,
scripture elsewhere teaches us, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen.” Against
all common sense, but with a conviction of things not seen, Peter actually gave
serious consideration to leaving the relative security of the boat and risking
the stormy sea – and then took the step.
Admittedly, he didn’t get very far.
Jesus had to step in like a kind of oceanic AAA waveside assistance
representative and pull Peter out of the drink.
But his subsequent bath doesn’t diminish my amazement that he did it in
the first place. It wasn’t until he allowed his common sense to sink him
that he sank.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, that courageous theologian martyred at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis,
once observed about this story, “The road to faith passes through obedience to
the call of Jesus. Unless a definite
step is demanded, the call vanishes into thin air, and if people imagine that
they can follow Jesus without taking this step, they are deluding themselves
like fanatics. …Faith is only real where
there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act
of obedience” (The Cost of Discipleship
pp. 53-60)
Faith requires a step, and Peter
managed to take it. Alone among the 12,
Peter seems to be the only one in whom begins to glimmer the realization that
disciples are called to do the things that Jesus did. A couple of chapters back, Jesus had summoned
the twelve and given them “authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out,
and to cure every disease and every sickness.”
Perhaps Peter is finally beginning to take his commission seriously. Now, maybe this is an odd moment to try and
take the idea of imitation literally, but better now than never.
And isn’t it always in the midst of
chaos that Jesus desperately needs imitating disciples? Isn’t it precisely in the midst of storms
that Christ needs a steadying witness? That
Peter eventually got “cold feet” – in more ways than one – doesn’t negate his
initial response. Jesus doesn’t rebuke
him for getting out of the boat, but for losing his focus after he did; for
listening more to the so called “realities” and complexities swirling and
roiling around him than to the one who was holding his hand.
“If you ask me
to,” Peter tells the Lord he has come to trust, “I will.” Maybe that is the
point of all this preaching: in the
chaos of our days, in the tumultuous messiness of our ministry, answering
Christ’s call, following where he leads; faithfully, adventurously stepping
where he empowers us to go – wind, waves, water and all.