1. Jesus Is.

   The dark clouds are already on the horizon, this early in Mark’s gospel. After Jesus’ sharpest encounter with his religious critics (3:1–5), we remember how they went out and began to make plans to get rid of him (v 6). Even Jesus’ family, having failed to “take charge of him” (3:21), are now distant from him (“standing outside,” 3:31–32), and, very soon, by telling the story of John the Baptizer’s death (6:14–29, Mark will give us another ominous hint. The cross is back-lighted, and its shadow falls upon us early in Mark.

   When that storm breaks, the best person who ever lived—God made man among us—will be seized, given a couple of sham hearings, tortured, and allowed to die a slow and cruel death. At our point in the narrative, the people in the boat don’t know this, but Mark has the whole story and tells us that Jesus is already in hazard.

   He tells us something else: that, within that hazard, Jesus is totally composed. We cannot keep out of our minds the question, “How can Jesus go to sleep?” Exhaustion, I said before—that’s if we read the story on the flat as nothing more than a story. But suppose we now hear it as a figure of Jesus’ own life. How can he be so bold in confronting his critics and so unruffled at their hostility? How can he blithely turn away even his family? Is he not asleep to his danger?

   But in the Bible, to sleep when surrounded by danger is a sign of trust in God. The psalmist testified,

   Safe and sound, I lie down and sleep,
   for you alone, O Lord, keep me secure (Ps 4:8, JPS).

   Here’s what I think this means. From the start of his ministry, Jesus engages satanic power in conflict. That conflict will end at the Cross, a means of dealing with evil that originates in the Creator’s own heart. The storm is a figure of Jesus’ coming arrest and death—that is, of the threat posed by the means and cost of redemption. Parts of that storm include the mounting hostility to him by a few, his own struggle under the olives of Gethsemane, the humiliation of false arrest and spurious conviction, and his fatal suffering itself. The basic question here is, “Will love work? Is it safe to be in God’s plan?”

   Most of this storm has yet to break in Jesus’ life, but in Mark’s figure, the Lord is asleep. It is not the sleep of ignorance, nor of folly, nor yet of presumption. The sleep is a figure for

   • the confidence that comes from knowing you are within God’s will,
   • the assurance that the way of the cross is the one thing that makes a lasting difference in human affairs, and
   • the safety the Christian feels in God’s care.

   In that perfect storm, Jesus’ boat was truly swamped. He went under in the dark squall of death, down until, like Jonah, he could say,

   The waters closed in over me;
   the deep surrounded me;
   I went down to the land
   whose bars closed upon me forever (2:5–6).

   All of that happens, right in Mark’s Gospel, except... except that when the women went to the tomb, it was open, and a young man in white said to them, “You are looking for Jesus. He is not here; he has been raised” (16:6)—it’s the same word Mark uses to say that the disciples “woke Jesus up” (v 38)—“he is not here!” God awakened him on the morning of the third day, and there was a great calm.

2. The Disciples Are.

   We are reading this storm story as a figure for life’s threats and tumults. In contrast to Jesus, the disciples are not at all composed. They are in panic and distress, facing what looks like drowning. They finally burst out at the sleeping teacher, “Will you wake up?!” They shout over the wind, “Don’t you care what happens to us?” Within the Gospel of Mark, these are virtually the first words they have spoken to him—once before, they said, “Everyone is looking for you” (1:37)—and we’re shocked at how rough and aggressive they are. When the other gospels tell this story, they soften them.

   But the same storm that breaks on Jesus will fall on them as well, and they are hardly ready. At the Last Supper, Jesus was to say to them, “You will all be tripped up,” and he then quoted the Bible to them,

   “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered” (14:27).

   Peter bragged that he would never be tripped up, but in a few hours, Jesus was seized, and every disciple disappeared into the night, leaving Jesus alone with Judas and the soldiers.

   In our story, Jesus reproves them for not having enough faith. Mark makes it sound as if Jesus was testing them; he has hardly talked to them this way before—returning the brusqueness of their outburst to him—and we are at the beginning of a number of episodes where they seem to have trouble accepting who Jesus is. The reproof seems to be, “With all the healings you’ve seen, didn’t you think I could handle this storm?”

   I think the disciples are in a different kind of storm. Jesus calmly pursues God’s will out of his own deep sense of call, even when he struggles. The disciples are in the tumult of making sense out of life, now that they have met Jesus. When he called them from their boats and nets, they had no idea what they were in for, nor do they yet. Nothing can ever be the same, that’s clear, but it takes them months finally to believe that he is the Messiah, and when they get there, he tells them he will die. They can’t quit—Peter even brags—but already, they have the ominous sense, “If he goes, we’ll all go down with him.”

   When Jesus transfers the composure of his own slumber to the wind and the waves—“and there is “a great calm”—we know that the disciples’ struggle will end in confidence and peace. It doesn’t really happen for them until after Christ’s resurrection, but the calm will come for them, too.

3. We Are.

   After all, the Gospel wasn’t written for Jesus and the disciples: It was written for us. If the storm is a figure of something, it ought to be something in our lives, too. The truth is, we’re those disciples. We’ve heard his call, and we’re following, even if a little uncertainly. Fortunately, we’ve taken Jesus with us in our boat, but we have to admit that we sometimes think we should have stayed on dry land.

   When Jonathan Dick was spending the night on the Tasman Sea, clinging to what was left of their boat, he began to think “how stupid it was to sail, how it wasn’t all that much fun or worthwhile, and how it’s a lot of effort for nothing,” and how, “with the same effort applied elsewhere,” he “could be curled up on the hearth of a fireplace, maybe eating chocolate.”

   Having made your choice to be a Christian, it’s easy to think that God should make life better for you, that there should be no hardship, that—because you’re a Christian—life should be easier for you than for those other people. When the storms come up, you may think, “If this is the way it is, I think I’ll get out.”

   Now, getting out may not be as easy as you think, especially if we were to press the figure of a boat in a storm on the open water, but leave figures aside: God does not ordinarily intervene to spare Christians the distress that life brings. Some things in life will be more difficult because you’re a Christian, not easier. The point is that Christ is in your boat. His power and care are yours even when he seems most absent.

   What’s a perfect storm, anyway? One that destroys the most boats and kills the most sailors? That’s the world’s definition! For us who follow Christ, a perfect storm is one where Christ is in the boat with us, where he opens his eyes, where he says, “Peace! Be still!” and then, the tempest ends with a great calm.

   George Herbert, clergyman and poet of the 17th century, has written of this event in one of his poems. He’s my favorite poet, and the first poet in the English language to devote his art only to the Christian faith and life. Here are his words:

   Away despair! My gracious Lord doth heare,
        Though windes and waves assault my keel,
   He doth preserve it; he doth steer,
        Ev’n when the boat seems most to reel.
   Storms are the triumph of his art.
   Well may he close his eyes, but not his heart.

   He preserves it—that is, my boat. “He doth steer”—why should Herbert say that Jesus steers? Because he is in the back of the boat, where the rudder is. Even in a perfect storm, Christ remains in charge, guiding even “when the boat seems most to reel.”

   1. It is not always easy for us to trust ourselves to God’s plan, as Jesus did so fully. We’re afraid that love will not work, now that we’ve bet everything on it. Sometimes we’re not sure what the plan is, and life seems full of waiting. George Adam Smith once spoke of waiting as a form of suffering, but sooner or later, he said, there will be a knot in the thread. We may seek Christ’s composure in trusting ourselves to God’s will.
   2. Like the disciples, we have to struggle to make sense out of life now that we’ve decided to give Jesus first place in it. His lordship is imperious, we know that. He makes claims on us: on our time, our energy, our money, our talents.
   3. Beside all this, none of us know when life’s weather may change.
      • You go to work and discover that you’re being laid off, after fifteen years; there’s a package, but what do you do now? How do you handle the rejection, the loss, the instability? It could be a big wind.
      • The medical report comes back positive: Your wife needs immediate surgery. They won’t know the prognosis until they operate, but... Heavy weather.
      • You can’t believe the voice on the telephone. “You’ve got a son named Kevin Murphy? Yeah? Better come down to the station.” Thunder and lightning out of a clear blue sky.

   Where’s Jesus when we really need him? Asleep? We say, “Master, carest thou not that we perish? Lord, don’t you see that we’re going down?”

   Storms are the triumph of his art.
   Well may he close his eyes but not his heart.

   Oh, he is there, all right: He’s in the boat with you, and your peril is his. His eyes are closed but not his heart. He is ready to transfer the peace of his own composure to the fear that grips your soul, and there will come a great calm.

   Write it in your soul for the days to come: “Storms are the triumph of his art.” And write this: “Even the wind and the sea obey him.”

Thanks be to God for his Word.