Mark 6:45-56 "No Fear" Scott Hoezee

There is an old story that has often been re-told in especially the Eastern Orthodox part of the church. According to the tale, a devout abbot from a monastery decided to take a prolonged spiritual retreat in a small cabin located on a remote island in the middle of a large lake. He told his fellow monks that he wanted to spend his days in prayer so as to grow closer to God. For six months he remained on the island with no other person seeing him or hearing from him in all that time. But then one day, as two monks were standing near the shore soaking up some sunshine, they could see in the distance a figure moving toward them. It was the abbot, walking on water, and coming toward shore. After the abbot passed by the two monks and continued on to the monastery, one of the monks turned to the other and said, "All these months in prayer and the abbot is still as stingy as ever. After all, the ferry costs only 25 cents!"

Humor aside, the point of the story is that it's amazing how easily we may sometimes miss the significance of something that is right in front of us. Mark's version of the well-known story of Jesus' walking on water is different than the parallel accounts in Matthew and John, and some of those differences deliver the real theological freight that Mark is trying to ship to us in framing these events the way he does. To see some of that, we need to widen out our focus just a bit to see the context of the story.

The immediate setting is, of course, the just-completed feeding of the 5,000. This is a story we have looked at several times in the past, including just this past November. You may recall that Mark depicts that feast in terms that connect it with themes related to the New Creation. The crowds linger too late into the day. It's getting on toward the dinner hour and so the disciples urge Jesus to shoo the folks away so they can go fend for themselves in finding some food. But Jesus has already viewed that throng as harassed sheep without a shepherd. He has had compassion on them and so, as the Messianic Great Shepherd of the Sheep, he had already fed them a spiritual feast of God's Word.

So when the disciples suggest Jesus chase these hungry sheep away, he says, "You give them something to eat." Aghast, the disciples sputter about how it would cost a king's ransom to buy enough food for so many people, but that totally missed the point. And you know the rest: Jesus takes what little they have and miraculously multiplies so many times that there were twelve baskets of leftovers. But you may also recall that this entire story took place in a desert locale. Mark went to great lengths to make clear they were in a remote, deserted, wilderness-type location. Yet when Jesus directs the people to be seated, Mark also takes pains to tell us that the people sat down on the "green grass."

The New Testament, including Mark, almost never mentions the color of things. But here Mark threw in the word "green" for a reason: he was hinting to us that this was a kind of blooming of the desert, which is exactly what Isaiah and others had predicted would happen when God's Christ arrived. The people who had been hungry in a desert wasteland suddenly find verdant grass and abundant food. It was a kind of proto-version of the Lord's Supper as Jesus takes, thanks, breaks, and gives the bread.

The disciples should have known this was possible all along. So long as Jesus was with them, they did have the resources needed to feed even so vast a crowd. "You give them something to eat," Jesus had said. They thought that was impossible but only because they forgot the identity of the man who had said this.

Who knows just what they were thinking as they gathered up that astonishing amount of leftovers but tonight's passage makes clear that whatever they thought, they still didn't see the larger picture. They still didn't really know what had just happened. Verse 45 begins with Mark's favorite Greek word: immediately. Mark is always rushing from one story to the next and so a lot of stuff happens immediately in his telling of events. In this case, Jesus immediately tells the disciples to go on ahead of him in a boat while he takes care to send the people on their way.

Once the disciples head out onto the lake and the crowds go home with Jesus' blessing, Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray. The day of teaching and miracle-making had doubtless left Jesus very weary and in need of the kind of refreshment that could only come by spending time with his Father in prayer. But while he is praying, he perceives from afar that the disciples are in trouble. The winds had blown up from out of nowhere, as they are wont to do in that part of the world, and despite their boating skills, the disciples were making no headway. We're not told in Mark 6 that they were in danger necessarily or that they would soon be swamped, but it's surely no fun to be out in the middle of a lake, in the dark, fighting the wind and the waves.

So Jesus goes out to them. He walks on water, which surely counts as one of the most famous of all Jesus' actions. "Walking on water" has become a metaphor for all kinds of things in the centuries since this story was first told. Curiously and for his part, Mark mentions this pretty much just in passing. Even the disciples are not reported to having asked, "How did you do that!?" As Lord of creation, this is apparently just something Jesus was able to do.

The disciples think they are seeing a ghost, and every single person here tonight would have thought the same thing. Yet Mark reports that initially it looked like Jesus was going to walk right on by the boat. That little detail has puzzled commentators ever since. The Greek in that part of verse 48 is a little complicated and open to more than one translation. Some take the NIV tack of straightforwardly saying Jesus was about to pass by the boat. Others think this can be translated in a way that focuses on the disciples, claiming they only thought this figure was about to walk right past them but they were wrong. Still others think it doesn't mean Jesus intended to pass by them so much as he wanted to "pass their way." Still others think this may be Mark's way of alluding to the way Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, "passed by" Moses that one time when Moses was hidden in the cleft of a rock on Mount Sinai.

Who's right? Who knows! But when in doubt, I usually take the simpler explanation, which in this case means Jesus was passing them by before they cried out in a way that let Jesus know they had spied him at last. Of course, when they called out, they did so in terror, not in hope. They weren't saying, "Hey, Master, we're over here!" but rather, "It's a ghost, we're doomed!" But the point is that they saw Jesus and only then did he reveal himself to them. In verse 51, Jesus utters a very telling phrase: ego eimi, which the NIV translates as "It is I," which makes good sense of the Greek. Literally, however, this is simply "I Am."

John's gospel is the one that does the most with the "I Am" utterances of Jesus but the synoptic gospels have scattered references to this telling phrase, too. As you may know, "I Am" is the main translation for the personal Name of God, Yahweh, that was first revealed to Moses at the burning bush. This is a divine revelation. Jesus is "I Am."

In case anyone missed it, once Jesus climbs into the boat, the wind ceases immediately. But the story doesn't end happily. There is a note of judgment against the disciples here. Mark says they didn't understand about the loaves, but lest we conclude this was simple ignorance at work, Mark gets a bit more harsh when he claims that the explanation for this cluelessness was that "their hearts were hardened." Whether it is Pharaoh in Exodus, the people of Israel in Isaiah's prophecy, or now these disciples, people with hardened hearts in the Bible are in a bad place. Spiritually speaking, a hard heart is a dire diagnosis.

But that's what Mark says about the disciples. That's an amazing indictment of them considering that Mark 6 began with the disciples' remarkable, first-ever solo venture into ministry. According to verse 12, they preached successfully, drove out many demons, and healed a lot of sick people. The Spirit of the Living God was obviously at work in those disciples. So how can it be a mere forty verses later that they are described as being hard-hearted? How can it be that they were still missing the truth about Jesus as the Messiah of God? And just what was it that they had not understood about that feeding of the 5,000? What specifically about "the loaves" did they not get?

Clearly what they have not fully grasped is the import behind Jesus' saying, "I Am." They have seen the miracles of their Lord, they have even performed some themselves. But they still are not seeing Jesus as the Messianic One who was long ago promised. They are still missing the full truth of just who this man is. It's startling and even a little stunning to recognize this, but there it is. They still don't know that with Jesus in their midst, all things are possible. Vast throngs can get fed from a few pieces of bread and fish. Water can be walked on like concrete and storms can be silenced without a word from Jesus. With God's Christ in their midst, all is well and all is possible.

Across the four gospels, there are several stories involving Jesus' calming of a storm. One version of this story has Peter also trying to walk on water. Another parallel story has Jesus asleep in the back of the boat to begin with such that the disciples have to wake him up before Jesus saves them by rebuking the wind. Most people believe that these stories represent a kind of real-life parable for the church. The boat, and the disciples in the boat, stand for the church of Christ as it is tossed to and fro in an often stormy world of persecution and unbelief. But always, always, the key for the disciples to remember--and the key for us to remember even now all these centuries later--is that Jesus' presence in the midst of life's storms makes all the difference.

But you have to see Jesus and recognize him for who he is to get the great comfort this knowledge provides. In the feeding of the 5,000, the disciples saw Jesus but even then didn't recognize fully who he was despite the miracle unfolding before their very eyes. And then there's this incident on the lake. Jesus walks out to them and looks at first as though he was going to walk right on by. That detail of this story, which we already noted has proven very perplexing to lots of people, may be the key. When the disciples first saw Jesus on the water, they didn't know it was he. But at least they saw him and their cries indicated this was so.

Yet even that mistaken cry was enough to make Jesus turn toward them and immediately identify himself as the Christ of God, the Great I Am in the flesh. No sooner does this happen, and the threats against the disciples diminish and fade away. They are amazed that this is so but only because their hearts had not yet been penetrated by the full understanding of who Jesus is. Even without that understanding, however, the storm is calmed. Apparently, and blessedly, Jesus' work in our lives and in his church is a gift of grace and is not something contingent on how strong our faith is at any given moment.

And that is good news to all of us who are honest. Sometimes we are more like the disciples in Mark 6 than we'd care to admit. After all, here are a group of people that have been with Jesus for quite a while now. They've seen so many wonders, have heard so many marvelous teachings. They even just recently accomplished a mighty series of works in the name of Jesus--the kind of thing none of them ever dreamed they would ever be able to do. Yet still there were those times when they just couldn't seem to see the Jesus in their midst. They didn't know a large crowd could be fed so long as Jesus was there. They didn't know Jesus was with them in the storm and were amazed after Jesus calmed that same storm by doing no more than joining them in the boat.

We're like this sometimes too, aren't we? We've been in the church for maybe many years. We know Jesus. We've prayed to God in Jesus' name. We've seen many prayers answered, have witnessed our own share of wonderful spiritual works, have heard the Holy Spirit instructing our hearts in the truth of the gospel, helping us to apply that to our daily living as Christ's disciples. Yet still there are those moments when we forget just Who it is that is present with us in the church. As a congregation or as individual disciples, we are asked at times to do something new yet we respond incredulously.

"You give them something to eat," Jesus had said. "Yeah right!" the disciples replied. In our fear and uncertainty about this or that ministry venture or opportunity, don't we sometimes say the same thing? How often haven't we hesitated or quashed an idea because we nervously glanced at the budget's bottom line only to conclude we don't have the resources necessary to accomplish this or that? How often haven't we tried to beg off from the Spirit's prompting us to volunteer for something new or become a member of Council or a committee by suggesting to Jesus, ever-so-gently, that we're not strong enough, talented enough, or whatever?

When life gets stormy, when the winds howl in the dark of night, don't we sometimes forget that Jesus is with us in the storm? Before the disciples called out, mistaken though that cry was, it looked as though Jesus was going to walk right on by. But at least they had seen him and that made all the difference. As the church and as members of it, we cannot think that being Christians insulates us from all hurt, from criticism, even from various forms of persecution. Jesus told us to expect rough times, and the history of the church bears out the fact that Jesus wasn't kidding. Jesus' presence with us in those storms may or may not result in an instant calming of the gale but there is more than a little comfort and hope in the fact that we are not alone.

In his commentary on Matthew's version of this story, Dale Bruner once suggested that Jesus' words in this story should be emblazoned overtop of the front door of every church in the world: "Take courage! I Am! Be not afraid." This is the second Sunday evening in a row when we've looked at a story from Mark's gospel that showed Jesus telling someone "Be not afraid." I think Mark is trying to tell us something.

Of course, the irony is that the final word of Mark is "afraid." Remember: after the angel tells the women that Jesus has been raised, they flee the tomb, saying nothing to anyone, "because they were afraid." But we know that not long after that, those women, along with the other disciples, encountered the risen Lord Jesus Christ and when they did, all fear came to an end. So also in Mark 6: the disciples' initial fear turns to an amazed calm once they recognize who it was passing them there in the darkness. "Be not afraid!" Jesus said then and has said ever since. Be not afraid. I think Mark is trying to tell us something. But wait, it's not Mark. It's Jesus. Because remember: he's here in the boat with us. Right here. My friends, believe the gospel and be not afraid. Amen.