When Jesus is on the Sea of Galilee with the disciples, and storm winds and waves frighten even seasoned fishermen, we find the God who made the waves, the wind, and the wood the boat is crafted from—who made everything and holds everything together—tired and asleep in the stern of the ship.
God is asleep on a boat, even though our first thought as readers is that, of course, Jesus, a mere human, is napping (and that is true, too).
What we tend not to ponder is that this one asleep on the cushion is the one who never slumbers nor sleeps, whoever watches over Israel and the world.
When the disciples awaken Jesus and he surveys the situation (and their hearts), he rebukes their fear, and a mere man stands up on two feet in a vessel sloshing with lake water and rebukes the wind: “Peace! Be still!”
Someone just like the rest of the disciples—with breathing lungs and a beating heart, groggy and finding his sea legs—makes the wind stop gusting and turns the waves to glass with his words.
As readers, we think Jesus is God and this awe-inspiring ability fits his divinity, but Jesus is also just a human, no more special in his biochemistry than anyone else in that boat on a sea gone wild.
Jesus is not Superman. He is as vulnerable in that moment as the disciples and the folks on the other boats in their crossing armada. Had his boat capsized or sank, and the storm continued to rage, he was as susceptible to drowning and death as anyone on any of the boats.
This story tells us that God takes actual risks, takes on the risks of being actually human when he comes among us in the flesh of Jesus. And we can be sure that he is as invested in our present storms—right there with us in the tumult saying “Peace. Do not be afraid.”
When we read every story about Jesus in this careful way that the first Christians taught us—realizing this protagonist is in every moment God “all‑in” and human “all‑in”—we begin to discern that something has happened forever in God and something has happened forever in us, because the Son who breathed the stars into fiery existence and set their courses in the sky, who made the orchid and the hummingbird, humbled himself and was made like us in every way: weary, thirsty, hungry, aching, longing, striving, rejected, fallen, marvelous clay that we are, that we might be as he is, as God from all eternity with his Father and their Spirit. World without end.
The Gospels remind us that in Jesus Christ, God leaves fingerprints, leaves DNA, wherever he goes. He left his fingerprints on the buckets they used to bail out the stormwater on the nearly-flooded vessel before continuing their crossing. He donates his DNA to us in the chalice on the table. Jesus is *human* without measure.
Jesus breathes the spirit of the Father’s loving-kindness on all things. By the Spirit, he calms seas, the raging oceans of the world, the raging waters inside the human heart. Jesus is *divine* without qualification.
And it’s proper here to note that Jesus calls upon the Spirit when as a human he does these miracles—never from self-interest, always to manifest the glory of the Father, and is not grasping at equality with God.
This gives us mere humans a pattern of prayer to emulate, invited as we are into the Father’s sovereign rule of all things, not as warlocks or wizards but as those who join his humble service to creation and all things, leaving the outcomes in his good and everlasting hands for his good ends.
Jesus shows us who God is and Jesus shows us who we are.
His blood, his touch, his stops of breath reconcile the creator and the clay that—as female and male—alone in all creation bears the image of God.
Jesus walks with us, walks as us now, and we participate by our prayers, by our touch, by our faith and compassion — sometimes even by our blood — in the renewal of all things.
And Jesus cares. About everything and everyone, whether or not we do. And it is good and proper for us to pause and ponder with the disciples: “What manner of human is this who makes the winds and seas obey?”
We see the likeness of Jesus in every human. We see like the likeness of Jesus in every Central American refugee. Would that they might behold in our faces the icon of his vulnerability, self-sacrificial love, and resurrection in this wild, wonderful world he became human to restore to life without end.
This really resonate's with what's going on in America today...So many waves this country has gone threw in such a short time. We as a country and individual's really need to seek out Jesus Christ for his guidance in this strange day of age. Peace
Posted by: Scott C Trautman | June 26, 2018 at 01:09 PM