Storms Ahead

Sunday 23 June 2024

Job 38:1-11

Mark 4.35-41

On my phone I have an app called Weatherzone, that tells you what the weather is likely to be up to 10 days ahead - with the cute little sunny faces and fluffy clouds and little diagonal lines for rain. Wind, hail, storm, all represented with cute little emojis that somehow don’t quite do justice to the powerful reality of hot and cold and sunshine and storm that we simply have to plan our lives around! It’s no accident, I think, that we use meteorological terms to describe all of the most powerful influences on our lives - from saving for a rainy day to navigating the choppy waters of an unstable economy or a failing relationship.

In the ancient world, one of the most powerful symbols of anxiety and disorder was the chaos of a storm at sea. At sea, you were in the power of forces almost too big to imagine, the violence of wind and waves was so feared that creation itself was supposed to be the result of divine forces holding back the unimaginable fury of watery chaos – as Yahweh reminds Job in the Old Testament reading set for today, ‘who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?’  It seems that for the ancients, the fury of a storm was a battering at the doors of creation itself, the forces of chaos trying to get back in. In the centre of the storm you were as good as lost – at the same time, as we read over and over in the Old Testament, the whirlwind was where you came face to face with the power of the God who was in control of the uncontrollable.

It’s a point, though, that seems to be lost on Jesus’ disciples, in spite of all the hints of the past few weeks, the miraculous healing power that they have witnessed, the parables that, as Mark tells us, went over the heads of everybody else but Jesus privately explained to the disciples. They should be getting the point by now!  And then they head out into the middle of the Sea of Galilee on an overnight trip, heading for the non-Jewish region on the far side of the Jordan. 

Mark seems to have a bit of fun with this story – according to my commentary there’s an echo here of a similar trip involving another prophet called Jonah who went to sleep in the middle of a storm. On that trip, too, the captain wakes up the passenger and accuses him of being too blasé – ‘don’t you even care?’ – though in the Book of Jonah the captain at least knows the right procedure for dealing with storms at sea – pray as hard as you can, to as many gods as possible, and hope that at least one of your prayers gets through! But notice that in today’s story the disciples don’t ask Jesus for anything: ‘Don’t you care that we’re getting swamped?’  ‘Have you even noticed?’, they complain. They clearly don’t think he can do anything about it.

Remember these men are fishermen, they’ve been to-ing and fro-ing on the Sea of Galilee in small boats all their lives, they do it for a living. And the Sea of Galilee is famously volatile, so the disciples really should have known what could happen on a night trip from one side of the Sea to the other. Maybe this storm was worse than usual.

‘Don’t you even care, God?’  Actually, we know what they’re talking about, don’t we? When you think about it, we’ve all been in that situation, when all of a sudden the storm that’s always just in the back of our awareness blows up, whether it’s a medical diagnosis or lost job or a financial disaster, the telephone rings with bad news or the email dings and we just know it’s bad news and we look around to see Jesus right where he always is, serenely unconcerned. ‘Don’t you even care, God? Why am I suffering like this? Aren’t you supposed to be in control?’

As I said, the disciples don’t ask Jesus to help – the implication is that they don’t believe he really can, they just want to make sure he’s panicking as hard as they are – notice how, despite all they’ve seen and heard, the remarkable events they’ve been part of, despite the fact that they have left everything to follow Jesus, the disciples immediately revert to unbelief when they’re overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control. To be honest, this happens to us too, doesn’t it? Trusting God is OK while the boat is more or less upright, but when the situation gets out of hand we want something a bit more tangible. Anxiety can make us think we’re on our own.

But notice Jesus’ reaction. He doesn’t talk to his terrified friends, not at first. Neither does he do the traditional thing, which is to pray for deliverance – and he certainly doesn’t do what Jonah does, which is to opt for oblivion and ask to be chucked overboard!

Instead Jesus talks to the storm as though it was one of the demons he has been exorcising. He commands it to be still. A storm, after all, is just a storm, and actually in the worldview of the ancients that should be exactly where the power of the divine is most on display. And so it is here, too. You see, Mark’s Gospel, the earliest, the most rushed, least polished Gospel, is sometimes thought of as having an unsophisticated, humanistic interpretation of who Jesus really is. But in this story, Jesus displays exactly the same power over the chaotic forces of precreation as the God who in Genesis speaks a word over the watery chaos and brings creation into being. The implication, for the first generation of Jewish hearers of Mark’s Gospel, would have been obvious. Jesus is Lord, Jesus is one with God and has the power to transform the chaos of our own fear and sin into new life.

 In our lives, the wildest storms can become demonic - notice, I’m speaking metaphorically here - only when we give them the power to diminish who we are, which is to say, only when we allow a storm to cut us off from our awareness of what really gives us life. But actually it is precisely in the storms of life that we should most look for God’s presence, because the chaos of our own lives is where God is most at work in us. St Paul says that too - it’s in 2 Corinthians 12.9 “for my power is made perfect in weakness”. Jesus shows that he has the power to cut through all that separates us from our awareness of God at the centre of our lives, and in the process sets us free from whatever has a demonic power in our lives. 

I think that in the story St Mark, who typically shows the disciples as not getting the point – ‘huh? what sort of man is this?’ - is more or less inviting us to fill in the blanks. And of course, we’re listening to the story from the other side of Easter, so we should already know what sort of man Jesus is – we already know Jesus is the bearer of God’s Spirit who challenges and transforms our deepest and most destructive demons, all that distorts our relationships with each other and with God. All that prevents us from trusting in the future that God intends for us. The storms that come upon us accidentally as well as the storms we stir up for ourselves. We already know, or at least we claim to know, that Jesus is Lord of all this - which is another way of saying that we know the presence and the leading of God’s Holy Spirit through the terrifying as well as the comforting aspects of life.

But we miss the point, if we hear this story as just an impressive way of Jesus revealing his secret identity to his not-so-clever disciples. Because - we also know what it’s like to be in situations where we haven’t got any control, we know what it’s like to be swamped and afraid. We know what it’s like to be in a place where only God can be any help. This isn’t just an all-too familiar story for us, it’s actually the story of our own lives. We know what it’s like to say to God, ‘Don’t you even care that we’re being swamped?’ – and to hear God’s silence in return. How easy do we find it to trust that God is in control of the storms that rage in our lives? 

The Gospel writer knows this. Mark is writing to a Christian community living through war and fear and persecution, a community that doesn’t actually know whether it has a future. He’s a realist, but he also knows that we - the people listening to his Gospel - already know what happens at the end of the story. When Jesus rebukes the chaos of wind and water, we know we are hearing a powerful message of hope from a man who later is going to cry out in despair on a Roman cross. A man who knows that the centre of the whirlwind is right where we are going to encounter the God of wind and storm. The God who comes to share our boat with us. This isn’t a gospel of cheap tricks, it’s a gospel of costly grace. ‘Don’t you even care?’ – we ask God, for the umpteenth time.

And we hear in return, ‘Be still. Be at peace’.

Amen.