Straight from the Heart: Orthodox Bible Study with Father Lawrence

          In the series Firefly (if you haven’t yet found it, do so) there is a quote, “We’ve done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.”  The line is filled with poignancy, since it was uttered in the face of hopeless odds.  In keeping with this quote, I would say that we Christians do the impossible, and that makes our God mighty.

            By “the impossible”, I refer to walking on water.  Christ walked on water, of course—the account is found in Mt. 14: 22f, Mk. 6:45f, and Jn. 6:15f.  In the basic story, Christ walked on the water to come to the aid of His beleaguered and storm-tossed disciples.  The surrounding context reveals their hearts and their anxieties, and fills out the story. 

            They were stretched to the breaking point and beyond.  (St. Mark’s account says that they no leisure even to eat.)  Christ therefore took them to what should have been a lonely and deserted place where they could find their desperately needed rest.  Instead, many saw them going and ran to the place on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them, so that when the Lord and His disciples disembarked they saw a tremendous multitude.  St. Matthew numbers the crowd at 5000, not counting women and children.  So, counting women and children, there may have been upwards of 15,000 people waiting for them.  Like the disciples, the multitude also was desperate—desperate for healing, for direction, for hope.  St. Mark describes them as sheep without a shepherd—that is, as vulnerable and starving.  Christ therefore had compassion on them and spent the day teaching and healing them.

          Then, when the Twelve were stretched even past their previous breaking point, a new crisis emerged:  how to feed about 15,000 in such a lonely place.  A hasty conference among the disciples produced a consensus:  the Lord must send them away so that they might descend on the surrounding villages (note the plural—one single village could not feed such a multitude), and find the necessary food.  Otherwise, if they were sent away to their homes fasting, many would faint on the way (especially the children).  It would be a disaster.  They would all be on the six o’clock news, under the headline “Catastrophe in Galilee”.

          To the apostles’ surprise, their Lord did not agree with the common-sense solution.  Instead, He had another one—they could feed them.  Checking their stash of money produced the obvious:  they had not the resources to buy enough food for even a few of them to get a little.  And what food did they have?  Nothing.  A little boy among them had a lunch of five loaves and two fish.  (The Greek word for “fish” is opsarion—not a large trout, but a small sardine.) The Lord was unfazed.  “Have the people sit down”.  Dinner is served. 

        He took the bread and the fish and said the customary Jewish blessing and broke the bread and gave it them.  And again. And again. And again. At length, all received enough to eat, and more.  There was even enough left over that each of the Twelve could fill his basket—Greek kophinos, a kind of Jewish “fanny pack”—with the left-over fragments.  The crowd was electrified.  So much so that they concluded in a kind of Messianic fever that Jesus was indeed the long-expected Prophet, and they were all for taking Him by force and making Him King.

          Another crisis!  The Lord therefore sent His disciples away, having them embark quickly by the sea from which they came, while He “dismissed the crowds”—i.e. defused the situation.  He had to separate Himself from the Twelve so that He could slip away unseen, and ascend the nearby hill to spend the night in prayer to God.

         As one can imagine, the disciples, whose nerves were already well shot, were a wreck.  They were to row across the sea to make for the other side, and there to await their Lord.  But (as the proverb says), anything that can go wrong, will.  A tremendous storm swept down suddenly on the Sea of Galilee, and they could make no headway.  By about 4.00 a.m. or so, they were still struggling against the wind, dead tired, falling asleep, kept awake only by the wind and cold waves slapping their faces.

         Then they saw it.  Coming closer and closer, floating, it seemed, across the water, like a demonic phantom.  They thought it was a ghost (the Greek is phantasma, compare our English “phantasm”—a scarier word at four in the morning), and cried out in terror.

        Here one needs to not think like a lover of tall ships (no “Sea Fever” or John Masefield here), but to think like a Jew.  For the ancient Jews, the sea was a place of demonic evil, so that a thing coming across the storm-driven waves in the wee hours of the dark morning could only be something terrible.  And yet it was not.  In that moment of terror, they heard the most welcome voice in the world—their own sweet Lord, calling out to comfort their hearts, saying, “Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.”

        The Gospel accounts in Mark and John give the story the obvious conclusion.  They received the Lord into the boat, and the storm ceased, and they immediately reached their destination.  But the account in Matthew adds something more.

         Peter (of course it was Peter) said, “Lord, if it is really You, bid me come to You on the water.”  The Lord simply said, “Come.”  And Peter did.  And least for a bit—he put one foot out of the boat (crazily lurching on the waters), then the other foot.  Then he took a step, and found the water upheld him.  And he began approaching his Lord, the dark figure a few paces away, standing (we may think), with outstretched arms.  Then he took his eyes off the Lord (always a bad move) and looked at the waves whipped by the wind.  Then the storm, which before was simply around him, entered his inner heart as well, and he began to sink.  He cried out, “Lord, save me!” (that’s all it usually takes), and the Lord did.  He plucked him from the watery grave awaiting him and brought him back to the boat, and safety.

       That’s the basic story.  But we need to look a little closer, and with more ancient and Jewish eyes.  It is tempting to think that the miracle consisted only of doing what was physically impossible—of walking on water, instead of sinking under it. For us, water is water, and if the Lord was seen walking on the water of an indoor pool would be basically the same miracle.

            But our Lord did not just walk on water—He walked on the sea.  And for the ancient Jews (unlike dear John Masefield, with his poem Sea Fever) were no lovers of the sea.  The sea was a place of chaos, of restless evil.  The world was created out of water, as God looked on the face of the formless and empty deep (read Gen. 1:2 again) and created form out of formlessness, and fullness out of emptiness.  The water of the sea was a remnant and reminder of the original chaos which God conquered when He created the world.  And they never forgot the terrible time when the primordial waters again overwhelmed the land and swept away all life and order in the Flood in the days of Noah.  God had come to the rescue, and now He was keeping the restless sea at bay.  “Here,” He said, “shall your proud waves be stopped” (Job 38:11).  (There is even an echo of this in the Orthodox prayer for blessing water:  we praise God’s power by exulting that God has put about the sea barriers of sand.)  It is as if the sea is constantly threatening to again overwhelm the earth and cover all with death, undoing the original creation.  And in the new earth, the new creation, there will no longer be any sea (Rev. 21:1).

            Thus, when Christ walked on the sea, He was walking on and trampling down the waters of chaos, of death, of the abyss. He was showing Himself sovereign over the powers of chaos, revealing Himself as the life-giver.  The powers of death and chaos had no authority over Him.

            And here’s the point of Matthew’s peculiar account of Christ walking on the sea—He shares this authority with us.  Remember that Matthew is the same evangelist who speaks of Peter confessing Christ and receiving the keys of the Kingdom (Mt. 1613f).  The point of the passage isn’t Peter—it’s us.  We are Peter.  Like him, we also confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  To say that Peter has the keys means that the Church has the keys, and can speak with divine authority for God.  Later arguments about the significance of this passage in Mt. 16 for the papacy obscure this basic point:  it’s all about the Church.  Peter is us.

            This is Matthew’s point, his sub-text, in adding that not only did Christ walk on the sea, but that He enabled Peter to walk on the sea as well.  Christ did the impossible—and He empowers us to do the impossible too.  Christ has authority over death—and He shares this authority with us, His Church.  Whoever confesses with lips and heart and life that Jesus is the Son of the living God—this one can do the impossible.  He can walk on water.  He can flout the authority of death.  Chaos and the abyss can never swallow him up.  Like the Lord Christ, he will defy the storms and return with Christ to safety and reach the other side.  Through Christ, we can do the impossible.  And that makes Him mighty, and almighty, and the Lord of all.