We Will Walk in the Midst of the Storm

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Sometimes I think that being a Christian is one of the most impractical things in all the world. 

Let’s begin with the fact that the most important person or thing in our lives—God—is invisible, inaudible, and technically unprovable. 

Next, you have unanswered prayer. We’ve all sought things from God that we haven’t received. We’ve all prayed for healing that didn’t happen, or for deliverance that didn’t come—at least, not in the way we were hoping for or expected. 

Then you have the moral teachings of the faith. On the surface, most of it makes pretty good sense. Love people. Be generous. And so on. But the deeper you go, the more you realize how little the Bible’s teachings come naturally. 

People are sometimes offended at the Bible’s teachings about sex, for example. It doesn’t align with their natural inclinations. Obeying the Scriptures would mean denying a core part of their being. And that’s true. But there are much better reasons to be offended at Jesus than because he says marriage is between one man and one woman, that monogamy is for life, and that even entertaining thoughts of sexuality outside the bonds of monogamous, heterosexual marriage is to be unfaithful in principle as well as in fact. 

How about when Jesus told that rich young guy to give away all his stuff? 

What about when Jesus said our forgiveness before God is inseparable from our willingness to forgive from our hearts those who have most deeply hurt us? 

What about when Jesus said to turn the other cheek when we are slapped in the face—and not in the modern re-imagining of this commandment, which you sometimes come across on the internet, where Jesus is saying to stand up for your rights and make the person hitting you treat you like an equal. 

No, Jesus is saying that when someone hits you in the face, let them hit you again. 

And if that offends you and brings all kinds of objections to mind, then you’re finally starting to understand Jesus. 

So, our faith is built on an invisible, inaudible, technically unprovable reality which sometimes appears to, and sometimes does not appear to, give us the things we ask for in prayer, and which makes impossible moral demands of us that ultimately cut across our deepest desires and most basic, natural inclinations. 

Yes, this does seem a bit impractical.

And yes, now that having a common religion is no longer a major, determining social factor in our culture, it does make sense that most people choose to go without. 

And yet…ask any person for whom the claims of Christianity are—for one reason or another—true and real, and you will almost invariably meet someone who says that God has changed their life. 

How has something so apparently unreliable and inconvenient made such a difference in their lives?

It certainly is an interesting question…

Our passage this morning follows directly on the heels of last week’s Gospel text. Jesus has just fed the five thousand. Evening has come. Jesus sends away the disciples by boat, and then sends away the crowds. He finally gets the quiet he’s been looking for. He spends the evening in prayer. At some point the weather gets stormy. Jesus finishes praying and looks out over the water to where the disciples are struggling in their boat. The waves have gotten large. Some of the men in the boat are professional fishermen, so if even they are struggling at the oars, you know the situation is bad. Jesus walks down onto the shore and steps out onto the water. 

It’s Jesus’ most famous miracle, second only to the immediately previous one. 

Jesus walks on the water.

Jews in the first century believed in ghosts. We modern Christians in the west would probably be surprised how superstitious they could be. They believed in omens and curses, in magic and in ghosts. Were they supposed to believe in these things? Not really. But they did. And the disciples, apparently, are no different. They see a figure walking to them on the water in the midst of the storm. Visibility must be pretty good in spite of the weather. The moon must be bright. Jesus could see the men from the shore, and the men can see Jesus from the boat. But people don’t walk on the water. What in the world could be happening? They cling to the only explanation they can muster: “It’s a ghost!”

But Jesus calms their fears, sort of, by yelling out to them over the sound of the wind and the waves, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid” (verse 27). 

Don’t be afraid, Jesus says. You can get a sense of how chaotic being Jesus’ disciples must have been. They’d just seen a miracle, the feeding of the five thousand. Then, mere hours later, they are on a boat wondering if they’re going to make it across. Then they see a ghost, which can only mean they are cursed. But then the ghost turns out to be Jesus, taking a stroll on the waves. And Jesus tells them not to be scared. Talk about commandments that don’t fit one’s natural inclinations! 

But then there is Peter. God bless Peter. The most impulsive man of the bunch. “Lord, if that is you, tell me to come to you on the water.”

What could Peter be thinking? Maybe, as a man who has been on the sea at night hundreds of times (because that was the best time to fish), he didn’t believe in ghosts like the others. Maybe he is testing whether Jesus is a mass hallucination or not. Maybe he’s decided they’re doomed and he may as well try something interesting. Who knows? But he asks Jesus to invite him out on the water. Jesus invites him, and the rest is history. 

Peter gets out. 

The waves hold him up.

He walks to Jesus, to the undoubted amazement of his friends.

But then Peter’s eyes go from Jesus back to the waves. He “sees the wind,” in the Gospel writers’ odd phrase. And he sinks. “Lord, save me!” Peter cries. “You of little faith,” Jesus responds, and pulls him out of the water and into the boat. 

What kind of lesson are we supposed to draw from this story? 

The first is that Jesus is God. 

Not because the disciples worship him here, though that’s important. Yes, they recognize they are in the presence of the Holy. They realize their friend is God’s unique Son. But we can’t imagine they have a fully worked out doctrine of Jesus’ two natures in their heads—fully God and fully man. They don’t have a theology of incarnation yet. The word “worship” means they prostrated themselves before him. They bowed down. They were shocked. They didn’t know what else to do.

And it’s not because only God could walk on the water, technically. After all, Peter did, too. God can work miracles wherever and however he wants to. And history is filled with wonder workers who levitate and do other supernatural things, by this power or that. Jesus isn’t God because he performed a magic trick.

No, Jesus coming to the disciples on the water is a hint. It’s a promise. It’s one of the many ways that Jesus turns the Hebrew Bible into a prophecy of himself. In the book of Job, chapter 9, as Job is debating his guilt or innocence with his friends, Job says these words about God:

“His wisdom is profound, his power is vast.

Who has resisted him and come out unscathed?

He moves mountains without their knowing it

and overturns them in his anger.

He shakes the earth from its place

and makes its pillars tremble.

He speaks to the sun and it does not shine;

he seals off the light of the stars.

He alone stretches out the heavens

and treads on the waves of the sea.” (Job 9:6-8)

Jesus coming to the disciples on the waves is a—veiled in the moment, perhaps—declaration that Jesus is God. Jesus is the God who treads on the waves of the sea. Which means Jesus is also the one whose “power is vast,” who “moves mountains without their knowing it,” and who “shakes the earth from its place.” When Peter takes his eyes off his friend and sinks because he’s looking back at the waves, what’s really happened is that Peter has taken his eyes off of God. God is the one holding him up, despite the storm all around him. God is the one holding him up, despite the storm that threatens to drown him. Why? Because Jesus is God.

And this, I think, is the reason Christianity changes so many lives despite its apparent implausibility—because Christians look at Jesus and say, “There is God.” “The deepest reality of existence is like that.” The one who makes impossible demands is also the one who does the impossible for us. The one who sometimes says No to our prayers is the one who received a No to his prayer in the garden outside Jerusalem before his death. The one who allows storms into our lives is the one who come to us in the midst of those storms. To see all of reality form itself around the person of Jesus is to be eternally changed. 

Which brings us to Peter, sinking in the waves. 

How often do you and I look at the waves instead of Jesus? How often do we drown in the depths of this life because we forget that God is also the God of the depths? 

If our faith rose and fell with how well things were going, or how scary tomorrow looked, or whether our prayers were receiving a Yes or a No, then the world would be right. God is an invisible, inaudible, unprovable waste of time. 

But if we fix our eyes on Jesus, and remind ourselves that the deepest truth of reality is a suffering and risen Lord, then the waves will fade from our vision, and we will walk in the midst of the storm.

Let’s Pray