Walking on water…it is, perhaps, one of the best known images from Jesus’ miracles. Most often, though, you hear someone use the image disparagingly. It’s most often used to indicate the impossible, or at least the highly improbable. It has about the same meaning as the phrase “When pigs fly!” At one company I worked for a person could only get an “outstanding” on his or her annual review if, as the president of the company noted, that person could either walk on water or cross the street without touching the pavement. In other words, “When pigs fly!”
But in Mark’s gospel, “walking on water” isn’t really
what it sounds like. “Walking on water” is an act that is part of
a whole host of acts by both Jesus and his disciples in a section of that gospel
that begins much earlier. In fact, the reading today begins with a reference
to what came before it, that is, the feeding of the five thousand. The truth
is that that story is, like today’s passage, merely part of something
much larger, a complex and fascinating story about faith. And if we
really listen to the whole story as it unfolds we find that
faith isn’t what we thought it was…and certainly not
what the disciples thought it was. Faith, as it turns out, is something that
we and the disciples must learn about together, in a manner
of speaking, since Mark is following their story and letting us
see how it unfolds.
As it turns out, Mark’s gospel is not like a series of snapshots but more
like a mural, a long painting made for us so we’ll understand many far
more complicated things that could never be captured in a series of
unconnected pictures or stories. In a nutshell here’s what has led up
to this: Jesus tells parables about faith, then gives his disciples examples
in his healing actions. He even stops a dangerous storm. It’s clear that
the faith that Jesus has works both at the human and non-human levels alike.
In today’s gospel Jesus walks on water to make that point again. But it’s
also a fragile thing; in his own home town, remember, Jesus
seems almost powerless. To try to teach the disciples more about
faith, Jesus sends them out, two by two, taking nothing but the faith
they have. They learn that what faith they do have—even as little
as they have—is more than enough to do the same
sorts of things Jesus has been doing. Next we come to the feeding of the five
thousand, a kind of summary of all that’s gone before in Jesus’
faith teachings. It’s completely ambiguous—a lot of Mark leaves
us loose ends to ponder: Jesus tells the disciples to feed the crowds but they
assume their faith can never equal his and
thus they figure they lack his power to pull off such miracles.
But Jesus blesses the meager food they have and then gives it to them—to
the disciples—to distribute. They break off pieces, they
hand it out, and then they realize that there’s more. I like to think
that for each of them there must’ve come a moment while distributing the
food when they thought, “Yes, now I realize that maybe I, too, could
have done this. Maybe I am doing this! Perhaps even my faith is
enough! Wait…Is it Jesus’ faith or their own that does this?”
I think we are left in the dark quite deliberately. And yet they—the twelve—were
only days before doing what they thought impossible
with the faith they possessed.
Jesus had sent them out, two by two, to learn just that. And it is those same
disciples—and many more who did not witness
these miracles—whose faith opens up an entirely new world for
us in the years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection! If
there’s anything for the disciples (or us) to miss or to get mixed up
on, then maybe it’s the fact that
faith is never about power but about love.
Acting as though faith itself is a means to get and exercise power
would indeed be missing the point. If Jesus shows us anything he shows us the
way that love manifests its own force—not ours—in
the world through faith.
That’s what I mean when I say that I think that
faith is the manifestation of love.
Any of the disciples who have thought that what they did on their journeys, sent out two by two, was because of some power that Jesus had given them would also be wrong. If they hope that Jesus will give them the power to walk on the water, they’d again be missing the point. The lesson is that there is NO amount of faith that is so small that it can’t do the impossible—not as small as the size of a mustard seed, not even as little as the disciples feel they have. The same holds true for us as well. Love, like the faith that comes from it is an absolute, it cannot be measured; indeed, trying to measure it also misses the point. Even though we seem to know that, we nevertheless try to put love and faith in the relative terms of power, and in that way we miss the point, too. That’s what makes all of this so important for us and all who come after us.
All this brings me back to the Bible and how it’s often viewed…and used. It’s interesting how we seem to take for granted the solidity of the Bible…its unchangeability, its permanence; to some it’s the “inerrant, unchangeable word of God.” Many think that if it’s in the ancient words of the Bible then it’s something unchangeable and timeless, even if all human culture around it has changed. But on the other hand, to be fair, it’s a nice feeling to have something permanent in a world where everything changes faster and faster all the time. But in the parables, in the boat in the storm or walking on water, in the healings, in the missions of the disciples, in the liberation from demons,…in the feeding of the five thousand…everything that would have been one way—the same old way—is changed when one person acts in faith out of love. This is one of most improbable and yet most powerful messages we get from this seemingly unchanging manuscript:
we are NOT called to live in an unchanging world of suffering and greed and hunger and war, but to CHANGE this world through acts that have NOTHING to do with our own power but the power of LOVE itself!
The Bible is not a pattern of life cast in an unchanging set of rules but a
call to change everything we can, and, in order to do that, to love all
that we can!
We have never…NEVER needed to know that more than we do right now, right
this very minute. After all, it’s got to start somewhere, doesn’t
it? Today’s news is full of concrete examples. The Middle East is again
exploding daily into new levels of violence, living by the law of Hammurabi—an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,…perhaps a missile for a bomb. That
ancient law is the law of no change at all, a law of unending
violence and revenge until there is literally nothing left.
Both sides—all sides—claim to seek justice but merely bring about
greater destruction and death. And so we come to another unpopular truth that
the Bible holds for us if we will only listen:
Justice is not “trying to make things fair or equal” but it
IS justice to make the
suffering STOP, and if you look at it that way then justice ALWAYS demands us
to do the improbable and the impossible, and if we learn ANYTHING from Jesus
we realize to our amazement that only one thing CAN do the improbable AND the
impossible…and it is faith, acting out of love.
Power…power changes nothing. Power is used to enforce one’s will and really nothing else. It has always been that way and always will be. And if faith is the manifestation of love, then we must also face the unpleasant truth that
suffering is the manifestation of power.
History teaches us that even when a war ends suffering does not, and that the situations in life that seem the most stable are always built upon the lives of those who must suffer and those who benefit from that suffering. If we profess to want to end that way of life, then we seek justice. If justice is the goal, then change is the answer. If change is the goal, then love is the final and irreducible answer.
Power changes nothing and never will, but love, and the faith that manifests it can change EVERYTHING.
The Bible is not our directions for the religious use of power but the history of power’s failings and love’s triumphs to bring about change in our world. And so, as odd as this might sound, the Bible calls us to live beyond its own words and stories, to change this world into the Kingdom of God, a place that, if we lived there, would make us wonder what the Bible was all about and why anyone would have made such a fuss over it. Let us hope that we may indeed at least dream of that day and live to see what changes love can bring, that we too can walk on water.