How God reveals himself to us most clearly, when we most need him

This arresting account of the disciples’ terror on a turbulent sea, assuaged only by the calming presence of Jesus, who quietens not only the sea but also their fear, is a parable of our stormtossed and fear filled lives, as we lurch from one crisis to the next, weak in faith and ever in need of reassurance. But it is also a parable of faith in God’s providence: even as he sleeps imperturbably in the stern of the boat on a raging sea, Christ’s presence is the only reassurance that can calm our fears fully and assuage our anxieties completely. For Mark, significantly, the opposite of faith is not unbelief but fear.

The message would have been immediate and obvious to those who first read this gospel. Mark wrote it for Christians in Rome sometime between 65 and 70AD, in all probability at a time of ferocious persecution of Christians under the emperor Nero (37- 68AD), who had scapegoated them for the city’s great fire. Even after Nero’s death, the subsequent civil turmoil that engulfed Rome was laid at the feet of Christians. On top of all this, they would have been on the receiving end of the savage backlash against Jews in Rome after the outbreak in 66AD of the Jewish Revolt in Palestine: Christians, remember, were believed by the Romans (and by Jews) to be an heretical Jewish sect.

This episode, then, would have spoken directly to Christians in a time of bitter suffering. They, like the disciples in the boat, would doubtless have asked, “Do you not care that we are about to perish?” The topographical context of the episode, which takes place on the Sea of Galilee, is also vital to its message. In Mark’s gospel, the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Tiberias, is where most of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry takes place. It was the source of the region’s economic prosperity, derived, primarily from fishing, but also from taxation on goods transported around and across the sea. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples are constantly criss-crossing it, as they were on this occasion.

But Mark is not just adding local detail to his story. The sea, any sea, carried rich symbolic significance. The ancient Hebrews were shepherds and city-dwellers not, like the Phoenicians, sailors and explorers: so, for them, the sea wasn’t their natural environment but a place of danger and threat, suggesting potential chaos. For Jews, so symbolic was the sea of the turmoil and dangers of life itself that, in the psalms for instance, storms at sea are a metaphor for evil forces at work in the world. For the same reason, the sea and its violent, unpredictable power often occasioned expressions of faith.

In Isaiah, God reassures his people: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and the rivers shall not overwhelm you.” (Isaiah 43:2) A potent reminder of God’s concern and care that was lodged in the collective memory of Israel is the fact that he rescued his people from the ‘raging waters’ when, at the Exodus from Egypt, he turned back the force of the sea in order to save them. He would do the same later when they entered the Promised Land. This episode is set, then, against a rich background of symbolism and history that would have resonated to its first hearers. The Sea of Galilee vividly embodied all this symbolism.

It is the lowest freshwater lake on earth. At 680 feet below sea level and situated between high ground on all sides, it is prone, then as now, to sudden, violent storms: in a matter of seconds it can go from a fish pond to a raging seascape. Panicked by fear on the storm-tossed sea, the disciples mistake Jesus’ seeming insouciance for indifference: they are shocked by his lack of care. But Jesus turns the tables on them and rebukes them for their lack of faith. The disciples make the same mistake we all make. None of us can fail to believe that God is at work in our lives when things go well: but what about when things seem to be falling apart? When we’re admired, respected, successful and in rude good health, we’re eloquent in our praise of God’s providence. But when nothing goes right, when we’re beset by loss, illness and disappointment, our thoughts go into reverse. Why me? Could God have changed his mind, turned away from me, ceased to care?

The whole of the book of Job in the Old Testament addresses this same question. It is precisely our tendency to conclude that God has abandoned us that the psalmist has in mind when he says: “I trusted, even when I said, ‘I am sorely afflicted’, and when I said in my alarm, ‘No one can be trusted’”. (Psalm 116) The point of this episode in Mark’s gospel, then, is that even though we all understandably feel fear, neither the disciples nor we have reason to fear. In their terror on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples, fearful for their lives, are near to despair: “…we are about to die”, they say. But, as Mark is so fond of pointing out, the penny for the disciples still hasn’t dropped. The Lord of Life himself is with them: how could they not trust? In this vivid account, Jesus manifests his power by calming not only the raging waters but also the disciples’ paralysing fear.

The point Mark is making is that Jesus’ power was just as truly present during the storm, even when he was asleep, as when, awoken by his disciples, he manifests his power by calming the storm and thus their fear. Our ultimate reassurance rests in the fact that he is never doing nothing, even if we cannot yet discern exactly what it is that he is doing. The further point, perhaps, is that God reveals himself to us most clearly, precisely when we most need him: it is only fear that blinds us to his presence. So, no matter what turbulence and turmoil we may experience in the many storms that beset our lives, we are never out of his presence. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age”, Jesus tells the disciples when the time comes for him to be removed from their sight. Notice: he is removed only from their sight, not from their (or our) presence. His presence has changed, not ended. As St Thomas More, preparing for his own death, reassured his daughter: “Do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best.” To be at all is, by definition, to be in God’s presence: it is he who called us into and at this very moment holds us in existence. And he called us into existence to be in his presence forever.