Saturday, June 20, 2015
Pentecost 4, Proper 7, June 21, 20015
Pentecost 4
June 21, 20015 É Proper 7B
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
Then they cried to the LORD
in their trouble,
and He delivered them from their distress.
and He delivered them from their distress.
He stilled the storm to a
whisper
and quieted the waves of the sea.
and quieted the waves of the sea.
.
É In the Name of
God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
I have no doubt that this incident really happened – that the
Son of God commanded the tempest to subside, so that He could go back to sleep.
My only question is whether that is the extent of the meaning – a display of
the power of incarnate God. So, what
follows is not an exercise in demythologization, but a reflection on what the
incident may mean in addition to the Divinity of Christ.
The lectionary pairs this passage with God’s derisive reply
to Job. In poetic terms, God seems to
say that Job can’t see the whole picture, and so he should sit down, shut
up. This approach was, in turn,
ridiculed by Voltaire in his novella, Candide,
in which the philosopher Pangloss
(meaning “all tongue”) assures the naïve Candide
that this is the best of all possible worlds.
At the time, everyone was aghast at the Great Lisbon Earthquake and
tsunami of November 1, 1755, which destroyed the entire city, killing as many
as 100,000 people, including the crowd gathered in the Cathedral for the All
Saints’ Mass. If God really loves us and if He can still the tempest on
Galilee, then why did He permit all those people to die, including those who
died because the Cathedral fell on them as they worshiped Him? This is known as
the problem of theodicy – and I don’t
really want to pursue it now. We can talk about it at coffee hour, but my view,
for now, is that God’s answer to Job is all we’ve got: there is more to all this than you are aware of.
So, what about the storm and the sleeping Jesus? The disciples are afraid they are going to
die, so they rouse Him. Their anxiety is
obvious in their accusation that He doesn't care. Isn't it interesting that this is Voltaire’s
accusation, pretty much? Obviously, God
doesn't care about those 100,000 Lisboans.
So, the Godman wakes up and says "Peace, be still!" And then the storm quieted down. But what if He were rebuking not the storm,
but the disciples' anxiety? "Sit
down and shut up," again. “Chill
and let Me sleep!” Could it be that the disciples' fear was an exaggerated
reaction to what was really happening?
Maybe the storm that needed calming was within their own hearts. Maybe the sea whose waves He quieted was
their own consciousness. Maybe, as they looked back on the incident, they
remembered feeling really afraid, and then comforted by His words, which they
later remembered to have calmed the external source of their fear, when in fact
He had calmed them down. “Peace! Be
still!” may have been our Lord’s reaction to His rude awakening. But as the
story was retold over the years until Mark finally wrote it down, the danger of
the storm became the main thing, not the disciples’ anxiety. In other words,
maybe the story reifies and objectifies what was going on in the consciousness
of the disciples themselves. Maybe their memory projects their inner state onto
the sea. Jesus seems to suggest as much
in His question: "Why are you
afraid? Have you still no faith?"
I believe in miracles.
I see no reason to reject the literal sense of the story. But, one might also ask, which is more
miraculous: turning a dangerous storm into a dead calm, or pacifying anxious
hearts? Which is more difficult, to
cancel an earthquake, or to win our love in spite of it? The Collect says that
God “never fail(s) to help and
govern those whom (God has) set upon the sure foundation of (divine) lovingkindness.”
What is it to be set there, if not to
surrender our anxieties? What is the
faith that the disciples, in Jesus’s words, still
did not have, if not trust in God's unfailing lovingkindness, all evidence
to the contrary notwithstanding? What is the case against that lovingkindness,
if not the entirely reasonable complaint of Job, who thinks God ought to do
better? God’s answer comes from the whirlwind, that is, from violent creation
itself, from the storm, from within the very earthquake:
"Where were you when I laid the foundation
of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements-- surely you
know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
É
AMEN!
MARANATHA!
COME, LORD JESUS!
