Sermon for 4th Sunday after Trinity. “Stormy weather” preached at the Eucharist, Sherborne Abbey on Sunday, 23 June 2024 by the Reverend Christopher Huitson. (2 Corinthians Ch 6: v 1 – 13; Mark Ch 4: v 25 – end)
The foreman of rowers in an ancient trireme brought good news. “You have a 3-hour rest period,” he said. “The bad news is that the captain wants you to take him water skiing this afternoon.”
The Israelites did not have much to do with the sea. The main body of water was inland as the sea of Galilee and as we heard in the gospel that was large enough to conjure up significant storms. Other kingdoms which bordered the Mediterranean made use of the sea for trading. When Solomon decided to build a Temple in Jerusalem he consulted Hiram, king of Tyre to purchase from him logs of Cedar. Hiram agreed to supply the Cedar and said that they would be brought from Lebanon to the sea (that is the Mediterranean) and then made into rafts to be floated down the coast to an agreed destination and thence transported to Jerusalem.
Water does appear in the Bible in the story of Noah and the flood but this seems to have been derived from the epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian mythology. Genesis itself begins with a description of chaos pictured as water covering the face of the earth. Water lacks stability and for a land-based people would be fearful and life threatening especially if they had not learnt to swim. Out of this dark, watery chaos God’s creative power brought sunlight, land and plants, insects, trees, animals, and finally human beings. But large bodies of water were still a threat for you never knew when a storm might wreak havoc.
Here then is the background for today’s gospel – the stilling of the storm. When the Alternative Service Book ASB burst upon a surprised Church of England, you would have looked in vain for the stilling of the storm amongst the set readings and gospels. Perhaps it did not fit the thematic approach of the ASB or maybe it seemed an uncomfortable story at a time when nature miracles were regarded with some suspicion by the Western world which looked askance at too much nuance. Either something happened or it didn’t, it was thought. The Bible is either true or else full of fantasy and inaccuracy. This is odd because we are surrounded by fiction which communicates truth and makes use of pictorial symbols. Our lives are dominated by TV images, films and even virtual reality – a kind of simulated experience.
And yet in this country we currently have rather an austere approach to life, without much poetry or symbolism. Our architecture is often utilitarian for we don’t waste money on ornament. If houses are to be beautiful then we look to past ages and build in mock Tudor or mock Georgian. So our attitudes do not fit in very well with the gospel writers for they did not set out to write pure biographies of Jesus with neat facts carefully dated. They set out to show the meaning of his life and why he was of the very greatest importance for the people of the world. And the gospels have served us well even if our age finds some of the stories difficult. What is difficult about the stilling of the storm is that many of the disciples in the boat were fishermen and would have been knowledgeable about the lake and its changing moods. They knew about sudden squalls and how they, just as suddenly, quietened down so it is odd that they were so surprised. Perhaps the violence of the storm was exceptional.
It is the ending which is significant in the eyes of St. Mark and the reason why the story was included – “Who is this that even the wind and waves obey him?” The difficulty about the story only arises if we take it at face value for then its various parts jar and clash.
The lake, even today, is well known for its sudden storms and equally sudden ending for the hills have a funnelling effect on the weather. Local fishermen would have been familiar with such conditions so why seek help from Jesus? Clearly they had no expectation that he would command the storm to cease and, as a carpenter he would not have had any greater skill at sailing than they did – probably less. Perhaps they were annoyed that, like Jonah in the OT story, he was sleeping while all around him was chaos and disaster.
Tomorrow, June 24th, is the feast day of the birth of St. John the Baptist and he too used water as part of his mission to baptise people – the water of the river Jordan. However, his message was the hard one of judgement. The expectation he created in the minds of his listeners was of the approach of the Messiah as an avenger who would sort the good from the bad and deal with the bad according to their deserts.
For many centuries the voice of prophecy had been silent, but in the person of John the Baptist the old authentic accents of a prophet were heard once more. It was a simple message of daily duty and inner repentance and change of heart. His message was close to that of Amos who was active in the mid-8th century BC, while his dress, manner of life, food and even the place where his ministry was fulfilled were close to Elijah’s. But his message was not merely prophetic: he was acting as a forerunner to Christ.
John gathered disciples round him and used baptism in water as a means of expressing his mission of repentance. How closely this mission connected with the coming of Jesus is shown in the opening words of St. Mark’s gospel: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ – John came baptising” John the Baptist started what today would be called a religious revival. Many people of all classes and types came out to hear his message and to receive the appropriate ethical and spiritual advice. Jesus himself sought baptism from John, an event which appears in all 4 gospels but it is St. Matthew who records John’s concern that Jesus should be baptising John rather than the other way round. The pre-eminence of Jesus finds expression in today’s gospel as Jesus’ power over the forces of disorder is revealed, as is the religious truth that Jesus is the saviour of those who are perishing. The human race is arrogant enough to suppose that it can control and harness natural forces, though nature is more powerful and destructive at times that we would wish and can overwhelm humans and their puny structures.
The gospel reminds us that it needs divine power to control the elemental forces. So, although we shall all eventually leave this world through the gates of death yet we can rely upon Jesus, as our Saviour, to bring us to the new life of his kingdom and the joy of resurrection.
So the answer to the question “Who is this?” is that it is Jesus, the Messiah, who has divine power since it is God who controls the forces of nature with his creative authority. Jesus stilling the storm points us to Jesus as Son of God, Lord of all, the one whom even the winds and waves obey.