Storms come in a rather wide range of shapes and intensities, and they aren’t always about the weather. Stormy moments in our lives can tear up our psyches by the roots and whirl through our hearts like a raging tempest—anger, rage, grief, sadness, bitter resentments and panic attacks can all howl and blow with remarkable force.
Most of us surely know people whose own interior storms shape their relationships and whole neighborhoods, just like the weather. We can feel the barometer drop whenever they enter a room or join a meeting or sit down at a table with us. Entire communities can exhibit collective weather patterns that feel like ongoing atmospheric disturbances; this U. S. election year might as well be one long storm front.
Storms need healing, which is a rather odd way to think about the weather. But perhaps not so out of place in Mark’s account of the Gospel. The passages from Mark in the lectionary over that last few weeks have been highlighting the vital significance of healing for Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, and in what we heard this past week, with images of a storm-tossed sea (4:35-41).
The familiar story of Jesus calming a storm seems a bit out of synch with the other stories and encounters we’ve been hearing from Mark, but that’s mostly because the lectionary slices up these ancient texts into small, supposedly “digestible” bites for Sunday worship. It’s easy to miss the way Mark is stitching his stories together and the connections he seems keen to make among them.
The week before last, for example, we heard about the soil and the seeds, but we did not hear that Jesus offered that teaching to crowds who were standing on a beach while Jesus stood in a boat.
These are not merely props or backdrop; the stage matters for Mark’s point nearly as much as the words and the action. Beaches are liminal places, those locations where land meets water and the ground itself feels unstable. It’s a place of change and transition, and therefore of uncertainty and anxiety.
Mark’s Jesus called his disciples along a shoreline; he teaches on a beach; and he invites an excursion across the lake. This seashore moment is a vital component for the disciples in their process of formation, just as vital as hearing and engaging with the parables.
In fact, we could easily read this story of a storm on a sea as if the story itself were a parable: the boat stands for the life of faith that takes us on a journey full of risk with a Jesus we cannot fully understand or control.
Mark underscores this challenging formation in discipleship not only with a fearful storm but an unsettled community of friends. The disciples are at least perplexed if not annoyed with Jesus, who is not exactly a soothing presence in this story; he doesn’t calm the wind, he rebukes it, just as he did the demons in the first chapter of this Gospel.
God’s creatures are meant to live in harmony, with each other and with the rest of God’s creation. So Mark’s Jesus shows up and then stands up wherever that harmony is distorted or destabilized—whether in the misuse of power (represented by demons), or in corrupt institutions (represented by the hypocrisy of religious leaders), or in the alienation from life-giving ecosystems (represented by the fury of wind and waves).
Mark’s Jesus stands up and, when necessary, rebukes all of these forces arrayed against the full flourishing of God’s own precious creation.
Yes, but I think Mark would caution us about finding relief too quickly. Mark is not just singing a Bobby McFerrin song—don’t worry, be happy—as if Jesus will just fix everything according to our liking. After all, Jesus is asleep during the storm and the disciples are incredulous: “are you kidding? don’t you care that we’re dying here?” Mark more often sounds like the Gospel according to the Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want.
Mark’s view of discipleship involves a serious recalibration of what we expect from God and from God’s presence among us. And that certainly sounds like the experience of Job, part of whose story the lectionary also assigned this past Sunday.
It’s worth noting (and recalling frequently) that Job had every right to expect divine blessings in return for living a righteous life—that’s just how a religious life ought to work. But that’s not what happened for Job, precisely the opposite. And most of that ancient book from the Hebrew Bible is devoted to trying to figure out what went wrong.
Let’s also recall that Job’s “friends” are keen to ‘splain exactly why Job’s life ran off the rails as they offer all sorts of religious theories to explain the inexplicable God. In what the lectionary assigned on Sunday (38:1-11), it’s God’s turn to speak, and God speaks to Job from a whirlwind. The very presence of God is itself a storm.
“Where you there,” God asks, “when I laid the foundations of the world? Who was it who measured the pillars on which the Earth itself stands? Did you hear the morning stars sing at the birth of creation? Who was it that shut the sea with doors and made clouds its garment? Was it you?”
Hearing those rhetorical questions while sitting in a religious space, and especially while wearing fancy religious clothes, makes me uncomfortable (to put the matter mildly). The point in that ancient encounter is unnervingly clear: be careful about what you presume of God.
This seems to be Mark’s point as well. Mark does emphasize healing throughout his account of the Gospel, but he keeps inviting us to re-think what “healing” even means, that it doesn’t always require a “cure,” and that “restoration” and “renewal” are not the same—our Gospel hope is not about restoring the past but facing a future we cannot yet imagine.
That future is on the other side of the lake, where Jesus invites us to travel with him, and whose sometimes (annoyingly) sleepy presence we have to learn somehow to trust.
That’s likely the other uncomfortable moment in these texts: When Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Peace, be still,” he must surely be speaking as much to the complaining disciples as he is to the storm.
Making that connection between stormy disciples and the storm on the sea testifies to an ancient spiritual insight that runs through nearly every religious tradition: there is a deep link between the outer world around us and the inner world of our thoughts and emotions.
But let’s be super clear about that connection: it does not mean that we ourselves cause all the suffering in the world; we’ve had enough victim-blaming in the modern West to last for many generations.
No, the more urgent point of making that key link between inner and outer worlds is this: in a world of violence, be the peace you long to see; in a world of hate, be the love that heals the wounded; in a world of chaotic communities and disordered institutions, be the gracious calm that stays focused on the distant shore—a future of flourishing.
Of course, we ourselves cannot generate the peace, the love, or the calm that the world so desperately needs. That’s why church matters, why worship matters, why gathering around the Eucharistic Table truly matters.
At the Table, the God of the whirlwind is our unspeakable peace beyond all understanding.
The God of Jesus Christ is the only love to soothe our troubled hearts.
The God whom we call the “Holy Spirit” is our gracious calm for fearful souls.
And this unfathomable God gives herself to us in all those ways for our healing.
And then still more: as we climb out of the boat on that distant shore, we remember that our healing is never for ourselves alone but for a storm-tossed, turbulent world.
Peace. Be still.
