Jesus' Power Mark 6:45-52

THE “I AM” IN THE MIDST OF A STORM (6:45–52)

Mark 6:45–52 was the object of intense interest in post-Enlightenment lives of Jesus. Starting from the premise that the “laws of nature” are inviolable and that all things in the universe must be capable of rationalistic explanation, the most improbable and far-fetched theories were advanced to explain Jesus’ walking on the Sea of Galilee. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) documents the opinions of scores of scholars who judged this story an optical illusion caused by Jesus walking along the shore, or a deception caused by his walking on a sandbar. For solely rationalist interpreters, the story was a code to be cracked, a conundrum to be resolved. If Jesus walked on water, it was like Xerxes crossing the Hellespont or Alexander’s siege of the island fortress of Tyre: solid underfooting had to be found somewhere. The effect of this preoccupation was to limit the possibilities of the story and virtually eclipse its meaning.

45–46 6:45–46 must be read in tandem with the conclusion of the feeding of the five thousand. “Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.” There is an unmistakable urgency to this verse. The Gk. euthys ēnankasen is unusually forceful, meaning that the disciples were “compelled posthaste” to depart the scene. They arrived at the place of the feeding of the five thousand with Jesus, but now, when darkness is close at hand or already upon them, he hustles them away alone. Jesus wants to be rid of the disciples so he can dismiss the crowd by himself. Why?

The answer follows from the clues in the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples are not unsusceptible to the messianic contagion of the crowd. The Gk. verb ēnankasen suggests that the disciples are reluctant to leave. The apparent sense is that Jesus must expeditiously remove them from the scene in order to persuade the crowd to disperse peaceably and thus avert a revolutionary groundswell (John 6:14–15).

The crowd had been dangerously fueled with messianic fervor after the feed- ing, and Jesus wanted to get the disciples out of there lest they fuel the fire even more.2

Evidently Jesus had some difficulty getting them into the boat, because the phrase “he made his disciples get into the boat” was a strong expression indicating urgency and pressure. The Twelve were reluctant, like children who are having a good time and do not want to get in the car to go home. Jesus cor- ralled them, insisting that they get in the boat. Then he probably gave the boat a shove. Keep in mind that Jesus forced his disciples to go out onto the sea.

Having sent his disciples away and having dismissed the crowd, Jesus “went up on the mountain to pray” (v. 46). Jesus, realizing the multitude’s intention to forcefully install him as king, knew that a turning point had come in his ministry. So he fled to the hills for solitude and a time of prayer with his Father.

A famous Old Testament scholar of past years, George Adam Smith, once climbed the Weisshorn above the Zermat Valley in Switzerland with his guide on a stormy day. They made the ascent on the sheltered side, and when they reached the top, exhilarated by the thought of the view before him and the triumph of having attained the summit, but forgetting about the gale, Smith sprang to the top of the peak and was almost blown over the edge by the wind. His guide grabbed him and pulled him down. “On your knees!” he shouted. “You are only safe here on your knees!”

Just so! Though Christ was one with the Father, he lived in constant prayer, and in times of crisis he took to the mountain or the garden—and to his knees. We can reverently say it was the only “safe” place for Christ, and indeed for us. For what did Jesus pray? He prayed he would live out his mission. The Passover, the wilderness, the lost sheep, the manna, the bread, the coming Supper, the crowd’s call—all of these things brought afresh to him what was coming. So he prayed. In the context we can be assured he also prayed for the Twelve in regard to the storms he knew were coming that very night.Having dismissed the crowd, Jesus retreats to the hills to pray. The mention of prayer in this context is a further clue of a messianic groundswell, for Mark notes Jesus praying at only three points in his ministry (1:35; 6:45; 14:35–39). Each prayer is at night and in a lonely place, each finds the disciples removed from him and failing to understand his mission, and in each Jesus faces a formative decision or crisis. Following the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus reaffirms by prayer his calling to express his divine Sonship as a servant rather than as a freedom fighter against Rome.

“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan de- manded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31, 32).

In the ultimate heights of Heaven, our resurrected Lord is praying for us on the storm-tossed seas of life. This is present reality!

Down on the shining lake, the tiny church was straggling: “And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them” (vv. 47, 48a).The feeding of the five thousand must have taken place in the hill country northwest of the Sea of Galilee, and if Luke 9:10 is an indication, somewhere west of Bethsaida. From the site of the open-air banquet, Jesus sends the disciples by boat across the northern part of the lake to Bethsaida (a similar crossing is noted in John 6:25). Bethsaida, meaning “house of the fisher,” was named for its chief industry and lay east of the mouth of the Jordan at the north of the lake in the tetrarchy of Philip.

47–50 The focus of the story now shifts from Jesus to the disciples. The “boat was in the middle of the lake, and [Jesus] was alone on land.” Whenever the disciples are separated from Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, they fall into distress. Even in poor conditions the Sea of Galilee could normally be crossed in six to eight hours, but the disciples are helpless in the face of a hard wind blowing against them from the northeast. The description of the gale fits that of the well-known easterly known as the “Sharkia” (Arabic, “shark”), which usually starts in early evening and is good cause for apprehension among fishermen. According to the NIV the disciples “were straining at the oars.” The Greek word for “straining,” basanizein, means “to torment.” The word often means the torment of demon possession (Matt 8:6; Mark 5:7), but it can also refer to dire straits in other forms (contractions of childbirth, Rev 12:2; suffering in hell, Rev 14:10; or the torment of a righteous soul forced to live among the unrighteous, 2 Pet 2:8). In the present context, however, basanizein does not appear to carry connotations of demon possession but to depict vividly the force of the wind and waves against the disciples (4:37).

The disciples had dutifully set out for their destination, but a wind had come howling from the northeast, driving them out to the middle of the lake. John was specific about this: they were about three to three and a half miles out (John 6:19). The wind had blown them away from their northwest destination, though they had been struggling for seven to eight hours to get there. The sails were down, the oars were out, and they were literally driving4 at the oars. Despite their strenuous rowing they were not getting closer, but farther away. Peter had probably taken charge. I can see him with his soggy beard flying in the wind, bellowing orders, with the others leering up at him from their oars. They were not in danger so much as they were miserable. Think of the disciples’ misery in that open cockpit, with their feet soaking in icy bilge water, straining at their oars for seven to eight hours. Ironically, the disciples were in this miserable trouble because they obeyed Jesus. What a lesson for the Church! Imagine what disobedience could have gotten those men that night: perhaps a full stomach, a warm bed in someone’s home, an opportunity to regale their hosts with stories about Jesus.

It was obedience that made them so uncomfortable. It was obedience that accounted for Helen Roseveare’s amazing story of persecution dur- ing the sixties in Africa. It was obedience that landed Corrie Ten Boom in Ravensbruck. It was obedience that put the four young missionaries through the rigors of captivity in Sudan. In all these cases, their misery was their own fault. If you submit your life to Christ in obedient commitment, you will expose yourself to a variety of sorrows. Your caring, your commitment to Biblical living, will make you vulnerable to things that the uncommitted heart will never experience.

Our passage is the coup de grace to Prosperity Theology. “Name it and claim it!” just does not go with this experience.

Yet we must say that while obedience will bring contrary winds, it also will bring joy. Never climb a mountain and you will never bruise your shins, but you will never stand on its peak exulting in victory in the alpine air. Never play baseball and you will never strike out, but you will never hit a home run either. Never obey Christ and you may miss some of life’s contrary winds, but you will also never know the winds of the Holy Spirit in your sails bearing you on in service and power!

The scene in our text is beautiful and spiritually enlightening: the night, Christ praying, the clear moonlight reflecting like burnished silver on the lake, the sailless mast of the tiny rolling boat, the contrary wind, Christ’s children struggling in their obedience and making no progress. In such a dilemma it would be so easy to second-guess one’s obedience: “Why did he give such ridiculous orders? Does he even care?” But Mark says that Jesus “saw that they were making headway painfully” (v. 48).

In their distress Jesus comes to them at “the fourth watch of the night,” that is, between 3 A.M. and 6 A.M. In dividing the night into four watches Mark follows the Roman custom rather than the threefold Jewish division, ostensibly for the benefit of his Roman readers. Jesus now looks on the disciples with the same compassion with which he earlier looked on the hungry crowds (6:34). Like Yahweh in the OT, Jesus comes to deliver his people in need, and the deliverance becomes a self-revelation. The centerpiece of the story is the description of his “walking on the lake … about to pass by them.” There is no possibility of translating “walking on the lake” in any other way. The Greek preposition epi (tēs thalassēs) means “on,” “upon,” or “on top of” the water (just as the Gk. epi tēs gēs in v. 47 means “on land”). The phrase cannot be retranslated to avoid the problem of open water sustaining a human body. If such an attempt is made, the point of the story is forfeited, for in the OT only God can walk on water. In walking on the water toward the disciples, Jesus walks where only God can walk. As in the forgiveness of sins (2:10) and in his power over nature (4:39), walking on the lake identifies Jesus unmistakably with God. This identification is reinforced when Jesus says, “ ‘Take courage! It is I.’ ” In Greek, “ ‘It is I’ ” (egō eimi) is identical with God’s self-disclosure to Moses. Thus Jesus not only walks in God’s stead, but he also takes his name.

The latter part of v. 48 is not immediately clear, however. “He was about to pass by them” is baffling, suggesting that Jesus intended to walk past the disciples. In the OT, however, this nondescript phrase is charged with special force, signaling a rare self-revelation of God. At Mt. Sinai the transcendent Lord “passed by” Moses (Exod 33:22; also 33:19 and 34:6) in order to reveal his name and compassion. Again, at Mt. Horeb the Lord revealed his presence to Elijah in “passing by” (1 Kgs 19:11). The most important antecedent of the idea, however, comes in Job 9:8, 11:

[God] alone stretches out the heavens

and treads on the waves of the sea.

When he passes me, I cannot see him;

when he goes by, I cannot perceive him.

This quotation bears linguistic as well as thematic similarities with v. 48, for “treads the waves of the sea” contains the same wording as Mark (Gk. peripatōn epi [tēs ] thalassēs), and the same crucial word for “pass by” (Gk. parerchesthai in the aorist; also in Exod 33:19; 34:6).

The Job quotation summarizes a passage that begins in 9:1ff. by recounting the awesome separation between God and humanity. God can do what humanity cannot do and can never conceive of doing. His wisdom is beyond compare, he moves mountains, shakes the earth, obscures the sun, arrays the heavens in splendor, and “treads on the waves of the sea.” This God cannot be conceived of in human categories, and any “natural” explanation of his acts is foolish and pointless. The God described by Job is wholly God, wholly Other, and can never be confused with human beings.

When read from this perspective, the futility of trying to explain Jesus’ walking on water by a “natural” phenomenon becomes apparent. The glory of the transcendent God who reveals himself in Jesus literally “passed by” the overconfident rationalistic theologians of a former generation—and those of our day who follow their lead. God “performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be numbered” (Job 9:10). But when Jesus “passes by” the disciples on the lake he does something differently from the revelation of God in the OT: he intends to make the mysterious and enigmatic God of Job visible and palpable as it had not been and could not have been to former generations. The God of Israel, majestic and awesome but unknowable face to face, is now “passing by” believers in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ walking on the water to his disciples is a revelation of the glory that he shares with the Father and the compassion that he extends to his followers. It is a divine epiphany in answer to their earlier bafflement when he calmed the storm, “ ‘Who is this?’ ” (4:41). In this respect Mark’s Christology is no less sublime than is John’s, although John has Jesus declaring that he is the Son of God (John 10:36), whereas Mark has him showing that he is the Son of God. In Mark one must, like the disciples, be in the boat with Jesus and enter into the drama in order to behold who Jesus is. The one who calmed the storm is the one who now appears in the storm, the “I Am” of God.

The reaction of the disciples in the boat parallels their earlier consternation when Jesus quelled the storm on the lake (4:41). Once again they misperceive and misunderstand, shrieking in terror and mistaking him for a ghost. The word for “ghost” (Gk. phantasma) occurs in the NT only here and in the parallel in Matt 14:26. In classical Greek it means the appearance of a spirit or apparition, hence a “ghost.” Its rarity in the NT is a sanguine reminder that the supernatural world was neither a commonplace nor a comfort to the first disciples.55 This speaks against the presumption that the vision is the result of superstition on their part. It should be remembered that the lake was where the disciples earned their livelihood; it was, in other words, not unknown and unusual for them but as familiar and ordinary as our own places of business are to us. The only other occurrence of the word as a verb is in Heb 12:21, where it refers to the awesome portents—fire, smoke, darkness, thunder—that accompanied the revelation of God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In the rare occasions where apparitions are attested in Jewish literature they often occur in relation to the sea, which Jews regarded as a vestige of chaos, untamed and overwhelming. Phantasma is thus a clue to the awesome appearance of Jesus walking on the water. It testifies that the empirical boundaries of the disciples have been broken.

51–52 Only when Jesus joins the disciples in the boat does the storm abate. Being with Jesus (3:14) is not simply a theoretical truth; it has practical and existential consequences, one of which is the safety and peace of disciples. If separation from Jesus brings the disciples into distress, Jesus’ presence with them overcomes storms in their lives. The response of the disciples to their rescue by Jesus is one of perplexity and bewilderment, however. They are not only “completely amazed,” but they are bereft of understanding and “their hearts were hardened.” Hardened hearts last appeared at the synagogue in Capernaum when Jesus healed the man with a deformed hand (3:5). There it occurred with reference to ostensible “outsiders”—members of the synagogue, Pharisees, and Herodians; here it occurs of “insiders,” of Jesus’ own disciples. Mark again (3:20–21) reminds us that faith is not an inevitable result of knowing about Jesus, or even of being with Jesus. Faith is not something that happens automatically or evolves inevitably; it is a personal decision or choice. In the Gospel of Mark it is more often than not a decision that must be made in the face of struggle and trepidation. Discipleship is more endangered by lack of faith and hardness of heart than by external dangers (3:5; 4:41; 5:17).

Some commentators suggest that Mark has formed the account of Jesus walking on the lake by combining two independent stories, a rescue story and an epiphany story. This conclusion runs contrary to the essential purpose of the story, however, which attests that it is in the midst of storms, hardships, and adversities that Jesus reveals himself to disciples. These two facets of trial and revelation combine to form a unified purpose, just as they did in the Exodus, where God disclosed himself as “I AM” (Gk. egō eimi, LXX) in the midst of Israel’s oppression in Egypt. Jesus likewise declares himself “I Am” (Gk. egō eimi) in the storm on the lake. Mark will reassert this point supremely in chap. 15, where in the catastrophe of the cross the centurion recognizes Jesus as God’s Son (15:39). In storms, adversities, and defeat, human self-sufficiency is revealed for what it is—human in sufficiency. When the defenses of human pride are breached, people sometimes see God’s presence among them—even if it at first appears in troubling and perhaps terrifying ways.

The Twelve would understand the spiritual significance of this only later. Jesus came in the darkest part of the night when they had exhausted their en- ergies and were in deepest despair. This is how he often comes to us, that we might learn the futility of our own strength and depend upon him. The very waves that distressed them became a path for his feet—so transcending was his power. His feet upon the waves bespoke his familiarity with their plight. He not only sees, but enters the human struggle.

James R. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos, 2002), 196–201.