The Space between Fear and Faith
Sunday School Faith
In this case the disciples’ fear stemmed from a real understanding that somehow the divine had met them in this teacher. The use of a different word (phobon) from the one in v. 40 (deilos) may support this.
Also the account pictures Jesus as doing what in the Old Testament only God could do
Brooks, J. A. (1991). Mark (Vol. 23, p. 88). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
In short, unlike the previous accounts of miracles this one ends with a question, has a hidden meaning and invites the followers of Jesus to come to terms with their fear of death, something they might otherwise avoid.
The dynamic tension between fear and faith is still an important, if often overlooked, component of spirituality.
In 1984 Jerry Levin, the CNN bureau chief in Beirut, was kidnapped on his way to work. For more than a year he was held hostage by powerful men who objected violently to the way the United States was employing its forces in Lebanon. Tethered to a radiator for fourteen months by a chain so short that he could not stand up straight, Jerry reexamined the premises by which he had lived. A convinced agnostic for most of his life, Jerry had thought that Jesus’ ideas about how people should live were too flimsy for the harsh realities of life. Day after day as his captors used his fear of death to humiliate him, however, Jerry began to see that constantly escalating violence was no solution for international disputes.
The Sermon on the Mount, he realized, was not wishful thinking. It was the only reasonable response to an absurd world. And so in an absolutely hopeless situation Jerry Levin found faith: “It was a shrinking … millionth of a second, on one side of which I did not believe and on the other side I did” (Levin 1989:188). Since his conversion Jerry and Sis Levin have both served as activists for peace in Israel and in the occupied territories.
If the miracles are parables, we have an answer to the question of what Jesus expected of the people in the boat with him. It was on the basis of his word, let us go over to the other side, that they found themselves in this predicament. Jesus expected them to ask something like the question in 4:10. That is to say, he did not expect them to leap over their fear and confusion to confess him as Messiah and Son of God. He expected them to ask him what to do or how to pray or where they could turn. That was the kind of thing they did when they asked him what his parable meant, but fear had turned their faith into sarcasm. The question don’t you care if we drown? is not the stuff of faith—it is an accusation.
The disciples now became more fearful than they had been when the wind and waves were swamping their boat. The Greek words Mark used, ephobethesan phobon, describe respectful awe that people feel in the presence of supernatural power (cf. 16:8).
Jesus’ miracle, however, does not produce this faith even in those who are already disciples. Instead, we are told that they respond rather like the crowd in the face of the supernatural. It says literally, “they feared a great fear,” a Semitic form of expression that echoes Jonah 1:10 (LXX).
Awe or even terror in the face of the divine is not enough, as not only this story but also others in Mark will reveal. Yet Mark does not treat these disciples as simple outsiders. They have not rejected Jesus, they have simply failed to understand him, and the upbraiding of their lack of faith assumes that they should by then have had more faith than a member of the crowd.130
The account may be divided into four parts: the calm before the storm, the calm during the storm, the calm after the storm, and the storm after the calm.