commentary and reflections – pentecost 3B

Storm on the Sea of Galilee

1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49 NRSV text
Psalm 133 NRSV text
2 Corinthians 6: 1-13 NRSV text
Mark 4: 35-41 NRSV text

“Getting to know you…”

“Who on earth is this guy?”  That’s how the gospel passage ends (4:41), with Jesus’ closest friends – the ones who should have known him best – discovering more and more how little they know and understand him.  What makes this all the more intriguing is the conclusion of the parables section from last week, where Jesus apparently leaves the crowds to figure things out, but “explained everything in private to his disciples” (4:34).  On the one hand, there’s a dynamic of the disciples being drawn closer and closer to Jesus – of getting to know him better and better.  And yet Mark immediately goes on in the very next paragraph to tell us a story that leaves the disciples puzzled!  Now, remember, we’re into dramatic narrative irony here, of course.  We, the readers, understand what the disciples cannot see.  And that’s certainly one of Mark’s major emphases at this transition point in his gospel: we are watching an increasing distance opening up between Jesus and the disciples, caused by the disciples’ inability and failure to grasp what Jesus is about.

But there’s something important here beyond mere narrative device.  They are discovering something in Jesus that is true in human relating: getting to know someone is not a “flat”, linear process.  It is not about getting to know “facts” or “mere information” about them, but being drawn into the mystery of their otherness.  Think of getting to know someone whom you have met and befriended – maybe even begun to fall in love with.  There’s an initial period in which who the other person is seems to unfold – startlingly and thrillingly.  They “make sense” to us.  This is a period of relating during which we find ourselves instinctively “understanding” the other person.  It’s the time in a relationship when we’re constantly making connections – finding out all the things we share and have in common.  The friendship is a celebration of precisely the amount we have in common with one another.

But then things appear to begin to change.  The other person does things that shock or surprise us.  We’re jolted.  We didn’t expect it, and we don’t like it.  This person who seems so “like me” has just done something that I wouldn’t dream of doing!  It appears to run counter to everything I’ve known until now.  This is about being confronted with their individuality – their otherness and difference.  We’re suddenly aware of the fact that we do not “control” them.  They’re unpredictable.  There are other things than we’ve so far thought about and seen in them that make them “tick”.  Some of them we will admire, or share.  Others we will come to like and adopt for ourselves.  Others will be neutral.  Some we will simply dislike and resist.  And when we discover that some of these last things are not open for negotiation, we have decisions to make about the future of the friendship.

That’s when friendships change.  They have to.  They move into a different phase.  They will either deepen, becoming relationships of mutual engagement and negotiation, or they may well fall apart in disillusionment: “I found I didn’t know her/him after all!”

Saul and David: it started so well…

That is precisely what we see happening in this week’s story about Saul and David.  It had started so well!  We see Saul, the king, meeting an astonishing young man who volunteers to go out and fight Goliath, when everyone else is too afraid.  The young boy, David, does more than answer the taunts of the Philistines (and vindicate Yahweh): as a result of his victory, “all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Samuel 17: 46).  In the context of the story, what is vital is that Israel learns about her own God – Israel, who has been cowed into faithless, terrified and helpless submission.

In the context of this text’s place in this week’s Lectionary readings, I want to draw out a related but slightly different emphasis.  Saul responds to David’s slaying of Goliath along with the rest of Israel.  There is excitement and admiration.  He wants to get to know David better.  In 1 Samuel 18:2, Saul makes David part of his own household.  He, like his son Jonathan, responds to David at “soul level”.  It is when he hears what people are saying about David’s victory that things change.  He is suddenly aware of a whole new dimension of David – in this case, David’s charisma and ability to arouse love and admiration.  He cannot “control” David.  Here is a dimension of David that he did not immediately recognise – David’s power to threaten him.  This is the crucial point is a developing friendship: it was much bigger and more multidimensional than Saul had first thought or imagined.  And we see the results in vv9ff.

Jesus and the disciples: change for the worse

That’s the point the disciples have begun to reach in their relationship with Jesus.  The question, “Who is this guy?” is not an appeal for information!  It’s a baffled acknowledgement that they are in for a (boat!) ride that they hadn’t actually signed up for.  They recognise something fundamental both about human relationships and about faith in Jesus: getting to know Jesus can be wonderful, exciting, high-octane, disturbing, offensive … the point is, you can’t get to know Jesus and stay the same!  Being close to Jesus means having to make decisions; means changing.  And in this particular journey of friendship with Jesus, it is Jesus who sets the terms.  Jesus, like his counterpart, Aslan, in the Narnia Chronicles, is not a tame lion!

Control, conflict and change in the Church (2 Corinthians 6: 1-13/Psalm 133)

Most instances of conflict in relationship arise from a defensive response to the “otherness” of other people.  How do you handle the dimensions of other people in relationships that you do not like, or which threaten?  The standard move is to try and find ways of controlling the other person.  The classic move is to ascribe moral value to difference: those aspects of the other person that you dislike are “wrong”, rather than potentially enriching.  That is what Saul does in 1 Samuel 18:8 – he assumes that David’s strengths are in fact greedy designs on Saul’s power and kingship.  The following chapters of the book describe the escalating and deadly conflict between the king and the boy.

That is also the sort of battle that Paul has been fighting with the Corinthian Church.  His opponents have sought to portray him as unspiritual, ineffective, foolish, unworthy, unimportant, heretical and insane.  It is a remarkably effective strategy!  Differences of opinion are elevated to a struggle of good against evil, truth against falsehood, God against Satan.  The point is that we lose sight of the humanity of one another in these sorts of conflicts.  Human beings – people with feelings, fears, failings and strengths – are reduced to ciphers: symbols of some cosmic struggle.  In so doing, the opportunities for growth, mutual enrichment and deeper knowledge that conflict affords (yes, conflict is essentially – and potentially – positive; it is a sign of life and passion) are lost.  During Apartheid, the champions of The System demonised voices such as Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, and Beyers Naude as Communist agitators.  That meant that they didn’t need to be heard and taken seriously; what was important is that they were crushed!  The Church has historically done that over conflicts of power (ie issues of control): one has only to look at the ways in which women were relegated to second-class human beings on a lower spiritual plane than men as an example.  We are doing the same thing over the sexuality debate.

By the time Paul writes 2 Corinthians, the conflict has been significantly resolved – or is in the process of being so.  The vulnerability, suffering and lack of credentials as a mirror of Christ.  But the point to note here is that, in order to resolve the conflict, Paul repeatedly draws attention to their shared humanity and the things that they found so helpful in one another initially.  He calls on them to “open their hearts wide” (6:13).

The epistle is a masterly lesson in conflict resolution within the Church.  It’s a model we would do well to heed, because we don’t “do” conflict very well.  We’re good at papering over the cracks.  We like to think of ourselves as welcoming and friendly.  That is not always the experience of people who come in “from the outside” – particularly people who haven’t already been socialised into “church”.  Underlying much of our welcome is the desire – and supposition – that people join in order to become more and more “like us”.  We want to clone people – not make disciples.  “Otherness” is unsettling.  How many times do we find the dynamic in today’s gospel reading and Old Testament reading repeated in Church life: someone new comes along, and initially things are great!  They seem to fit in well – take an increasingly active part, swell the ranks and are generally good news.  But then, as time passes, they become troublesome – by which I mean, they want to do things differently.  And if they can’t be “controlled”, we begin to ask ourselves, “Who is this person, anyway?”

What we do is to reinforce and reaffirm the status quo.  We then make a virtue of absence of conflict, and a vice of questioning the status quo.  “Tradition” becomes self-evidently right.  We betray our lack of interest in growing – because these sorts of conflicts are, as I have said, signs of life and growth.  They are opportunities for change and development, and signs of the activity of the Holy Spirit.  Small wonder, then, that churches are increasingly becoming smaller and smaller enclaves of like-minded people!  The “non-conformists” leave, because it is too uncomfortable.  There is no space for them to bring new insights and new ways – their gift to the Church.  They find them unwelcome and unwanted.  We talk about radical change in the Church, yet we want to control it.  We pray for renewal, and quench the Spirit.  True, we minimise conflict – but that is not the same thing as the “unity” the Psalmist speaks of in Psalm 133!

“Like-mindedness” is not unity.  The unity of Psalm 133 presupposes significant differences of opinion.  Unity happens when people are allowed to be different; when their differences and insights are valued and treasured.  Then difference becomes life in startling, divine variety!  It is like the “dew of Hermon” (Psalm 133:3) that waters the slopes and allows all sorts of life to flourish.  It is a sign of Yahweh’s blessing of life.

That sort of unity is what Paul considers the single, knock-down argument for evidence of the presence of the Spirit.  It isn’t the manifestation of the spiritual gifts that the Corinthians prized so highly, but the fact that Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians could live together and be part of the same Church without killing each other and without the community tearing itself apart at the seams.  Unity is the sign of spiritual maturity.  It is a gift of grace (as Paul reminds the Church in 2 Corinthians 6:1).  It is the grace that doesn’t seek to silence the other by exercising control.

The stilling of the storm in the narrative structure of the gospel

All of this brings us full circle to the gospel story set for today.  Mark 4:34 concludes the opening section of Jesus’ ministry.  We are about to enter a new phase in the narrative, and it is marked by the lake crossing – Jesus saying “Let’s go across to the other side” (4:35).  There is symbolic significance here in terms of the narrative.  Mark makes extensive narrative-symbolic use of place and movement, and here Jesus is crossing from the “Jewish” side of the lake to the “Gentile” side to begin a new phase in his ministry.  On arrival, he will be confronted immediately by the Gerasene demoniac.

Mark, we must remember, presents Jesus as the one who binds the Strong Man (Satan).  His ministry is a ministry of confrontation with the powers that threaten and imprison human beings.  Mark’s Jesus is a Liberator.  And here, at this moment of transition, Jesus confronts and defeats a storm at sea.

If that sounds a peculiar way of putting it, look at how Mark shapes the story.  Sudden, violent storms are common on Galilee.  But this is a lake, not the sea!  By casting this as a sea voyage, Mark is quite deliberately evoking the biblical symbols of the sea as a place of chaos and danger.  That’s the first point to note.

The second is that Mark casts the stilling of the storm in terms of an exorcism.  Jesus “rebukes” the wind and the “sea”, literally saying to them, “Be muzzled!”  “Rebuking” and “muzzling” are technical terms for an exorcism (cf the very first exorcism at Capernaum in 1:25).  If we read this as a “nature miracle”, we are missing the point that Mark is trying so hard to make!  The power of Jesus that is displayed here is not that of a “miracle worker” so much as an exorcist and liberator.  The biblical tradition describes creation as disordered.  Paul talks about it “groaning in bondage”.  Its deadly power is a sign of disorder: creation is meant to give life.  Yet all of created reality is symbolically described as being under a “malign power”.  It isn’t free.  One answer, therefore, to the disciples’ question in 4:41 is, “This is the Liberator king of the universe!”

The disciples’ failure to “get” Jesus

Finally, we need to note that this transition piece in the gospel has a theological parallel to the change in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples that we were considering earlier.  Mark has set us up in 4:34 to assume that Jesus will reveal himself in a special way to his disciples – and this is precisely what is happening in this incident!  The trouble is, instead of the disciples going, “Ah!  I see!” they are left puzzled, wondering who on earth (no pun intended!) Jesus is!  Why?

This is part of the Messianic Secret motif in the gospel.  Jesus is revealing himself as the Messiah – but not the sort of Messiah that the disciples are interested in having!  Jesus’ messiahship entails suffering and death – and that is not on the disciples’ messianic agenda.  What Mark signals here is the start of an increasing alienation between Jesus and the disciples, caused not by a diminishing of his affection for them but by their refusal to allow him to be who he really is.  They want to write the messianic script – to “control” Jesus.  As the gospel unfolds from this point onwards, their attempts to dissuade Jesus from his course of action will cause more and more friction.  Increasingly, Mark marginalises the disciples from the significant action that happens around Jesus.  They want to make Jesus in their own image of what a Messiah ought to be, and so Mark will develop the theme of the disciples’ blindness more fully.  Ironically, more and more, it is the very group to whom Jesus wants to reveal himself that is least able to see and hear.  Their relationship with Jesus has reached crunch point.  Either they are going to walk with Jesus and learn to grow and change, or there will be a parting of the ways.  They elect to stay – for now – but to resist Jesus and to seek to manipulate him.  It won’t work.  The final parting of the ways takes place in Gethsemane, when they will all flee.  Restoration, understanding and appreciation lie only on the other side of the cross.

Jesus refuses domestication!  Discipleship is not a guarantee in and of itself that we “get” Jesus.  Church history is littered with spectacular failures of the Church in this regard: Christendom, the Inquisition, the oppression of women, Apartheid, the Holocaust, the Religious Right.  The Jesus who is on the side of the poor and the marginalised, who welcomes sinners and who comes to liberate humanity from all that threatens and destroys flourishing and life is a constant thorn in the side to a middle-class, respectable Church.

Taking Jesus seriously is constantly to be amazed, affronted and challenged.  It is to face up to the things about Jesus, his message and his mission that we dislike and wish fervently were different.  We need to face up to our tendencies to control him; remake him in our own image; resist the changes he urges on us through the Spirit.  How can we begin to do that?  We can be honest: these are the things that make us afraid.  The changes he wants to make in us generate fear – good, old-fashioned, paralysing terror!  The future of the Church can look pretty bleak just at the moment.  Like the disciples in the boat, we long to shake Jesus and say, “Wake up!  How can you be asleep at a time like this!  Don’t you care that we’re perishing?”  If that’s how we feel, then let’s be honest about it – because only then will we hear the words of Jesus: “Why are you afraid?  Have you no faith?”  This is the One whom even the winds and seas obey!

Amen.

Tagged as: 1 Samuel 17: 1-49, 2 corinthians 6: 1-13, bondage of creation, conflict in corinth, controlling jesus, david and goliath, david and saul, Lawrence Moore, lectionary blog, liberation theology, mark 4: 35-41, ordinary 12b, proper 7b, psalm 133, shared humanity, the collapse of the discipleship narrative in mark's gospel, the dynamics of similarity and difference in relationships, the stilling of the storm, the stilling of the storm as an exorcism, the united reformed church, The Windermere Centre, unity vs like-mindedness