Proper 7 | 5th
Pentecost — 24 June 2018
St. Peter’s, Bettendorf — 9:00 am
[Track
Two] Job 38:1-11 | Psalm 107:1-3,23-32 | 2 Corinthians 6:1-13
| Mark 4:35-41
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea,
“Peace! Be still!”
I suspect that many of you have had the same experience
that I have often had, watching television in the evening. A program comes on – a situation comedy, or a
police procedural, or Jimmy Kimmel after the evening news, or whatever it is –
and I say, “Oh, this is a repeat, I’ve seen this one before.” And I switch to another channel, or I turn
the TV off and go do something else, or go to bed, or whatever.
But occasionally I may say, “I’ve seen this one before, but
it was good,” and so I watch it again. And I enjoy it again, and maybe I see some
things the second time through that I missed the first time and so I enjoy it
even more.
It’s one of the hallmarks of great drama, or great
literature, or great music, that they bear watching or reading or listening
over and over again. They never grow
old. The experience gets better and
richer with each repetition. We keep
finding new things.
I’m afraid that some people – but none of us, surely! – take the attitude toward
reading the Bible that some of us take toward watching TV – “Oh, I’ve already
read this. I know how it turns
out.” And they put it down and go do
something else.
I’ve been reading the Bible for a long time. Maybe longer than some of you. Certainly not as long as others of you, but
I’m not asking for birth certificates!
But one of the things that always catches me and often delights me and
frequently challenges me is that I will be reading a passage of Scripture and I
will say, “I never saw that before! That
never occurred to me! Oh, now that makes
more sense! That gives me a new
perspective!”
And God just chuckles.
I’ve been having that experience lately with the Gospel According
to St. Mark. I think we sometimes think
of Mark’s Gospel as “the short and simple one.”
It is indeed the shortest, and it is the earliest of the four canonical
gospels (Matthew and Luke both use Mark as one of their sources). (Yes, they do. There are still some folks who deny the priority
of Mark, but there are also still some folks who believe the earth is flat.) However, Mark’s Gospel is by no means
simple. It is not just a stringing
together of Jesus stories, ending up in Jerusalem with the Passion narrative. It is a very sophisticated literary
composition, maybe even as sophisticated (though in a very different way) than
the Gospel According to St. John.
The Gospel reading today, Jesus calming the storm, is
probably familiar to us all. We’ve heard
it or read it before, and Matthew and Luke both include it as part of the
material they draw from Mark. If you did
art history in school, you may have seen the famous painting of this scene by
the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, “The Storm on
the Sea of Galilee.”
(You can look it up
on the internet, but you can’t see the painting itself – the original was
stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has
never been found – one of the most infamous art thefts in history! But I digress…) And in fact many artists over the centuries,
up to and including modern times, have painted this scene – some of them great,
some of them not so much.
What makes this such a fascinating episode? I suspect that many of us have found that
this passage resonates in our own lives, as we reflect upon times in the past,
or perhaps even in the present, in which our circumstances were very
stormy. We may have felt threatened,
uncertain about the future or even whether there would be any future. It may have seemed like God was asleep, or at
least not paying attention, and in our prayer we cried, “Do you not care that
we are perishing?” And yet ultimately,
with faith, the storms of life abated and we safely reached the shore.
This is a perfectly reasonable and appropriate way of
relating to this story. And it is an
aspect of the power of the Scriptures that we are able to reach into them, back
two or even three thousand years, and hear God’s Word for our own lives today.
But I don’t think this is primarily what Mark was thinking
about as he compiled his Gospel. We tend
to hear the Jesus story in bits and pieces, because that’s how we hear it in
church on Sunday mornings, that’s how we share them in Bible study groups, that’s
how we read them in our own devotions.
But even though that may be how Mark’s community had received the Jesus
tradition from the earliest followers, that isn’t how Mark, or any of the
Evangelists, composed their written Gospels,
Mark’s Gospel was, and is, and all the Gospels were and
are, continuous narratives. I’m not
questioning the basic historicity of the stories themselves, but Mark assembles
them with his own narrative outline in mind.
You will recall that in Mark’s Gospel, following the
appearance of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, Jesus begins his
ministry in Galilee , announcing God’s kingdom
and healing the sick. This results in
initial conflicts with the religious establishment, principally the Pharisees
and scribes; and Jesus continues to teach the crowd with a series of parables
of the Kingdom.
(Incidentally, the word that Mark uses that we translate
“the crowd” (“leaving the crowd behind”) is a different word from that which we
usually render “the people.” “The crowd”
is not just “a lot of people,” it’s “the poor folks,” “the peasants,” “the
nobodies,” “the mob,” “the masses.” Mark
is very consistent and very intentional about this. But I digress again!)
But now today Jesus leaves the crowd behind, and he and his
disciples get in a boat (presumably one of his disciples’ fishing-boat) and “go
across to the other side.” Okay, what’s
that about? Well, they have been in
Galilee, on the west side of the Sea of Galilee
(which actually is a freshwater lake, and isn’t very big, though it’s big
enough for some pretty rough storms).
“The other side” is Gentile territory, at least mostly. It was called the “Decapolis,” Greek for “The
Ten Cities,” and was a league of ten more-or-less autonomous Greco-Roman cities,
not under the direct rule either of Pontius Pilate (the Roman prefect of Judea)
or of Herod Antipas (the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea). So what is Jesus up to? In fact, as Mark continues the story, having
confronted the Jewish establishment in Galilee ,
Jesus is now going over to the east bank to make an initial confrontation of
the imperial Roman establishment.
Not an uneventful journey, as we hear. And this is not just a garden-variety lake
storm. In the imagery of the Hebrew
Scriptures, storms at sea are signs of the chaos that resists the rule of God. The creation story at the beginning of
Genesis tells of God imposing order on the formless void. In the psalms there are repeated references
to the ancient monsters that inhabit the sea.
The first reading this morning from Job speaks of the power of God to
rule the sea, and in Psalm 107 today we give thanks to the Lord for delivering
from the perilous storm those who went down to the sea in ships. And so now when Jesus awakes (“Awake, O
Lord! Why are you sleeping?” – Psalm
44:23, and numerous other verses in the Hebrew Scriptures), Jesus rebukes the wind and commands the sea to
be quiet. I think it is not coincidental that in Greek
these are exactly the same words that Jesus used at the beginning of his
ministry to exorcise a demon in the synagogue at Capernaum [Mark 1:35]. And so also at this turning point in his
mission, Jesus must once again confront the demonic powers.
And if we were to continue today’s reading, we would see
that when Jesus lands in the Decapolis, he immediately encounters the Gerasene
demoniac. (Gerasa was one of the cities
of the Decapolis.) You remember this
guy. He hangs out in the cemeteries –
places that were unclean according to the Jewish Law – and is possessed by
demons whose name is “Legion.” A Legion
of course is a division of Roman soldiers.
That’s the only sense in which this Latin loan-word was ever used; Mark
is not being subtle here. In fact,
throughout this next story Mark uses a number of unsubtle and subversive words. Jesus is confronting the powers of domination
and driving them into the sea – oh, there’s wonderful subtext in that story! Alas, you will not hear that story next
Sunday, for reasons known only to the Lectionary Gnomes, although we will hear
Luke’s version of it at this time next year.
Next Sunday you will hear how Jesus goes back across to Galilee (without
incident), heals a woman with a socially isolating disorder and raises a young
girl from death. (Still confronting the
powers of domination, but that’s for Rev. Elaine to talk about next week!)
So yes, we pray that God will deliver us at the end if with
faith we persevere through this life’s tempests. “While the nearer waters roll, While the
tempest still is high: Hide me, O my
Savior, hide, Till the storm of life is past, Safe into the haven guide, O
receive my soul at last!” (Charles
Wesley. Hymn #699, “Jesus Lover of My
Soul.” The Communion Hymn today!)
But the Gospel today, like the whole of the Gospel, is
about more than just that. It is part of
the epic story of liberation from the powers of domination into the freedom and
wholeness of the Kingdom
of God
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