"Can You Believe Jesus Hiked on Water?”

August 30, 2015                   John 6: 15-21 




So the situation is as follows:


Jesus fed the five thousand.  They now want to make him king.  Jesus does not want to be king so he withdraws, alone, into the mountains.  The disciples hop in a boat, at night, to cross the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum.  This is on the other side of the lake from where the miracle took place. 

It was a dark and stormy night.

So, three to four miles out, the disciples are in a bit of a tempest.  Then they spot Jesus hiking out to meet them.  It was three or four miles.  And Jesus scares the bejeezes out of them.  Still, he identifies himself and they calm down immediately.  They want to take him into the boat, but they discover they’ve just arrived where they wished to go.

Jesus does more than walk on water, he hikes on it.  Now last week, in discussing the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, I spoke of two competing explanations of the miracle.  One, Jesus made all the found divinely.  Two, Jesus inspired all the people to share the bits of food they’d brought along.  The second explanation was from a compelling sermon by a pastoral colleague who has a different view of how God performs miracles in the created order.  But this little story seems to be placed here exactly to disprove any assumption that Jesus does not do miracles in the created order of things.

This passage lends itself to a simply, sappy sermon.  When your life is stormy, and you do not know how you are going to get through the darkness that is overtaking you, there might be a moment when, off in the distance, something ghostly and completely unimagined suddenly shows up.  It’s timing is uncanny, right at the moment of the trouble.  Whatever it is, it is a scary thing.  But give it consideration, and you will see Jesus in that scary thing.

What might be a boiler plate application of this interpretation?  Maybe it is about the job.  Maybe you are in a horrible job, horrible for any number of reasons.  The boss is a real jerk.  You are totally unappreciated.  They treat you like dirt.  The pay is lousy, the hours are long, the environment is dangerous.  Then, at some point, in the storm or wind that is the job, something happens.  You get fired or laid off.  Things tip past the breaking point and you outright quit.  Something in your gut that feels like an ulcer about to explode finally pushes you out the door.  Maybe the tipping point was there for the longest time, just out of reach, but you were too afraid to take the plunge.  Then some moment, a ‘Jesus’ moment occurred and you made the change. 

This story usually ends well with a better and more fulfilling job, or a happy retirement, or something, a benefit because the power of Jesus intervened.

It is not my intention to dump on that idea.  Amazing things happen every day through the power of faith.  The Lord watches out for us.  He intervenes in our lives.   Happily ever after is real, for many people, but maybe not for everyone.

Sometimes, amazing things do not happen.  Sometimes, disaster piles on disaster, and life gets pretty gruesome.  How do we account for that?  There are some TV preachers who would tell you that your faith is inadequate.  If God hasn’t blessed you, the problem isn’t with God, it’s with you.  Because if you believed hard enough, God would bless you.  It’s called prosperity theology.  It defines the goodness of Christian faith with what is considered ‘good’ in capitalism, more stuff, money, possessions, whatever.

I think we should take another look at this story, that there is an entirely different consideration to make.  Let’s return to the details of the story.

Jesus just performed his biggest miracle yet.  The response is apparently mob rule because the people want to force him to be their king.  The result is predictable, the Romans will object and kill everybody.  Not a good idea.  Jesus is not there to get the people killed, but to give up his own life when the time is appropriate.  In order to avoid the trouble, Jesus withdraws “to the mountain by himself.”

Meanwhile, the disciples are down on the beach, watching the sun set.  Maybe they are munching on some left over barley bread from the twelve baskets they gathered up.  It gets dark.  Maybe the disciples got bored.  Maybe they were indignant that Jesus was holding them up.  Maybe they assumed a couple of angels would pop down from heaven and fly Jesus across the Lake.

For whatever reason, they decided they could not wait for Jesus any longer, and they took off in the boat without him.  I wonder how they let Jesus know they were going to Capernaum.  I hope they agreed to do that before they left.  They don’t have cel phones, and it would really be presuming on God’s power that Jesus is just going to like, divinely read their minds or something.

The bottom line is, they left without Jesus.  And they ended up in the dark and in the wind, and Jesus had to come out and save their sorry butts.  They saw him, were scared witless till they figured it out, then, when they tried to get him in the boat, they found they’d arrived where they were headed.

Maybe the moral of this story should be something more like “Don’t get into the freaking boat without Jesus in the first place!”  It is a much more basic and comprehensive message.  If Jesus is part of our life on a daily basis, you won’t get into so much trouble.  The joy is that when we do forget about Him, He will crash the party when we need Him too.

To abuse this metaphor, if we make sure Jesus is in the boat with us, a few things change.  What we call ‘happily ever after’ can change.  Here is one of the hard truths of life.  Everybody dies, period, end of discussion.  But because he died already, and broke death, coming back to life, Jesus changed the game.  “Happily ever after” is not achieved by doing everything we possibly can to try and stay in this life forever.  Happily ever after is dying with dignity and the sure and certain knowledge that there is a life beyond this one.

But the moral of the story is that when we do get into the boat without Jesus,  and when we do start to flounder-because we will, he’s going to hike out into the middle of the lake to rescue us.  Praise his Holy Name.  Amen.