“Who Is This Man?”

Karen Sloan 20/06/2021

Readings - Mark 4:35-41

I have been feeling a bit restless lately, partly because I have had my Covid injection and feel somewhat freer and eager to go somewhere, and partly because I have finished about ¾’s of my virtual Camino.  I’ve mentioned previously that I have been doing a virtual walk from St Jean Pied Port in France to Santiago in Spain, almost 800 kms.  I have hit the point where Matt and I have walked the real path and so my Facebook feed is coming up with photos from our trip.  Hence the itchy feet to get back to Spain to finish it in real life.

But the reading today also added to this restlessness, because it took me back quite a few years, when we were free to explore more widely, and I went with Nev and Marg and Cathy Lambert to Israel.  We probably couldn’t go there even if we could now, with the tensions so high.

Yet I want to return to some reflections I had on that trip before we look at the reading from today, not just to relive those times but because they are relevant to the topic at hand.

For in the reading the writer of Mark ends with a question, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

A very good question for us today.

I want to concentrate on Jerusalem initially, an amazing and incredible city, of history and culture and faith,  a place of extremes.  A place where 3 faiths sit side by side, sometimes not very peacefully. We saw so many things related to Jesus yet it was hard to get a sense of the human Jesus, the Jesus who lived, rather than just the bit at the end and the beginning of his story.

This is because over the centuries many people have come to Jerusalem specifically to see where Jesus was executed and buried, and where they believe he rose from the dead.  The traditional place is now in a small chapel within the church of the holy sepulchre, an overwhelming building erected in the 4th century by Constantine. 

Followers come to touch and kiss the stones that mark the spots to show their piety.  This is actually an activity that dates back almost to its inception, where people just didn’t kiss but actually bit off parts of the cross of Jesus. The rituals are wild and very uncomfortable to watch.  Somehow Jesus has become covered in gold and silver and worshipped as an icon by many rather than covered in dust and with his people. 

In Bethlehem it’s the same, the same craziness to touch the spot Jesus was born. Bethlehem lies 10 kilometres south of Jerusalem, in the fertile limestone hill country of the Holy Land. Since at least the 2nd century AD people have believed that the place where the Church of the Nativity, now stands is where Jesus was born, even though it’s now possible it was in Nazareth and not Bethlehem. Again, people line up to kiss and touch the spot as though Jesus was this the object of the worship rather than a pointer to something bigger and more profound.

As a member of Wembley Downs Uniting I suddenly felt very distant to my fellow Christians at this time. And I truly believed Jesus would be horrified.

it wasn’t really until we got out of Jerusalem, away from the craziness of that city and even left Bethlehem behind that I really found the Jesus I was looking for, a human Jesus like us. 

Our travels led us to the Sea of Galilee, around which he lived..

And through desert and dry land, the land that he walked on, the land in which he lived and where we find the people he loved. 

We sat next to the fertile banks of the Sea of Galilee and imagined people fishing, responding to his call to join him,

we went to the city of Capernaum, or what is left of it,

 saw the Synagogue in Nazareth he may have preached in,

climbed the hill side that he may have given the beatitudes, a way of living and being

and stared at the cave where perhaps he spent 40 lonely days and nights pondering his life, God and the direction he must ultimately take to be faithful. 

Away from the sparkle and the adoration we found a countryside and place where Jesus came alive.  Not literally but figuratively.  I could see the places he spoke to the crowds, the places he slept, the places the disciples were found fishing and left to join him.   A dusty, relatively poor and ordinary place.  This is who he came to speak to, ordinary people, about their ordinary lives, and what they could do to make things better.  A man intimately connected to the creative life giving spirt of God. He craved that this followers could to find that connection. That they too could live different, transformed lives with one another.

Jesus was a man, a man fully of God, but a man done the less.  In Jerusalem there is a reference to this at Ecco Homo monastery, where it is believed Pilate said, “cometh the man”.  I think by the time we got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre  that message has been lost amongst the gold and glitter.

So how to reclaim this Jesus for our own time and place.

I think part of it is reclaiming our tradition, and that includes reclaiming the bible and its stories as a window to this Jesus. Not by taking  it at face value, for that would be like kissing the stone in the Church. But by looking beneath, for things are not always as they seem.

So back to our reading for today.  And of course, there are still many who would just see this as a miracle story just like many others.  To show the greatness of Jesus.  But is that what its really saying? Maybe not!  The message gets lost if we just take it as a miracle story and Jesus as a miracle worker for it is so much more than that.

So let’s explore it a bit.

Most scholars agree it can’t be traced back to an incident in Jesus life, and even if it was, we see the control of the weather slightly differently today. Maybe it’s based on the story of Jonah, who knows.

But that's not the point.

The writer of Mark’s gospel uses this story in what is otherwise brief gospel to say something pretty profound to his readers and to us. 

Let’s have a recap.

Jesus in the story is in a boat with his disciples crossing the sea to the other side, a non-Jewish side, the gentile side of the lake.  In ancient times the sea was a place to be feared, as it represented all that was unknown and frighting, and demonic. To be tossed into the sea would be the worst thing ever.  So as the story goes a storm erupts, quite likely on the sea at that time, and the boat is being flung all over the place.  The disciples call out for Jesus, who was asleep at the time, to save them.  He awakens, stands and stills the storm.  Then berates them, asking why are they afraid, don’t they have enough faith.  Finally the disciples stand slightly non-plussed, and ask “who is this that even the wind and sea obey him”

Firstly we have to remember that in Mark's time Jews who were followers of Jesus were being persecuted, marginalised and killed for following their faith.  Scapegoated for the fire in Rome and generally undergoing mass extermination.  God seemed to have gone missing.  So here is a story that says to them, Christ is with you, God is with you, even in these terrible times. God is with you just as Jesus was in the boat with the disciples because in Jesus they saw the divine power of God and so looked to him for deliverance.

Did it help, those who were suffering and afraid,  who knows. Sometimes it’s hard to place ourselves in such terrible times.

But the story doesn’t really end there.

For it’s interesting that the disciples don’t call out to Jesus to help empty the water out of the boat, or help support the boat, they call out for him to perform a miracle to save them and maybe that’s the crux of it.  They have become fearful of the path they are following, and want Jesus to save them, again and again. They don’t understand who Jesus really is and so they ask, “who is this that the wind and sea obey him?”. They seem powerless to do anything themselves.  They seem to have lost courage and assurance that God is with them and that they are enough.

The writer of Mark comes back again and again to the image of crossings  and the sea in his gospel and the progression of the stories demonstrates a much bigger picture, or so says Alexander Shaia….

“Although Jesus continued to use his power to still storms, in each crossing Mark recounts that Jesus grew increasingly impatient with the presumption of his disciples that he would simply perform a divine act and in every instance relieve them of their fear.  They seemed to completely ignore that they had responsibilities.  They had an obligation to endure and continue the journey and to find an inner calm through faith. By the final crossing Jesus was totally exasperated and demanded to know if his disciples had yet learned anything whatsoever”.

Shaia believes Mark’s overall message to the Roman Jews who were followers of Jesus is not one of miracles but of presence, and courage.   The disciples still sought a God who would rescue them, remove obstacles, to remain safe under the umbrella of an all-powerful protective parent.  As Shaia concluded they could not fathom a God who not only did not do this, but pushed his followers to the edge, to the other side, to the margins of society for there was to be found the poor, the persecuted,  the sick, the outsider.  The storms and the darkness.  They had not yet found the inner place of God.“

They had forgotten who Jesus was. Who is this man!!!  That asks them to follow him.

So how does this reading speak to us today.  I have pondered this at great length, and I come back to who I think Jesus is.  Jesus, for me, like Marcus Borg, is a prophet, a mystic, a teacher and a movement initiator, a barrier breaker, a man urging us, willing us to find life in love, in compassion, in equity, in peace, in inclusion, in kindness, while at the same time always connecting to that which gives us the strength to keep going. Jesus is the pointer to God, and to fullness of life, not an icon to be worshipped but a path to follow.

Sometimes we forget some or all of this in times of trouble.

The truth of the reading today, and the rest of Mark’s gospel, and Jesus himself is that God is always with us as we make the journey of life.  The God who Jesus reflects is always with us.  That unseen and mysterious presence at the heart of life, is ever present, and in the midst of darkness, even when it seems we are alone, we are never alone!

And we have to trust and go to the edge, where life and transformation is found taking the spirit that is within us on the journey.  And believe we are enough, we have enough resources, that our faith will give us courage and hope for the road, if we let it. 

Do we take comfort and strength from this.  I hope so, because there is certain to be more storms and waves in the future. 

When I returned from my trip to Israel all those years ago, I felt Jesus had become alive to me in a way that I’d had not experienced before.  Do people see him still as a miracle worker and icon to be worshipped and sung to.  Yep, and it will always be the case.  Will people still take the bible literally, reading the words in a way that make faith a bargain and a contract.  Yep.  Will people still not see what lies beneath the glitter and gold.  Again, yep.

But I also take comfort that there are many of us that hear the Jesus from the Sea of Galilee, from the hills and dusty roads, calling us forth into the world.  To make a difference if we can. 

And I can also hear him saying, you will always be children of God, the spirit is always with you, even if sometimes the waves seem too big.

Amen