Series

Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. [46] After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.

[47] When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land. [48] He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, [49] but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, [50] because they all saw him and were terrified.

Immediately he spoke to them and said, "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." [51] Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, [52] for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.

INTRO: “I told them you walk on water.” I am frequently asked to write references for people for school admissions, or job applications, and most of the time I am honestly able to say very positive things about the person in question. Often, when I see them later, I’ll say, “I told them you walk on water.” It’s a phrase that has crept into our language because of this incident with Jesus in Mark 6.

I’m working my way through Mark, but today I am skipping the feeding of the 5,000 so I can tie it in with the feeding of the 4,000 in a few weeks. After Jesus fed the 5,000, He sent His disciples off to another town, not too far around the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

“Mark 6:45, “Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.” Jesus made the disciples get in the boat. This is a strong word that indicates some urgency and force. They may have wanted to hang around and kibitz with some of the people who had been fed, or maybe they were thinking that they never did get that quiet, alone time with Jesus that He invited them to, and maybe they could do it now. But Jesus demanded that they get in the boat and head off to Bethsaida.

The clue as to why He did that is in John’s account of this incident. John 6:15, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.” Jesus probably had two concerns here. One was that He was on a very strict timeline. He had to die, but He had to die on one certain day, and He couldn’t afford to have the populace proclaiming Him the Messiah too soon, or it might precipitate a premature move on the part of the authorities before His time had come.

Secondly, He didn’t want the disciples to get infected with that Messianic fervor, because it was misguided. He was not that kind of Messiah; He had already rejected the temptations to power in the wilderness before He started His public ministry. He couldn’t have His men getting caught up in that political, nationalistic frenzy, because that was not His way. He had come as the Suffering Servant, not as the Conquering King, and they needed to learn that.

So the disciples went. They got in the boat, and headed northwest to Bethsaida. But the wind blew them off course, out into the middle of the lake. That’s the problem with obedience—it will sometimes lead us into very difficult situations.

That notion is directly counter to our expectations. We somehow assume that if we are following the Lord’s will for us, it will be smooth sailing with the wind at our backs. An Old Irish Blessing says,

That’s our stereotype of life with God. But here we see that Jesus made them go—right into difficulties. When God is holding you in the palm of His hand, you may have a rough go of it.

Why are we surprised at this? Jesus Himself said the servant is not above his master. And Jesus experienced a lot more hardships in His life, lived right in the center of God’s will, than most of us ever will. Matthew 4:1 tells us, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.” It wasn’t just a coincidence that the devil met Him there and severely tempted Him; that wasn’t just an unfortunate, and unforeseen consequence of Jesus’ obedience. No, the purpose of the Spirit’s leading was to put Him in that very difficult test. But even that was just a warm-up for the ultimate test that was to come at His trial and crucifixion. Jesus left the glory He had with the Father from eternity to come to earth as a man, specifically for the purpose of suffering on our behalf. So why would we be surprised when our obedience to Him sometimes puts us out in the middle of a lake, rowing hard for hours on end and getting nowhere fast? Don’t assume you are out of His will, just because things are hard.

So after He had dismissed the crowd, Jesus went up on the mountainside and prayed.

What do you do when you’ve got a lot on your plate? Keep running faster? Keep sawing harder? Or take time away with the Father? Jesus followed the advice He had given to the disciples earlier, when He invited them to get away with Him alone. Here He does that Himself with the Father, by sending the disciples off in the boat, and then retreating to a mountain. Mark 6:46, “After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.”

Jesus had a lot on His mind. The opposition from the religious authorities was growing. His fame was also growing, but that had at least two negative consequences. One, Herod Antipas had noticed Him, and that couldn’t be good, since Herod had beheaded John the Baptist. And two, there were political radicals in Galilee who wanted to make Him king by force, which would spark an armed conflict with Rome, and that would only end badly for the Jews.

So Jesus gets alone with the Father to talk things over, to get perspective, to draw strength for the coming ministry. Friends, if Jesus needed to do that from time to time, don’t you think you need to, as well? When will you do it? As Jesus said to His men in another context, “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:17).

It doesn’t explicitly say it, but the implication is that Jesus also prayed for the disciples. From His mountain top view, Mark 6:48, “He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them.” Commentators think that this took place around Passover time that year, which is a time of the full moon. So it is entirely likely that Jesus could have looked out across the lake around 3:00 a.m. and seen the disciples working hard against the wind in the moonlight.

This is a great picture of what is happening for each of us every minute of the day. We all know the kinds of things that make it tough going in life—relationships that are broken or difficult; physical and health problems, increasing with age; finances can be hard, especially for those who are in mortgage trouble these days; concerns of caring for our children, or our parents; things not going well at work. The wind is often against us. We feel like the disciples, rowing hard against the wind, and not making any progress toward our goals, maybe even losing ground. Worse, we may feel abandoned by Jesus—sent away, even, as the disciples had been. The last time they had been in a storm on that lake, Jesus had been with them, sleeping in the stern. But now they were alone! We may feel very alone in the midst of our struggles.

That’s what it felt like for the disciples that night. But from Jesus’ perspective, things were altogether different. He had His eye on them. Another time Jesus said, Matthew 10:29, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father… 31 So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” His eye is on the sparrow, the old spiritual sang. He is always watching us, as He was watching them then, and He is watching in the context of prayer. He had almost certainly been praying for Himself and the many issues He faced, but when He spotted the disciples out in the middle of the lake, further from their destination than when they started, don’t you think He continued to pray, only this time for them? I’m sure He did. Because this is His ministry for us now. In the midst of the trouble that He may actually send us into, He is praying for us. Hebrews 7:25, “Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.”

What are you going through that’s hard right now? You know where the wind is coming from; you know how hard it is to row against that. You’re tired, maybe exhausted. You feel all alone, and don’t see any evidence that Jesus is there to help you. Friends, don’t give up! You need to know that Jesus is watching from the heights of heaven, where He has constant access to the Father’s ear. And He is praying for you. He is asking the Father to give you courage, and determination, and strength. He is praying for more love and patience for you as you deal with difficult people. He is interceding for more faith and hope in God to flood your soul. He is asking the Father to give you His peace, in the confidence that He is watching, and praying, and has everything under His control.

Not only is Jesus praying for us in our troubles, but He is with us in them. He walked out on the water to the disciples while they were straining at the oars. Their first thought was that He was a ghost, a spiritual something, because it was obvious to them that no one can walk on water. So add to their physical and emotional exhaustion from rowing for so many hours the sheer terror of seeing something that you know can’t be. “They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified” (Mark 6:49,50).

It looked to them like He was about to walk right on by, but He quickly stopped and identified Himself. He said, “Take courage, ego eimi.” This is the normal Greek expression for “it is I”. (That’s actually the correct English usage, but most of us would say, “It’s me!”) When the disciples heard that, their first understanding would have been that He was just identifying Himself as the Jesus they knew, rather than a ghost or apparition. But it is also possible that Jesus was hinting at much more with these words.[1] Literally, it reads, “I am.”

You remember when God spoke to Moses from the burning bush and called him to go set the Israelites free. Moses said, If I’m going to go to the Israelites and tell them God has sent me to lead them out of Egypt, they’re going to want to know which God. What is your name? Exodus 3:14, God said to Moses, "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "

This name has been the subject of vast amounts of scholarly study over the years, but these things seem to me to stand out about it.[2] First, God is personal. This is His name. Whenever you see the word LORD in your Bible in all caps, that translates this name, which is usually pronounced “Yahweh”. As you read the Old Testament, try reading “the LORD” (in caps) as the personal name Yahweh, rather than as a title. Sometimes it adds a real personal touch and a different sense of the meaning to understand it that way. God is not the good side of the Star Wars “force”; He is a person, with a name, who relates to us in a personal way. That’s why we stress a personal relationship with Him. Christianity is not about the rules and rituals of religion; it is a relationship, as it says in John 17:3, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

A second thing God’s name tells us about Him is that He is free to be faithful.

He is who He is, and no one or no thing constrains Him or forces Him to be something He does not want to be, or to do something He does not want to do. So He always does what He wants. Psalm 135:6, “The Lord does whatever pleases him…” And what pleases Him is to be faithful to us and to His own purposes. Nothing can push Him off course, or cause Him to abandon us as His people. That was certainly meaningful in the context of Jesus coming to the disciples on the lake that night. He wanted to assure them that He was the God who was always with them, and for them, who would never desert them in their time of trouble. He was not only watching, and praying for them, He was with them.

So I think that Jesus is saying both, “Don’t be afraid, men, it’s me,” and “I am the God of the Old Testament who is both personal and faithful to you in every situation.” It would not be unlike Jesus to use a phrase that could be interpreted both ways, both of which were true. And what He was doing at the time certainly seems to fit the description of God in Job 9:8-11,

As it looked like He was going to pass them by, they saw Him, and yet did not recognize Him. They did not perceive who He really was, so Jesus had to tell them. And I think that the very act of walking on the waves of the sea (remember, the wind was blowing hard that night) was another way of telling them who He was, which they may have realized later was a fulfillment of this description of God in Job.

We have a cultural proverb, no doubt started by the folks in Missouri, the “Show Me” state, that says, “seeing is believing.” We often use it to mean, What you’re telling me is hard to believe, but I’ll believe it when I see it. But we Christians sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that it means, When you see it, you’ll believe it. In other words, the plain evidence right before your eyes will convince you of the truth of the Bible, or of Christ, or whatever point we are trying to make.

Unfortunately, that is not always true. It wasn’t for the disciples in this case: Mark 6:51, “Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, [52] for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.” For them, seeing Jesus walk on the water (even when combined with all the other miracles they had seen—from authority over illness, to demons, to the forces of nature) –not even all of that was enough to really convince them of who Jesus was. They were completely amazed, because they did not really believe that He was the Creator, the Lord of heaven and earth. They saw Him walking on the water, but they didn’t believe what it meant.

Jesus knew that it was hard for people to believe some of the things about Him and about the spiritual realities of the world. He told a parable one day about a rich man and the poor man who used to beg at the rich man’s door. They both died, and the rich man went to hell, and the poor man went to heaven. In torment, the rich man begged Abraham to send somebody to warn his brothers about hell, but Abraham said, They can read the prophets who all told people how to get right with God. Luke 16:30, " 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' [31] "He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' " And that was literally true with Jesus. He raised Lazarus, and the widow’s son, and the ruler’s daughter from the dead, and He rose from the dead Himself, and many people still didn’t believe. Seeing is not necessarily believing.

We sometimes think the disciples were pretty dull not to catch on any sooner to who Jesus really was. They saw all these miracles, and they were impressed, and “completely amazed”, but they didn’t connect the dots to the right conclusion about Jesus’ identity. We wonder how they could be so stupid.

But put yourself in their shoes. We read this from our perspective of faith, having already believed that Jesus is God incarnate, but they didn’t know that. They just thought He was a really great rabbi, of which there were many in those days. Sure, He had uncommon wisdom, and did some amazing things, but it was a long way from that to the conclusion that He was God. If someone showed up today and started doing these kinds of miracles, we’d find some naturalistic explanation for it. We’d come up with every possible explanation other than this must be God in human form. That is just too preposterous!

And by the way, it seems really preposterous to our unchurched friends, too. Christians’ insistence that Jesus is the only way to God is offensive to them, but the claim that He was God is just incomprehensible. And to be fair, it is incomprehensible to us as well. No one fully understands this; we just take it on faith because the Bible says so. You can read a lot of very dense theology on the deity of Christ, but in the end, no one fully understands how one person can have both a divine nature and a human nature in the same body. So we take it on faith. That’s exactly what we should do, but we should also be sympathetic toward those who find this teaching just too much to swallow. It took them a long time to really get it, and they were eyewitnesses to all these miracles. We should give our friends time to come around, too.

Finally, the most encouraging point in this whole story was mentioned by Jim Eng in our staff meeting on Wednesday.

Jesus showed up. The disciples had obeyed Him, and in the process, had found themselves in a very difficult situation. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was hard. They had been rowing for at least six hours[3] against the wind, and were now farther from their destination than they had been when they started. They were doing everything they could, and were still losing ground. Have you ever felt that way? You’re working hard, getting too little sleep, you’re anxious and frustrated by your lack of progress, you’re exhausted, and frustrated that Jesus doesn’t seem to be there for you.

And then Jesus showed up. When we most need Him, Jesus often shows up in unexpected ways. Here’s one example of that from our family recently. Our daughter, Heather, and her husband, Mike, and daughter, Kasey, moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin summer a year ago so Mike could go to school at the University of Wisconson, Milwaukee, to get a Ph.D. in creative writing. He has long dreamed of writing, and teaching writing at the college level, and this seemed like what he had to do to get there. Heather would be the primary breadwinner, teaching high school English. She taught in the Milwaukee schools last year, but a conflict between her philosophy of education and that of her principal led to her not being offered a job there for this coming year. So starting last spring, she has been looking for teaching jobs in the area. She has a Master’s degree in literacy, and 9 years of experience, and we thought that surely there would be plenty of jobs for her. But as time went on, and she interviewed for different positions, and we prayed diligently for each one, she was turned down time after time. During the summer, Mike got a T.A. position at the University, which included medical insurance and paid for all his tuition, so that relieved some of the pressure, but still, as they examined their budget, they were many hundreds of dollars short each month.

Complicating the situation was Holden, who was born June 4. Heather was supposed to be the breadwinner for these three years, so it was quite a surprise for them to discover last September that she was pregnant. But with the birth of Holden, Heather found that her heart really wasn’t in the interviews or the applications; she mostly wanted to be home with her new baby. Can you blame her?

We continued to pray, and began to change our prayers from “give Heather a job” to “make a way for her to stay home with Holden.” Just when the last deadlines for applications for teaching positions were passing, Heather and Mike realized that they had some stock which Barbie’s mom had given them years ago, and they had never sold. They had thought about selling it many times before, but for one reason or another, never did. They checked into it, and discovered that if they sold the stock, they would have enough to cover their shortfall for most of this school year! That meant Heather could stay home with Holden! She’s doing that, and just loves being a stay-at-home mom with her new baby!

Jesus showed up! Heather and Mike had been rowing hard against the wind for about five months, looking for a job, and nothing was coming up. They were falling farther and farther behind in the whole application deadline process. They were tired, and frustrated, and it felt like Jesus was nowhere to be seen. And suddenly, He showed up! And, just like God, it turned out He had been preparing for this very situation years ago when Grandma gave them the stock! He knew they would need it now; He kept them from selling it then and spending it on more immediate needs. Jesus showed up, very unexpectedly, and very wonderfully. And just like when He entered the boat with the disciples, they were suddenly at their destination, all of a sudden, the financial crisis the Clarks thought they had disappeared.

I’m sure you have similar examples of times when it all looked pretty bleak, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Jesus showed up! When you are going through the hard times, remember those other times. Remember Jesus, the Great I AM, the personal, and faithful God, who will never leave you or forsake you, who will walk on water to you and help you in whatever situation you are in. Expect Him to show up.

[1]“it is conceivable that Mark intends his readers to be reminded of the Old Testament use of the expression.” C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to St Mark in The Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary (Cambridge: The University Press, 1966), p.227. There may be some question about whether Jesus meant this phrase that way in this instance, but it is much clearer in John 8:58, "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" This is the same two Greek words, ego eimi, but here, the ungrammatical use of the phrase calls attention to it in such a way that it is obvious He is making a reference to God’s name in the Old Testament.

[2] Paul K. Jewett, The Doctrine of God: The Tetragrammaton and Exodus 3:14, Bulletin, Systematic Theology T21, Fuller Theological Seminary, n.d., p.13,14.

[3] Assuming they left the feeding site no later than 9:00pm, and it was now 3:00am.