Canter Bridge

Jesus’ earthy parables often offended the sense of justice that had accrued over centuries to conventional wisdom and salt-of-the-earth logic. His contemporaries, like ours, managed fairly established assumptions about what a good man was like and how a bad man was likely to behave. Even for those unschooled in the legal minutiae of Israel’s long dance with Torah would have agreed with a high level of consensus about the kinds of behavior that were worthy of respect, the kinds that cried out for retribution, and the unspoken moral code that lay behind all of this. (more…)

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As to seasick disciples on a turbulent Sea of Galilee, Jesus sometimes appears out of context, seeming very much to be a ghost. He comes at an angle from which we expect only threat and danger, messengers of an alien chaos that could only devour us.

Amazingly, to his disciples’ cry of ‘It is a ghost!’ (for who else comes walking on water through a storm but weird, destroying things?), Jesus’ reply echoes the long, biblical pattern by which unsought appearances of the divine are announced by just these words: ‘Don’t be afraid!’

But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Quite reasonably, we fear that chaos which we cannot control. Yet very much to our amazement, Jesus often approaches us most promisingly from out of that very disorder. He is not to be controlled. Yet we ought to welcome rather than fear him when he comes to us this way. Or if we cannot do that, then at least we may hear his words of friendly intimacy: ‘Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.’

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