Canter Bridge

In the gospel accounts of his life, Jesus’ authority over all things—an advised rather than careless description—becomes increasingly evident as his little cohort follows him around the land. The confidence that emerges in fits and starts runs a course that is at cross purposes with fear, its primary alternative.

In the fourth chapter of Mark’s gospel, the emerging argument for trusting this Jesus with one’s life takes a qualitative step forward:

And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

It is not easy to move the pieces of this ontological puzzle into any quaint congruence. On the one hand, we have Jesus asleep in a boat that is about to founder, with loss of life. On the other, he seems to slap down the same followers who wake him and beg for his assistance against forces that are almost by definition uncontrollable. They lack faith, he tells them, a diagnosis that might come across as a little severe given the request they have just made of him.

In the end, he ‘rebukes’ the wind, suggesting both enmity and something like personality on the part of what we usually take to be a natural force that lacks both.

Jesus’ followers are moved to awe. The narrative sustains the odd notice of nature’s near person-hood, offering the conclusion on the lips of Jesus disciples that ‘even the wind and the sea obey him’.

The simple dualities of myth are missing from this text. In their place one encounters a struggle to describe a series of events that defies conventional categories. The wind and the sea obey him. His followers, soaked by waves and spray that seemed intent on drowning them, are learning to do the same.