For Christmas we turn to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, who tell us the events surrounding Jesus’ birth. But we can find a word on Christmas in Mark’s Gospel too. To do so, we turn not to a manger, but to a boat. Jesus and his disciples are out upon the Sea of Galilee when a doozie of a storm threatens to capsize them. While the disciples anxiously try to remedy the situation as best they can, Jesus lay asleep in the boat’s stern, oblivious to all the noise and panic. But eventually Jesus obliges the others and stills the storm, simply by speaking to it. “Peace, be still!” (Mark 4:39) What happens next is quite puzzling. The disciples become more, not less, afraid. “Who is this,” they ask, “that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Why would they respond to their rescue by becoming even more afraid? One answer is that this is simply the pattern of Mark’s Gospel. The disciples don’t get much right. Every chance they get to exemplify understanding and courage, they do the opposite. The Gospel of Mark is where we come when we feel like failures ourselves to see how Jesus so constantly surrounds himself with failures.
But on another level, the disciples’ question (“Who is this?”) may be more rhetorical than open-ended. That’s to say that they’re asking the question because Jesus just gave them a big hint toward answering it. See, Israel had their own hymnal. We call it the Book of Psalms. We may not know the original tunes to which the Psalms were sung, but they are songs nonetheless. And here in this boat, one of those songs just flashed through the minds of the disciples. It goes like this: “Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters… Yahweh commanded and raised the stormy wind which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity… Then they cried to Yahweh in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress; he made the storm be still (Psalm 107).”
The song they’ve always sung about Yahweh, the Lord of creation, is no longer just a song – it’s now a present experience. The disciples ask “Who is this?” because they’re thinking to themselves, We’ve heard this one before; we know who this song is about. Apparently, it’s not simply Jesus in the boat. Yahweh himself is in the boat.
This is Christmas – God is present. We don’t have to go looking for him. He’s right here. He got into our boat without us even realizing it! And so we ask, what does life begin to look like with this blessed assurance? The Christmas proclamation is a joyful proclamation. But the disciples aren’t feeling joyful here in the boat. They’re just as afraid after this realization as they were before it. After all, if Jesus is the walking, talking, storm-calming Yahweh, then we’re confronted with the fact that we can’t control him. He’s too big, too powerful. And we’re inherently afraid of what we can’t control. If that’s our reaction to the sudden presence of God in our lives, so be it. We can at least be honest about it. But let it lead to joy and to trust. Jesus’ word to the disciples in the boat is “faith.” And this is Christmas faith – that the infinite, uncontrollable power that is suddenly present in our midst is on our side and ready to rescue us.
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