FIVE

THE POWER

Each part of the story Mark tells reveals a little more of who Jesus is—his power, his purpose, and his self-understanding. Mark is revealing Jesus gradually, like an expert storyteller.

But at the same time, he’s also a faithful reporter. The beginning of our next story is laced with detail. In his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, biblical scholar Richard Bauckham examines the characteristics of eyewitness memory. One of the marks of an eyewitness account is “irrelevant detail.”23 Composed, fictional stories contain details that move the narrative along or convey a message that the author wants to get across. But eyewitnesses record many details simply because they remember them. It is true that fiction writers today often add small details to their stories to make them realistic. But that’s not the way legends were composed in ancient times. According to Bauckham, scholars who believe the Gospel of Mark is fiction have trouble explaining why Mark, in the story we are about to read, tells us Jesus started out across the Sea of Galilee with other boats around his, or why he adds that Jesus was asleep in the boat on a cushion. These sorts of details don’t advance the plot and don’t develop the characters. Vincent Taylor, the prominent twentieth-century biblical scholar, said that these details were “so unnecessary to the story” and therefore have the marks of “genuine reminiscence.”24

Mark, then, is giving us Peter’s firsthand reporting. We can know that this story—which is all about the power of Jesus—really happened. Let’s get into the boat and learn about this power alongside Jesus’s disciples:

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

(Mark 4:35–38)

The Sea of Galilee sits seven hundred feet below sea level, and just thirty miles to the north is Mount Hermon, ninety-two hundred feet high. The cold air from the mountains continually clashes with warm air coming up from the Sea of Galilee, and as a result there are impressive thunderstorms and squalls. Professional fishermen from Galilee (like Jesus’s disciples) were used to them. This storm must therefore have been an incredible one, because experienced sailors though they were, they thought they were going to die. They cried out to Jesus, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” How did Jesus respond? Mark records:

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

(Mark 4:39–41)

Jesus woke up, and two amazing things happened. The first was his words themselves, a command of utter simplicity. He didn’t brace himself, roll up his sleeves, and raise a wand. There were no incantations. He said: Quiet! Be still! That’s it. To a hurricane, Jesus simply says, Quiet! Be still!—just as you would talk to an unruly child.

The more astonishing thing is that the storm obeyed like a compliant child. “Then the wind died down—and it was completely calm.” That sounds like redundancy until you realize that Mark is talking first about the wind and then about the water. “Completely calm” could literally be translated “dead calm.” Have you ever seen water that is smooth as glass, no waves at all? You can see your face in it. When the winds stopped after Jesus’s rebuke, that could have been a coincidence. But if you’ve ever gone on an ocean cruise or lived on the shore, you know that even when the winds stop and a storm ends, the waves keep pounding for hours afterward. Yet when Jesus said, Quiet! Be still! not only did the winds die down but the water instantly went dead calm.

One consensus point among the ancient cultures was that the sea was uncontrollable by any power but God. In ancient cultures and legends, the sea was a symbol of unstoppable destruction. The ocean in full fury was an ungovernable, inexorable power, and only God could control it. Did you ever hear the story of King Canute, a Danish king in the eleventh century? His fawning courtiers were flattering him excessively, and he responded, “Am I divine?” He walked to the shore and said, “Stop,” and of course the ocean waves just kept coming. He was saying, “Only God can stop the sea. I can’t—I’m not God.” Jesus, however, is able to exercise that power that only God has. And remember, Jesus did not conjure; he did not call on a higher authority. If you read any of the old miracle healing legends, the healers call on a higher power. They say, “In the name of _______ I say . . .” Jesus says simply Be still to a storm.

When Jesus was with the Pharisees on the Sabbath he said, “I am not just someone who can instruct you to take rest; I am rest itself.” Now by his actions here Jesus is demonstrating, “I am not just someone who has power; I am power itself. Anyone and anything in the whole universe that has any power has it on loan from me.”

That is a mighty claim. And if it’s true, who is this and what does this mean for us? There are two options. You could argue that this world is just the result of a monumental “storm”—you’re here by accident, through blind, violent forces of nature, through the big bang—and when you die, you’ll turn to dust. And when the sun goes out, there won’t be anyone around to remember anything that you’ve done, so in the end whether you’re a cruel person or loving person makes no lasting difference at all. However, if Jesus is who he says he is, there’s another way to look at life. If he’s Lord of the storm, then no matter what shape the world is in—or your life is in—you will find Jesus provides all the healing, all the rest, all the power you could possibly want.

Unmanageable Power

Look at the emotional state of the disciples in this passage:

The disciples woke [Jesus] and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

(Mark 4:38–41)

Before Jesus calms the storm, they’re afraid—but after Jesus calms the storm, they’re terrified. Why? Before Jesus was awakened, Mark says, the boat was nearly swamped—it was almost full. The disciples couldn’t bail fast enough; they knew the boat was just seconds from being totally filled and they would die. They woke Jesus and said, “Don’t you care if we drown?” This picture goes to our hearts, because everyone who’s ever tried to live a life of faith in this world has felt like this sometimes. Everything is going wrong, you’re sinking, and God seems to be asleep, absent, or unaware. If you loved us, the disciples were saying, you wouldn’t let us go through this. If you loved us, we wouldn’t be about to sink. If you loved us, you would not be letting us endure deadly peril. Jesus calmed the storm, and then he responded to them. Did he say, I can understand how you felt? No, he asked, “Why are you so afraid?” Can you imagine what the disciples must have been thinking? What do you mean, why were we afraid? We were afraid we were going to drown. We were afraid you didn’t love us, because if you loved us, you wouldn’t let these things happen to us.

But Jesus’s question to them has behind it this thought: Your premise is wrong. You should have known better. I do allow people I love to go through storms. You had no reason to panic.

If they had little reason to panic during the storm, they certainly had no reason to be afraid after it had died down. But Mark writes: “They were terrified and asked each other, ‘Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’”

Why were they more terrified in the calm than they were in the storm? Because Jesus was as unmanageable as the storm itself. The storm had immense power—they couldn’t control it. Jesus had infinitely more power, so they had even less control over him. But there’s a huge difference. A storm doesn’t love you. Nature is going to wear you down, destroy you. If you live a long time, eventually your body will give out and you’ll die. And maybe it will happen sooner—through an earthquake, a fire, or some other disaster. Nature is violent and overwhelming—it’s unmanageable power, and it’s going to get you sooner or later. You may say, that’s true, but if I go to Jesus, he’s not under my control either. He lets things happen that I don’t understand. He doesn’t do things according to my plan, or in a way that makes sense to me. But if Jesus is God, then he’s got to be great enough to have some reasons to let you go through things you can’t understand. His power is unbounded, but so are his wisdom and his love. Nature is indifferent to you, but Jesus is filled with untamable love for you. If the disciples had really known that Jesus loved them, if they had really understood that he is both powerful and loving, they would not have been scared. Their premise, that if Jesus loved them he wouldn’t let bad things happen to them, was wrong. He can love somebody and still let bad things happen to them, because he is God—because he knows better than they do.

If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn’t stop your suffering, you also have a God who’s great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can’t understand. You can’t have it both ways. My teacher Elisabeth Elliot put it beautifully in two brief sentences: “God is God, and since he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere else but in his will, and that will is necessarily infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.”25 If you’re at the mercy of the storm, its power is unmanageable and it doesn’t love you. The only place you’re safe is in the will of God. But because he’s God and you’re not, the will of God is necessarily, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond your largest notions of what he is up to. Is he safe? “Of course he’s not safe. Who said anything about being safe? But he’s good. He’s the King.”26

Costly Power

Jesus asks the disciples, “Do you still have no faith?” That could actually be translated as “Where is your faith?” I love that way of phrasing it. By asking the question in this way, Jesus is prompting them to see that the critical factor in their faith is not its strength, but its object.

Imagine you’re falling off a cliff, and sticking out of the cliff is a branch that is strong enough to hold you, but you don’t know how strong it is. As you fall, you have just enough time to grab that branch. How much faith do you have to have in the branch for it to save you? Must you be totally sure that it can save you? No, of course not. You only have to have enough faith to grab the branch. That’s because it’s not the quality of your faith that saves you; it’s the object of your faith. It doesn’t matter how you feel about the branch; all that matters is the branch. And Jesus is the branch.

Let’s return to George MacDonald’s story The Princess and the Goblin, from which I quoted earlier. Curdie, a strapping young miner, has been captured by goblins and is trapped in a cave. One night little Irene, hearing goblins in her house, takes out a magic thread given to her by her fairy grandmother and starts to follow it. It takes her right down into the darkness she most dreads, but she follows it in faith, finds Curdie, and leads him out. But Curdie can’t see or feel the thread. He tells Irene, “I’m very grateful that you saved my life, but I don’t believe in your grandmother or the thread.” Vexed, she protests, “How could I have ever saved you without the thread?” When Irene’s fairy grandmother appears next, the grandmother says, “He is a good boy, Curdie, and a brave boy. Aren’t you glad you have got him out?”

“Yes, Grandmother,” says Irene, “but it wasn’t very good of him not to believe me when I was telling him the truth.” Here is how the grandmother answers: “People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.”27 What MacDonald is saying is extremely important and profoundly biblical. People who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less. Why? Because faith ultimately is not a virtue; it’s a gift.

If you want to believe but can’t, stop looking inside; go to Jesus and say, “Help me believe.” Go to him and say, “So you’re the one who gives faith! I’ve been trying to work it out by reasoning and thinking and meditating and going to church in hopes that a sermon will move me—I’ve been trying to get faith by myself. Now I see that you’re the source of faith. Please give it to me.” If you do that, you’ll find that Jesus has been seeking you—he’s the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith.

Something unusual happens in our response to this passage about the storm. The disciples always screwed up, and normally we respond by laughing, “They just don’t get it!” But we don’t feel that way in this case, do we? We sympathize. There was a storm, Jesus was asleep, they were about to sink, and they came apart. They were thinking, Jesus doesn’t love us. He woke up and said, “If you knew how I love you, you would have stayed calm.” That’s nearly impossible, we think; we know we can’t handle storms so calmly. But we have something that the disciples didn’t have yet. We have a resource that can enable us to stay calm inside no matter how the storms rage outside. Here’s a clue: Mark has deliberately laid out this account using language that is parallel, almost identical, to the language of the famous Old Testament account of Jonah. Both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, and both boats were overtaken by a storm—the descriptions of the storms are almost identical. Both Jesus and Jonah were asleep. In both stories the sailors woke up the sleeper and said, “We’re going to die.” And in both cases, there was a miraculous divine intervention and the sea was calmed. Further, in both stories the sailors then became even more terrified than they were before the storm was calmed. Two almost identical stories—with just one difference. In the midst of the storm, Jonah said to the sailors, in effect: “There’s only one thing to do. If I perish, you survive. If I die, you will live” (Jonah 1:12). And they threw him into the sea. Which doesn’t happen in Mark’s story. Or does it? I think Mark is showing that the stories aren’t actually different when you stand back a bit and look at them with the rest of the story of Jesus in view. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “One greater than Jonah is here,” and he’s referring to himself: I’m the true Jonah. He meant this: Someday I’m going to calm all storms, still all waves. I’m going to destroy destruction, break brokenness, kill death. How can he do that? He can do it only because when he was on the cross he was thrown—willingly, like Jonah—into the ultimate storm, under the ultimate waves, the waves of sin and death. Jesus was thrown into the only storm that can actually sink us—the storm of eternal justice, of what we owe for our wrongdoing. That storm wasn’t calmed—not until it swept him away.

If the sight of Jesus bowing his head into that ultimate storm is burned into the core of your being, you will never say, “God, don’t you care?” And if you know that he did not abandon you in that ultimate storm, what makes you think he would abandon you in the much smaller storms you’re experiencing right now? And, someday, of course, he will return and still all storms for eternity.

If you let that penetrate to the very center of your being, you will know he loves you. You will know he cares. And then you will have the power to handle anything in life with poise.

When through the deep waters I call you to go,

The rivers of woe shall not overflow;

For I will be with you, your troubles to bless,

And sanctify to you your deepest distress.

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,

I will not, I will not desert to its foes;

That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,

I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.28