When We Cannot Walk on Water
Matthew 14:22-33
January 21, 2024
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn5VwNzHmQE
Image: Lorenzo Veneziano, Christ Rescuing Peter from Drowning. 1370 Staatliche Museen, Berlin
There are so many ways to read this old familiar story. First, we might jump in as twenty-first century people. If we do that, our default may be to call into question whether this really happened. Everyone knows that you can’t walk on water, unless it is frozen, and if it were frozen, then the disciples could not have been sailing a boat across it. So, some contemporary people read this story and immediately dismiss it as un-factual and therefore untrue.
But some contemporary readers are not bothered by those details. They understand that a story can be true on another level. So when they read it, they comprehend that the story is about storms. Storms might be weather-related with thunder and lighting and rain and wind as in this story. Or storms might be a metaphor for difficult times in life. Whatever this story means, maybe it can be applied to something like a health crisis or a relationship challenge or a job loss or grief or any other time when circumstances have rocked your boat and knocked you down and the waves of fear and uncertainty keep rolling over you.
Not caring whether Jesus really walked on water, these readers focus on the message which they think is about having faith in the midst of a storm. Often, their take-away is that Peter just didn’t have quite enough faith. He jumped out of the boat full of confidence, but then then he noticed the wind and became afraid and started to sink. “But if he would have stuck with it”, they say, “he would have walked on the water all the way to Jesus.” When the story is read this way, it too easily becomes a guilt-trip for ourselves or for other people.
Sometimes, the message sounds like this: Peter could have walked on water if he had only believed. So if you just have enough faith, then your marriage will be happy. Or if you just believe hard enough, you will be healed. . . or your children will be safe. . . or you will overcome whatever storm is currently about to knock you off your feet.
You could read it that way. Many a sermon has been preached around that premise.
Nadia Bolz-Weber has a great response to that. She says, “this approach . . means that a) the chaos of my life is still terrifying and b) now I also have to feel bad for not being able to transcend it through a sufficient amount of faith and self-esteem.”[1]
If we are currently afraid and doubting in the midst of a storm, then that reading may do more harm than good.
Another approach – you might read from the perspective of someone who understands the Sea of Galilee. Local tour guides apparently will tell you that wind storms spring up suddenly and frequently. This is a typical part of the region’s weather. [2]
As experienced fishermen, the disciples would surely have been used to this. This is a strong storm, battering the boat as they row into the wind, but it is not the storm that scares them. They only become afraid when Jesus comes towards them. They are afraid because they don’t recognize him. They think he is a ghost. This is Jesus, their friend, their amazing teacher. They spend the better part of every day with him – why don’t they recognize him?
To be fair, the disciples have had quite a day. First, they had received news that John the Baptist had been executed. John who had baptized Jesus not so long ago. John, whose disciples had brought word to Jesus when John was in prison. The news that John had been beheaded would have been terrifying and grievous. But they hadn’t been given any time to mourn or process, because there was a crowd of needy people and Jesus spent the day teaching and healing them. And then, when they finally thought they might get to call it a day, Jesus had insisted on feeding everyone. They had been pressed into picnic set up and clean up for a few thousand people. Pushing down their grief and terror about John – now we call that compartmentalization – they must have been completely astonished to find themselves playing a role in this miraculous feeding.
And again, they find themselves with questions and thoughts that need to be explored with their community and with Jesus.
But, do they get that opportunity now? Absolutely not, because Jesus makes them get into a boat without him. He commands them to go to the other side of the lake. The way their day has gone, maybe they are not surprised when the winds start up and the whitecaps form. They have been rowing hard into the wind and are still far from shore. When Jesus comes walking toward them on the water, they are physically and emotionally spent. It’s not really that surprising that they don’t recognize him.
What is it that keeps any of us from recognizing God’s presence among us? Could it be anxiety or confusion? Are we emotionally overloaded, pre-occupied with worry or distress or grief? Are we physically spent from living life too fast – the to-do list, maintaining home life and church life in ways that deplete rather than sustain. Are we overwhelmed with responsibility and caring for others, like the disciples who had to put the needs of 5,000 people ahead of their own? Have we pushed out all sense of wonder and possibility so that when God shows up, we don’t recognize them and we are afraid?
Where does fear lead us?
I don’t know about you, but sometimes, when I am afraid, I do something stupid– like getting out of the boat in the middle of the lake. Author and minister Debi Thomas says “Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to prove our faith (or test God’s character) by taking pointless risks that threaten our lives. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus teach that bad things happen to us because we’re too chicken to earn God’s protective care.”[3]
Sometimes, in our fear, we call out to God for help. Jesus helps Peter do what Peter asks – to walk on the water to him. “Jesus does not demand that Peter get out of the boat, but he seems as interested as anyone else to see how the venture will end.”[4] Even when Peter fails, he doesn’t drown, because Jesus rescues him. Perhaps this is how our faith develops, how we start to recognize God’s presence, in the tension between doubt and trust, between we know and what we don’t, between sinking and swimming.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew all about the real dangers of courageous faith. In The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote “Peter had to leave the ship and risk his life on the sea in order to know both his own weakness and the almighty power of his Lord. If Peter had not taken the risk, he would never have learned the meaning of faith.”[5]
There is a third way we might read this story. We could see it through the eyes of Matthew’s post Easter community. If the storm is the metaphor that 21st century people recognize, the first century Christians would have immediately understood the symbolism of the boat. For Matthew’s first readers, the boat, on the water with the disciples inside it, is an image of the church on mission in the world. Matthew says that Jesus made the disciples get in the boat and go without him to the other side. “This, then, is a story about the community of faith commanded by Jesus to sail off without his physical presence. It is a story about the church in every age.
We’re all together in the same boat, and finding it hard going. We’ve been rowing all night, but the wind is against us, the waves are battering and the shore is still a long ways off. We have less and less hope, and more and more doubt about ever really getting there.
In this story, Jesus is not in the boat with the disciples. And is this true also of us, more than we realize? Are we, like them, a lot of the time just sailing by our own wits and wiles? Relying on our skill sets and past experience to get us through. Doing over and over what got us through storms in the past ?” [6]
What takes Peter out of the boat? Is it his fear or his courage? That’s the question for me. If the boat as symbol of the church, is Peter abandoning ship because the external forces against it are too strong? Is he leaving because the chaos and hostility are just too much? Or is he leaving the boat to be closer to Jesus? Is he stepping out on faith in order to be more like Jesus?
I agree with Debi Thomas. We are not called to prove our faith with pointless risks. But sometimes we are called to leave the safety of our tribe, our church, our comfort zone to go where Jesus is. We remember that when Jesus said “take up your cross and follow me,” that was not a call to a safe and convenient life.
One final thing I notice is that Jesus neither praises nor scolds the disciples who stay in the boat. We have not explored this story from their point of view. Matthew doesn’t really offer it to us. But I’m sure they have opinions about what Peter did. Maybe some of them wanted to join him. Maybe some thought he was a total fool or even disobedient because Jesus had put them into the boat in the first place. Maybe they were angry at him for abandoning his post and endangering them all further.
Even when we are in the same boat, we are not in the same place on our spiritual journeys. For some of us, the most faithful thing to do is to stay inside the boat. Others needs to test the waters, to see what happens when they test the waters. But what Jesus says to all of us. What Jesus says to everyone in the boat or out of the boat or about to go over the side, is this “Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid.”
Take heart, friends. Trust that God who brought us this far will be with us all the way to the far shore, even when we can’t see them or don’t recognize them. Take heart –reach for deep for the courage that comes from leading and living and loving with your heart. Trust and doubt and trust again, even in the storm, even thought we have been rowing all night. Trust and doubt and trust again even when we are foolish or afraid. Even when the sea is so great and our boat is so small, take heart, all the way to the far shore.
[1] https://thecorners.substack.com/p/the-case-against-wwjd-bracelets
[2] Karoline Lewis, https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/when-we-cant-walk-on-water
[3] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2709-out-on-the-water
[4] Lance Pape, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp Editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 225.
[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, rev. ed, trans. R.H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 53.
[6] I am greatly indebted to the Rev. Brian Donst, for this sermonic angle and his succinct phrasing. http://food4fifty.blogspot.com/2023/08/welcoming-jesus-as-he-is-not-as-we.html