After Jesus fed the crowds on the hill, Matthew tells us that "He made the disciples get into the boat and go before Him to the other side while He dismissed the crowds." The word is 'compelled' - He compelled the disciples to get into the boat, while He dismissed the crowds. In John's account of that episode (6:15), the reason is given: the crowds afterwards wanted to take Jesus by force and make Him king. There was a surge of mob excitement which might easily have gotten out of hand. Galileans were notorious for their volatile political temper; a revolution might have started that evening if Jesus had let it. Whether Jesus did it for the disciples' protection, or so that they should not be infected with the crowd's mood, who knows? But for whatever reason He got the disciples out of it and handled the situation Himself. There are some things the Lord does best Himself, without help from us!
And then at last He had what He had wanted ever since He had been told the news of John the Baptist's murder - time alone, to pray.
The hills along the north shore of the Lake of Galilee are a great place to pray. They are uninhabited, even today. I have led a Communion Service there in springtime, the wild flowers in bloom while we sat looking down the sloping hillside to the blue, blue waters of the lake. It is beautiful. This was at night, of course, but it was springtime: the Gospels tell us the grass was green (Mark 6:39). It was very likely Passover time, in fact, when the moon was full. I imagine it as a marvellous scene - the whole countryside and the lake below it bathed in bright moonlight.
So there is Jesus up in the hills, praying. And down on the water, the wind is rising and the disciples in their boat are facing danger. They were "beaten by the waves," Matthew says, for "the wind was against them." In all weathers those hills funnel the wind down across the lake; there may well have been no clouds or rain. It might all have been happening in bright moonlight. And in the fourth watch of the night - some time after 3.00 am, the hour when, if you are having a bad experience at night, it is at its worst - Jesus came to them, walking on the sea. It is easy to understand why they thought they were seeing a ghost walking toward them on the sea ... in the eery moonlight, with the wind shrieking in the rigging.
See the picture: Jesus, at prayer in the hills keeping watch above His own as they face danger at night from wind and sea, comes down to them in it.
Isaiah it was who said, "It is the Lord Who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters." (43:16) So the Lord comes to them in their need and their distress and they discover, not only that they are safe when He is near, but - miracle of miracles - they themselves can walk on the stormy sea as He did.
When we reflect that this episode followed the marvellous meal they had shared with Him in the hills, do we sense a pattern of things somehow familiar tugging at the sleeve of memory? When was it like this again? The feeding of the crowd on the hills suggested the Last Supper to our minds. After that meal, too, Jesus was separated from them, as He went to death and burial. And with Him gone (who knew where?) they faced danger in the dark. They huddled together behind locked doors in fear. But then from the height of His resurrection, He came to them in their night of fear, and with the same greeting: "It is I: have no fear."
Indeed the part played by Peter on that night at sea was to be strangely echoed later. Peter would vow never to be separated from Jesus, and he would begin by being as good as His word: he would draw a sword and be ready to fight for Him in the garden; but then he would go under. And afterwards, in the bitterness of his failure, Jesus risen would come to him again, and take him by the hand and lift him up. Indeed He would do it by this very lakeside. And Peter would find himself again in the 'boat' - the church, of which a boat became the symbol - at its helm, and Jesus in the vessel with him while he steered its course.
How often, too, the story would be told in dark times later, when the church faced persecution. It would seem to them then that 'the wind was against them,' that they were hard pressed to survive. The little ship of the Church must have seemed likely to founder. How often then, I wonder, did the cry go up, "Carest Thou not, O Lord, that we perish?" Matthew would have his beleaguered congregations lift their ears and listen for the reassuring voice of the Son of God, carrying to them on the wind, "It is I; be not afraid." Did He not keep watch above His own, interceding for them in the hills of heaven where He was ascended? Did He not see them when they were 'distressed in rowing'? Would He not come to them - even in the fourth watch, the longest and the darkest? For He is the same, yesterday, today and for ever. And if they took His hand, they would find that they could 'walk on water' - could tread a path through the storms of persecution that threatened them.
The Lord will come and not be slow, His footsteps cannot err;
He plants His footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.
So it has ever been, and will for ever be. The Lord Jesus is supremely the One Who has it in His power to bring us through the storms of life, whether they be storms in our family life, or a tempest of anxiety in our private mind, or a welter of confusion on the world scene. It is when things are at their worst that He comes. It is then we are bidden to "lift up our heads, for our redemption draws near." (Luke 21:28) It is not in the balmy days, when the wind is fair and the sun shines bright on a calm sea that we keep our best hold on Christ, but in the stormy times when the pressure of crisis threatens to overwhelm us. Then is when we best experience joy at His coming. In every age, it has been the genius of Christian faith that it grows strongest precisely when life grows grimmest. It is when the storm and darkness strip every shred of self-confidence from us that we discover best the power of Christ to hold and lift us.
There is a difference between this episode and the one recounted earlier in 8:23-27. There, the moment Jesus was on the scene, the wind died and the storm abated. But here it is different. Jesus appears but the storm does not at once abate. With Christ in sight, the winds howl still and the waves pour into the vessel as before. But this time, Peter is bidden to walk on those very waves to Christ. As he does so, his eyes fixed on Jesus, the very waters he so much dreaded become a firm path under his feet. Only when he takes his eyes off Christ, allowing the threatening waves to obsess him, does he begin to sink. That is how it is for many. Christ comes to them; there is no doubting either the sincerity of their cry or the reality of His coming, but the storm does not cease. Temptations batter them as before, anxieties shriek like wind in the rigging of their minds, and crisis after crisis, like advancing waves one upon another, crash upon them. But if they lift their eyes and their hand to Christ, they find a strange, uplifting power to tread a firm path through them all. Sometimes He stills the storm in our life. Sometimes, He does a better thing: He changes, not our circumstances, but us, giving us a power to cope with them that we have not known before, so that far from defeating us they become the very ground on which we and He walk hand in hand together.
The concluding comment in the episode, 14:33, might be taken as a theme verse of Book IV as a whole: "Those in the boat worshipped Him, saying, 'Truly you are the Son of God.'"
Since the days of Noah's flood, a vessel floating on the ocean has been a symbol of God's People in their journey through this world. For Noah and his family were the little community of those who experienced God's salvation in a world under judgment, and that is what the Church is. Those who worship Jesus of Nazareth as 'truly the Son of God' are the Church, and they experience His salvation.
The last thing is perhaps the most precious.
We have noted that running through this Book IV, whose overall theme is our life together in the Church, there runs a sub-theme: that of "little faith." In the previous chapter we traced it through 14:16, 14:31, 16:8, 16:23-24, 17:20, 18:21-22. In the first we saw it to mean that the little we have in our hands, if it is what He has given and blessed, can feed a multitude. With the bread of the Word God gives to us we shall be able to sustain the faith of others. Here at 14:31 it means that mere mortals like us can "walk on water" - can press through impossible odds, and not go under. And the whole point is that it is for "little-faiths" that this is true.
Our faith is no better than Peter's: his was not strong enough to keep him above water. But he did it anyway! It is not our faith that keeps our head above water, it is Christ. Faith is only the hand with which we reach out to Him. For that, even a little faith is enough.
A key verse in this fourth book of Matthew's is 17:20: "Truly I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed" - such a tiny, tiny thing you can hardly see one with the naked eye - "you will say to this mountain, 'Move hence to yonder place,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you."
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