Jeremy Duncan: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Bobbi Salkeld: Okay. This is our 2nd to last installment of Mark part 1 before we pick up the gospel again in the spring. And Mark is a short gospel, but we are stretching it out So far, we've talked about how Mark drops you right into the action. It's a new beginning, and Jesus is on the move Doing something new. And we've examined 4 healing stories all while Jesus is inviting folks to come closer to the sights And the sounds of God at work in their midst.
And we felt these clashes between Jesus and his critics as he straight up Refuses to fit into any box that leaves the sick and the lonely to suffer and to die. This is Jesus, the giver of life. So breathe that in to anything That feels a bit hopeless in your heart. Last week, we made like gardeners Through the parables of the seed and 4 soils, the lamp on a stand, a field that can't help itself but flourish, And a teeny tiny seed that grew into a big plant providing shelter to birds. Wherever Jesus goes, he tells parables To describe the world as it is and the world as it could be.
And he fits the mystery of the kingdom into the ordinariness of everyday life. Today, we're out at sea at the end of March 4, so strap on your life jacket. There is a storm, A brewing. But before we dive in, let us pray. Loving god.
As we take a moment to Settle in a little more together. We are mindful of so many spaces in the world that are So unsettled. Conflict, injustice, Violence rages in faraway places and also sometimes so near. And so we ask For mercy and compassion to rise up again And still in the dark, we are invited to not only look For the light, but to be light. So today, Christ of all beauty, won't you remind us Of our brightness, the brilliance of our care for one another, the Sparks of kindness that kindle love and the glow of community, Pockets where we make the world as it could be.
And so we breathe in We breathe out spirit, bring peace. Bring joy. Bring energy. Amen. Okay.
Today, we are out in a boat at night with Jesus and the disciples. So keep your head on a swivel. A lot can happen in 7 verses. We're in Mark 435 to 41, and we'll talk about The other side, sleeping deity, wind and sea and the numinous. That day when evening came, Jesus 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. And we often think about Jesus as being all in control all the time, but I love that he needs His fishermen friends to make this great boat escape. For Jesus, It's been a long day of teaching with parables from this boat pulpit and explaining them. It's evening, and it's time to move on.
And there are 6 boat journeys in the gospel of Mark. The 2 more perilous mirror each other in many ways. This is the first of the 2 perilous boat journeys With the 2nd being more extreme and taking place in chapter 6. And Mark uses stories so that the reader looks Twice. This is the gospel of the double take.
So when you keep reading and you think, wait. Did Something like this already happened. Hold on to that. Mark has caught you in the double take. Something of Jesus is being revealed here in this boat story, and more will be revealed later.
So Jesus says, hey. Let's get out of here. And they pull up anchor and along with other boats set out for the other side. So what's this other side the narrative refers to? Well, Jesus was on the Jewish side of the lake in Galilee.
And he's been with his people. And to cross over to the other side is to point the boats toward the west. What's in the West? The gentile decapitalist region. Now you likely have an understanding of what the word gentile means For Israel and the Jewish community, it's everyone else or the rest of humankind.
And throughout the Scriptures, you'll find a real mixed bag of feelings toward gentiles. There are references to blessing and inclusion In Jonah and Ruth, and there are these instances of animosity and exclusion like in Ezra and Nehemiah. And in the 2 centuries before Jesus, barriers between Gentiles and Jews became even more rigid. And you can trace this resistance to inclusion all the way to the apostle Paul's ministry to the gentiles. All this to say, I don't think to the other side should be ignored.
Those votes point in the direction of illusion. Jesus has already gathered a crowd with his own people, but he's inclined to stretch the circle Further, shalom is meant for everyone. Now what's up with the boats, plural? And I pointed out because they're mentioned here in the setup, But then they disappear, and we're eventually left with only 1 boat. Then I've been reading the bible carefully and academically for Far too long to ignore the case of the missing boats, and scholars offer some pretty hot takes.
One, the extra boats are lost in translation. Something just doesn't work after all this time with this detail in the text. So, basically, who cares? Move on. 2nd option, this is a storm story, and that can only mean that the extra boats don't make it out safely.
And that is pretty bleak for the text to not care about, so I'm like, meh. 3, Job sunk the yacht. J k j k. That's arrested development. But, seriously, there is a third option, and it's This.
Like the gospel writers are prone to do, the boats offer the readers an imaginative way into the story. And I think that's what Mark is doing here. It's like, see all the boats? There's plenty of room. Get in.
Let's go to the other side. What for, you might ask. It's simple, really. Come along To see who Jesus is for yourself. So you've stepped into a boat, But you might soon regret it because 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? Now we don't exactly speak like the NIV, do we? Nobody says on the way across Auburn Bay, A furious squall came up. So let me break down the nature of the storm.
It is a mighty blast. It is a whirlwind out of nowhere. It's the kind of literary storm that you'd would make the characters completely wrecked with fear. So let's play a little game of hot and cold to look at what this situation is like when it comes to storytelling. Biblical stories are never just stories.
They are meaning making machines. So first, a little cool but getting warmer. A storm at sea and a hero Asleep could make ancient listeners think about Homer's odyssey. And in the odyssey, Odysseus is on many perilous adventures as he tries to get home to Ithaca. And in book 10, Odysseus is asleep When his men open up a bag that holds the wind and the whirlwind rushes out and stirs up a storm that threatens their lives.
And and Emily Wilson's brilliant translation, Odysseus says, A sudden, Buffett seized us and hurled us back to see the wrong direction far from home. They Screamed and I woke up. And in both stories, the crew with their hero asleep Begin to panic and doubt overtakes them like the water crashing into the boat. Now we get warmer and a little closer to the meaning when we think about how the story of Jesus Asleep in the storm is like the biblical story of Jonah asleep in A storm. Only in that story, Jonah is running from God.
God had told Jonah to go to Nineveh, A gentile alert, but Jonah hates that plan because he hates the Ninevites. Instead, he gets in a boat To go in the opposite direction. What happens? Yahweh tracks him down with a mighty whirlwind. And where's Jonah?
You remember it, fast asleep in the hold of a ship. And the crew is terrified. And when they ask him for help, Jonah says the only way to get out of this pickle is to pick him up and to throw him into the sea. So this Jesus asleep story, it's not exactly like Jonah's, is it? But you can't help but think it's meant to hint at it.
And early Christians even spoke about Jesus as A kind of Jonah that finally gets it right. And finally, the warmest Possibility is that Jesus is not exactly a powerful hero like Odysseus, And he's not a reluctant prophet like Jonah. Here in this storm, Jesus will wake up and show himself to be so powerful that if they didn't know better, They'd be sure he was god. But Before we get to the calm that you know is coming after the storm, I do wanna slow us down In this panic. It's a short story, so we're just taking a pause.
Because if your faith is honest, and I truly hope that it is, Then you, like these disciples, have likely been caught in a storm that came out of nowhere. Could be a storm of betrayal, a storm of grief, a storm of crisis. And you've certainly witnessed the storms that are all around us. Storms of war, Storms of corrupt financial dealings, storms of history of our own collective making. And in your honesty, you have voiced a cry like that of the disciples.
I know I've heard you. You've screamed. God, are you asleep? Don't you care that we're drowning? And all I wanna do With that cry is to just simply honor it.
If your heart has cried out, god, Are you asleep? I honor that. Not being able to ask Questions or feel what you're really feeling is a toxic spirituality. We are not here for that, So I honor your cry. And I want you to know, Help can be roused.
Good can still happen. Of course. No one is drowning on this sea today. Jesus got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the waves, quiet. Be still.
Then the wind died down, and it was completely calm. Jesus said to his disciples, why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith? Now when Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves, our English translation tames this a bit because it's Actually supposed to sound a little bit vulgar here. Rebuke is the strong verb Tamayo, and it means to throw down a penalty or express severe disapproval.
And when Jesus shouts something more like, shut up or put a muzzle on it, This rebuke of the wind and the waves is a lot like Jesus' rebuke of an evil Spirit in Mark 125. So here, it's like this exorcism of the sea. Now Why would Jesus yell at the wind like this? I mean, what did the wind ever do to him? It seems like weather is just behaving like weather.
It's wild. It's unpredictable, and we are always at its mercy. But in the ancient world, the sea means more than water lapping up on the shore. The sea is emblematic of an evil force. It means chaos.
And in both Greek and Jewish literature, the wind and the sea get personified as this evil force, As even demons. So when Jesus steps toward the destructive force believed to be behind the chaotic storm, he speaks In the language of his day, he's saying, yeah. I have power, and here's what my power looks like. It looks like resistance in any way to stop harm. It looks like turning evil back upon itself.
It looks like chaos taking new shape as calm. So when the wind dies down and the scene is perfectly tranquil, the story is meant to show that Jesus is not Just a leader in the realm of rulers who claim power over land and sea, but Jesus is divine. Only Yahweh controls the wind and the waves. Psalm 107, they cry to the lord in their Trouble, and the lord brought them out of their distress. God made the storm be still.
The waves of the sea were hushed. But here's the deal. In Jesus' day and in the decades following when the gospels took shape, resistance to Rome was futile. The Judean revolt of 66 CE and the subsequent war To resist Rome ended in the temple's destruction. They lost.
Jesus was murdered. His followers tracked down and harmed in the temple it lay in They didn't exactly shout down chaos in all its terrifying forms, did they? And I think that's why this story mattered so much to them after Jesus was gone. I think that's why they took his sharp rebuke of chaos, wrote it down, and passed it around So that they could listen to it, repeat it to each other in the night when they were afraid. There once was a time when Jesus shouted down the chaos And everything became calm.
Jesus speaks To chaos as god, to show the disciples what they are meant to do together. Join your voices. Lift them up. If I yell and you yell and we all yell together, it could be possible to bring about a world where Faith means goodness attempted everywhere for everyone. But what does stilling a storm, like, really look like in our lives?
And there are these tiny ways that we all work to bring calm Out of chaos. Simple stuff, really. When you clean out a messy closet, when you stand against Anything or anyone that's like a bully. When you sit and listen to someone in the chaos of their grief, When you go to therapy, when you ask for help, when you express sincere gratitude, these tiny, tiny practices are meaningful because through them, we develop this musculature to do more when it's needed, To hold our leaders accountable, to generously meet needs together as we pool our resources During Advent, to provide the world with a spirituality grounded in the trust that there is a benevolent power Always at work, and it is so much bigger, so much more compassionate than we can ever comprehend. So let's go back to the disciples.
There they are. They're gently rocking in a boat in the dark, calm sea. They were terrified and asked each other, who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him. Through the disciples' confusion, Mark provides a proclamation to his readers.
You Know who this is, the crucified and resurrected one. This is the one who crossed the boundary of death to bring new life, The boundary of chaos to bring calm, the boundary of separation to bring union, God's love For the whole herding world. When people talk about this gospel event, the calming of the Storm as one of 5 nature miracles in Mark, and that word is a little misleading. As the biblical scholar William Placher puts it, a miracle means a violation of the laws of nature. But for early Christ Followers, there were no laws of nature.
God was the source of everything. So this story is an epiphany. This is the wildest thing the disciples have seen Jesus do so far, And they are left to ponder who Jesus really is and what Jesus really came to do. They have an experience that at least for today, I'd like to call the numinous. Now don't go looking for that word in your bible.
It is not there. A professor of theology named Rudolf Otto made the word up. I love theology for this. He made the word up in his book called The Idea of the Holy From 1917. And the numinous describes an experience as a mystery that elicits dread and fascination.
So think about that line. Who is this? Even the wind and the sea obey him. And then CS Lewis got ahold of this word And wrote about the numinous as this feeling of wonder and a certain shrinking. It's like awe.
And the object that excites awe is the divine, the numinous. So, again, who is this? Even the wind and the sea, obey him. Now I've never been able to shout down a storm That would come in very handy, driving through any number of blizzards that come out of nowhere along highway 2 between Edmonton and Calgary. What even is that stretch of road outside of Airdrie?
I would like to know. Now we can't We can't yell down a blizzard. But by now, you know. It's not the storm that Jesus was on about anyway. In your ongoing struggle, and it is ongoing, to just be human, to be you, To live justly, to do mercy, to side with life, to keep hope alive, to trust wisdom, to step with Spirit to confront evil, to be like Jesus.
There will be fights, maybe not now, but probably later, that nearly do you in, moments that make you teeter on the edge of your existence, experiences that make you rock in a boat wondering what is even going on here. Know that even there, Before you know the whole story, you can meet god as the numinous. And after that, I truly believe you'll know what to do. Let us pray. Loving god, We confess that we so often prefer a picture of you that's cozy.
You as a close friend, you as a gentle spirit, and you can be all of that. There are also times when we confront something so much more outside the mounds of our imagination, so much more mysterious and strange, So much more likely to make us shrink with awe. And you can be all of that too. So stir in us this impulse to move toward the other side of any divide, and I know how hard that is. Remind us of the strength of our honesty, and invite us into the world of calming storms With our faith.
So spirit of the living God present with us now, Enter the places of our heartbreak, our confusion, and our loneliness, And heal us of all that harms us. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan: Hey. Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information. You can find us on all of the socials at commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community.
You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.church/discord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week.
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