“Trust”
Matthew 14:22-33
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/24/14
Jesus has been feeling a lot of heat lately. It’s like he’s
walking around with a bullseye on his back. He knows the Pharisees and
Sadducees don’t care for him, but at least they know why. The Romans, the soldiers
especially, are like guard dogs. They pace and bark, waiting to be turned
loose. They don’t need a purpose – just a command.
Not long before the story we just read, Jesus is in Nazareth.
And even there his own neighbors reject him.
“We know who your daddy is,” they say. “Don’t get all
uppity with us, like you’re somebody!”
And Jesus says, “Prophets always get the coldest shoulder
from those who think they know them best.”
What a loving way to express disappointment. Living as a
person of faith, in any age, requires that kind of grace. It requires compassion,
forgiveness, and humble trust in the one who calls us to faithfulness.
Jesus’ cousin, John, seems to have struggled with the idea
of grace-ful trust. It’s hard to tell whether he’s motivated by love and
compassion or by anger and fear. He just throws one prophetic brick after
another. Targeting everyone, all he manages to accomplish is to make himself a
target. Finally, he throws a brick through the wrong window – Herod’s bedroom
window. And now it’s too late to tell him that he has lost his mind, because
Herod sees to it that John loses his head.
Hearing this news, Jesus’ heart begins to sink. He wants to
be alone and grieve. Slipping away in a boat, he finds a secluded place, but
even there the crowds find him. When they do, Jesus feels their desperation,
perhaps because he feels his own so acutely. So he reaches out to all of this
drowning humanity. He tends to them, feeds them, and assures them of God’s
presence.
Afterward, he really must get away. First, he sends his
disciples off on a little excursion.
“We’re going to Gennesaret next,” he says. “You guys make a
run across the lake and set things up for us.”
Then Jesus pronounces a benediction on the crowd and sends
them home. When the last straggler has wandered away, Jesus climbs the nearest
mountain. In biblical literature mountains represent the ultimate “thin place,”
the place where earth and sky meet, the place of communion between time and
eternity, creation and Creator. On the mountain, an exhausted and beleaguered Jesus
and his sinking heart reach for the restoring hand of solitude.
Jesus and Matthew are teaching us an uncomfortable but
life-giving truth. Jesus has just offered a tangible, immediate presence to the
crowds. Yet his quest for seclusion says that very often, the most compelling
assurance of God’s presence available to us in this life comes through an acute
sense of God’s absence. To feel that storm surge at the pit of our being, that
ache telling us that all is not right with the world – this is a kind of
knowing. The mystics say that it wells up from an ancient memory of the great wholeness
from which we come and toward which we live. They teach us to receive that ache
as God’s call to enter a chaotic, complicated, and otherwise disappointing
world with a word of healing and hope.
This may smack of denial and foolishness to some, but we
hear these things through a long and storied identity. Remember Elijah, for
example. Fleeing from the claws of the wicked Jezebel, he hides in a cave. God’s
word sniffs him out and asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
The prophet’s response is pure sulk: “I’ve done everything
right while everyone else has done it wrong! Now I’m all alone. And everyone
wants me dead.”
Elijah has sought solitude, but out of fear rather than
trust. So, the word invites the miserable prophet to stand outside the mouth of
the cave because God is about to pass
by. Then come the rock-splitting winds, the earthquake, and the fire. And
doomsdayers take note: God is not in any
of this loud, sensational, terrifying stuff. That’s not the way God works.
After the turmoil, Elijah finds himself all alone inside “a
sound of sheer silence,” and only then does he know that Yahweh is near.
“Lord, if it is you,” cries Peter over the loud, sensational,
terrifying storm, “command me to come to you – on the water.”
Let’s remember that to the first century mind and spirit,
the deep water of a lake or the sea, symbolizes chaos, the dark mystery of
evil. When Peter demands a command to step out of the boat onto the sea, he is
asking Jesus to call him out of the cave and into the wind, earthquake, and
fire. He is asking Jesus to call him into Pharaoh’s court to tell him to let
the Hebrews go. He is asking Jesus to send him into Canaan, where the people
are so huge he will feel like a grasshopper in both size and consequence. Peter
is asking Jesus to call him into Jesus’ own footsteps where one thrives by
faith alone.
And Jesus says to Peter, “Well come on.”
The next thing Peter knows, Jesus is hauling him through
the waves like a drag net.
“What happened, Peter?” says Jesus. “I thought you were
thinking that you thought you could do this. You don’t follow me by thought
alone. You have to learn to trust.”
We are truly gifted creatures. As the psalmist says, we are
“fearfully and wonderfully
made.” (Psalm 139:14) Our minds are
capable of remarkable feats of memory and interpretation, of penetrating
inquiry, and of heights and depths of creativity that are nothing short of
holy. There comes a point, however, when all our critically necessary thinking
has done all it can. Even when a theory can be further developed, or a work of
art further refined, or a lesson plan more tightly structured, or a field more
evenly plowed, there comes a moment when we have to trust, and to move forward
in faith. At that moment we step out of Elijah’s cave, out of the disciples’ tiny
boat, and we set foot on troubled water. Sink or swim, we must trust the One
who calls us out.
The life of faith is a life of trust. And while they are
often considered opposites, faith and doubt are hardly mutually exclusive. As
Frederick Buechner has so memorably written, “Doubt is the ants in the pants of
faith. They keep it awake and moving.”1
All the disciples see Jesus, but Peter says, “Lord, if it is you.” Seeing may constitute
believing, but believing often becomes an end in itself. Trust embraces all the
doubt and dares to step forward into a future that lies beyond our sight,
beyond our ability to create, and way beyond the surface tension of mere belief.
All manner of waves are battering our boat: The unspeakably
brutal death of James Foley, an ebola epidemic, the sweeping anxieties
connected with events in places like Ferguson, MO, the continual loss of loved
ones right here in our midst, change itself. We can huddle together in here
screaming “Jesus Loves Me” so loud we never get quiet and alone enough to feel
the hand and hear the voice of the one who loves.
But he is calling. And he calls us not away from the storm,
but into it, onto the very face of the deep. And he calls us there not to target ones whom we deem wrong
with our spiteful judgments. He calls us there to target all creation with his compassion
and grace, and to receive those healing gifts, as well.
“Trust me,” he says. “And come.”
1Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking A Theological
ABC, Harper and Row Publishers, 1973. p. 20.
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