What do you do if your friends have gone on ahead of you, and you want to catch up? If you’re Jesus, you take the quickest route, even if it means walking across a lake.
When evening came, the boat was out on the lake, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the lake. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’
There is much in this little story that confuses – if he came to them because he saw them straining against an adverse wind, why was he going to pass them by? And did he really think they wouldn’t notice him?
In a way, they didn’t. There was no way he could be there, so they didn’t see him – just like some people after the resurrection. But they did see a figure of a man quite obviously walking upon the water, which scared the daylights out of them. Of course they thought he was a ghost – and so real! So he stopped to reassure them. I think if I’d been in that boat, that’s the moment I would have fainted, when this apparition spoke words, and revealed himself to be a friend very much alive.
Once again, Jesus was where no one expected to see him, doing something they could not imagine was possible. That was to be his pattern with his followers, one way that he gradually expanded their sense of what God could do in them. They still didn’t quite grasp that until after they were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, but they did grow into it. In Matthew’s version of this story, Peter even gets out of the boat and joins Jesus on the water, for a short time.
This is a question for us to ask every day as well: Where did I see Jesus today? Where did he show up where I did not expect him? And if we don’t have an answer, a follow-up question might be, “What situations in this day might have been improved if Jesus had shown up?” And then think back to those situations. Where might he have been that we didn’t notice? Until we become adept at recognizing him in the moment, we can train our hindsight.
On good days, we are aware of the presence of God all over, in encounters with others, in unexpected peace, in solutions and creative ideas. On not-so-good days, it feels like he's on the shore, or "up in heaven," and we’re alone. But I don’t believe we are. I believe that, especially when we are straining against a head wind, Jesus comes strolling along, speaking peace and courage, the molecules of water supporting him as though they were solid.
For him, they are.
For us, he is.
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