A sermon on Matthew 14:22-33 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen my dog, Dusty, do was to leap off a boardwalk onto what appeared to be a nice flat grassy surface to chase a duck, but the nice flat grassy surface turned out to be a thick layer of water weed on the top of wetland waterhole. So instead of hitting the ground running, as he expected, he disappeared from sight beneath the weed, and came up spluttering and looking completely bewildered and not a little embarrassed. Walking on water is apparently not his forte. O dog of little faith! Even the duck was doubled over laughing, as I remember it.

The story of Jesus walking on water is one of the best known of the miracle stories, but that certainly doesn’t make it the best understood. To most people, the miracle stories serve only as a test of our credulity. You either believe that they really happened, or you don’t, and that apparently makes you a person of faith or not, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. And on that approach, the story of Jesus walking on water is number one. It is so well known that it has become a cliche. We joke about people who think they can walk on water.

But the truth is that none of the miracle stories are recorded in the gospels simply because they happened, or simply to test whether we can bring ourselves to believe that they did. They are recorded because they signify or illustrate really important things. In fact, whether they actually happened or not is not that important at all. If it were proved one way or the other whether Jesus ever walked on water, it probably won’t make any difference to the way you or I live. But if we get our heads around what this story is illustrating, what it means, then we will probably all be living quite differently.

The biggest complication of this story for most of us is not that Jesus walked on water, but that Peter managed it too, until he lost his nerve. Most people put Jesus in a different category and don’t ask too many questions about what he could or couldn’t do, but we all know that Peter was just an ordinary bloke. Very ordinary, according to the gospel writers! So if Peter could manage it, what about us? And since Jesus chides him for sinking, saying “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”, doesn’t that suggest that the reason we can’t do it is that we are also people of little faith? And since no one we know has walked on water, who on earth does have much faith?

There may be some people alive who have walked on water. I’m generally a sceptic on these things, but I’ve seen people walk on burning coals, even though I tend to think that’s impossible too. There are traditions of shamans in many cultures and a number of them do things that most of us regard as impossible, so I wouldn’t altogether rule out the possibility that some of the reports of them walking on water might be true. But that doesn’t help the rest of us work out what to do with the sense that this story is somehow about us.

I do think it is about us, and about us being called to do as Jesus does, but I don’t think it means that at a literal level. I don’t think I’m just copping out here because I’m no better at walking on water than my dog is. It’s just that I don’t think Jesus much cares whether we literally walk on water. I don’t think the world will be any better a place if people start taking short cuts across lakes on foot. There has got to be more to it than that. And I reckon there is. Quite a lot actually, so I’m not going to exhaust its meaning tonight, but I’ll try to at least do justice to one angle on it.

This story is full of strong symbols that would have been very familiar and obviously meaningful to the original hearers of these stories who were brought up on the Hebrew scriptures and worldview. Deep waters, and especially waters tossed by raging storms were the usual symbolic way of speaking of the threat of violent chaos and trouble. Alone on the sea in a violent storm is like the classic way of depicting the last place on on earth you want to be. The only thing worse is to be out of the boat. Remember Jonah on the boat in the terrible storm and in the end he is thrown overboard and swallowed up by a giant fish. Think of all of your fears of being battered on rocks, drowned, and attacked by a shark rolled into one, and you might be getting to the sort of primal imagery that is being worked with in this story. And of course there are other echoes of older stories going on here too. When Jesus walks over the water, we are reminded of the image in the very first verses of Genesis of the Spirit of God hovering and brooding over the watery chaos before creation. When the story talks of Jesus reaching out his hand and then calming the waves, we are reminded of Moses who stretched out his hand and parted the waves of the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape from slavery. And when Peter sinks and cries out, “Save me, Lord”, readers of the Hebrew scriptures will hear an echo of Psalm 69: “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.” In that psalm, it is quite explicit that the threatening waters are a metaphor for enemies and persecutors and violence. But where does all that take us?

Well, for starters it should reassure us that we are on the right track in reading this story as a rich and meaningful metaphor instead of thinking of it as nothing more than a vaguely interesting report of an obscure event in the distant past.

The question of having enough faith to keep going is our way in here. The trouble with the way we think about faith now is that we nearly always get it all back to front. We hear Jesus chiding Peter about his little faith, and we think we have to grit our teeth and try really really hard to muster up more faith. “If I can just muster up enough faith, I might be able to step out of the boat and do something amazing.” But Jesus and the writers of the New Testament continually talk of faith as being a gift that is given to us, not as something we have to try hard to generate by ourselves. Faith is given to us by the actions of the one in whom our faith is put.

I had great faith in Lindsay Nicholson. I didn’t have to try to generate faith in Lindsay. He gave me that faith by being so utterly reliable. We all knew that Lindsay wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but boy, was he reliable. If I had had to pick one member of this congregation to bet my life on being at church the next Sunday, it would have been Lindsay every time. I think I can count on my fingers the times he missed church in the 20 years I knew him. And I think the only time he wasn’t there without telling me was the week he died. My faith in Lindsay was a gift that he gave me by being so completely and obviously worthy of that faith. God creates faith in us by consistently and unswervingly loving us and being there for us, no matter what we do.

The faith that can step out into the waves is something more than just knowing ourselves loved, but it is still a gift. The theologian James Alison makes a rather bizarre comparison here by saying that Jesus is kind of like Evel Knievel. For those of you who are not old enough to remember Evel Knievel, he was an American stuntman back in the 70’s who was famous for jumping his motorbike over ever increasing numbers of lined up buses, and sometimes through hoops of fire on the way over and things like that. So the way James Alison compares him to Jesus is this. He says that if Evel Knievel was working with a group of young followers, and he said, “OK, we’re all going to jump our bikes through a hoop of fire and over 13 buses,” they’d probably look at him and say, “No we’re not, it’s impossible.” But then, rather than try to talk them into thinking it possible, Evel Knievel would hop onto his bike and demonstrate the stunt himself, and then they’d all go, “OK, it is possible. Let’s start learning how to do it.” So what Evel Knievel would have done by jumping his bike, is create the faith in them that it can be done. He has given them a gift of faith, perhaps not yet in their own ability to follow him, but at least in the fact that it can be done and that if they learn from the master, they might eventually be able to do as he does.

Now you can see that this is precisely what Jesus does in the walking on water story. Peter sees him doing it, and thinks, “Maybe I can do it too.” The day before, it would have never occurred to Peter to try walking on the waves in a storm, but suddenly Jesus has given him the faith to believe that it might be possible. Now that is very significant, but the application that the gospel writer wants us to make is not to literally jumping overboard in a storm. It is much bigger and braver than that.

We, like Jesus, live in a world that is constantly tossed by raging storms of chaos and violence and hatred. Look at the horrific bloodshed and destruction taking place in Gaza in recent weeks. There has been wave after wave of the same thing in that part of the world for decades. With one retaliation after another, the whole thing keeps escalating. What’s going on in Syria and Iraq and several countries in Africa is just as bad or worse, and increasingly there are fears that several of these conflicts could even have spin off attacks in places like Australia. And while we don’t usually see that sort of bloodshed in our communities, there are still times when our little conflicts seem to tear apart our lives and families and friendship networks. And sometimes our churches. There are times when random little personal disputes blow up and threaten to turn really nasty. Just this morning, I thought I was about to have to intervene when a man in my local park was threatening another man over a dispute over the behaviour of their little dogs. There was swearing and racial abuse and it looked like punches were about to be thrown, and not only was I the nearest person, but my martial arts training means I know how to block a punch and I had two cattle dogs for back-up, so I really didn’t have any excuse to just keep running and let an assault take place without stepping out of my boat of comfort and into the midst of the waves to command the storm to be still. Fortunately, they didn’t get past the posturing and verbal abuse, but these sort of incidents happen, and they make our world a scary place at times. No wonder we want to stay in our boats with our heads down.

But one of the important dynamics that keeps these conflicts alive is that there is so seldom anyone standing in the middle demonstrating an alternative. Of course, we don’t do it because we are too afraid. We know that if you stand up for the one who is being attacked, you’ll probably be the next one attacked. We know that if you stand up, as Jesus did, and dare to be that different – dare to love the Jews and the Palestinians and the Romans and the black and the white and the left and the right and the straights and the gays – if you dare to be that different, instead of them all returning your love, they will all hate you for loving their enemies, and they will all turn on you and cast you into the raging waves of hatred and chaos. So as long as we are all more afraid of being the one who is cast out than we are of the storm continuing without respite year after year, nothing can change. The perfect storm rages on and on, while everyone tries to keep their heads down in their own little boat.

But then Jesus comes towards us, walking on the waves, proving that it is possible. Jesus deliberately steps into the middle of the storm and dares to be different, dares to love everybody and hate nobody and stand between the attackers and their victims and absorb in his own body whatever hatred and hostility flow from that. And rather than sink beneath those waves without a trace, he shows us that God’s love can hold us safe and radically and joyously alive, even when all the world turns its fearful angst on us.

Of course, as Peter shows us, if we step out there with Jesus, and then give in to the old fears that the worst thing that can happen to you is to be the one everyone is rejecting, then those waves will indeed begin to swallow you again. The way to survive is to keep your eyes on the one who is walking in front of you, the one who has walked all the way to the cross without drowning in despair, the one who could even keep loving as they nailed his flesh to the cross, the one who seemed to have gone under for the third time, but here he is among us again, scarred for sure, but still overflowing with life and love and mercy and walking calmly over the raging storms of hatred and fear.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to do any better than Peter. We’re all going to have our moments when we lose our nerve and sink into our fears. Notice that Jesus doesn’t give him a lecture about faith and then only reach out to save him if he promises to have more faith next time. Peter cries out “Lord, save me”, and the writer emphasises that “immediately” Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him. The faith is given to us as a gift, by the example Jesus sets of what can be done, and even when we fail to hold onto that gift and begin to sink, Jesus is more than ready to immediately reach out and save us.

Now your mileage may vary, but I reckon that message is a whole lot more interesting than a monotonous debate about the historical accuracy of the miracle stories. In a world beset by violent storms, following Jesus in taking steps of world-changing and war-ending love and reconciliation is a vision worth following and a life worth living. It’s never going to be easy or comfortable, but he has shown that it is possible, and that nothing can sweep us out of the love and life of God. And if that doesn’t get you walking on water, nothing will.